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Mark Poepsel
To pitch a journalism or media product is to make the case for your idea to an individual or group in exchange for financial or some other kind of support. Pitching is a dynamic process that requires you to be of two minds. On the one hand, you need to believe in the value of your idea and in your team’s ability to make it viable. On the other hand, you must also demonstrate a capacity for change and perseverance as your idea evolves over time in response to feedback from potential customers and investors. Your pitch must demonstrate that you have a great product idea, that you have done market and competition research, and that you are willing and able to scrap key features, even ones you love, if feedback from customers or investors makes it necessary. Developing a pitch is more than coming up with a great idea for a media product and shopping it around to investors. It involves ideation, key feature identification and testing, market research, design and branding work, redesign, and pitch performance practice. At the heart of the pitch is your promise to develop a successful product, even though you may not yet know all of the variables that will influence its success.
Let’s freeze the conversation for a second for students who are not necessarily interested in being entrepreneurs. “Why should we study ideation, research, project management, and pitching?” You should study this because every job involves pitching. Journalists make story pitches every day and to a growing extent they are expected to provide evidence of engagement on previous similar stories to justify their pitch. For example, they may need to pull data from CrowdTangle or Chartbeat to show that stories about a particular bridge under construction garner a lot of attention and engagement. Stories may not seem sexy at first, but engagement numbers can help a journalist close the deal.
If nothing else, you will need to pitch yourself and your skills on the job market. If you treat your career search as a product to be managed, you will ideate potential outcomes in terms of workplace, location, and job description. You will go into job interviews with a well-researched plan, good-looking supplementary materials including your resume website, and you will know what the competition looks like. You need to understand what your “key features” are as a potential employee. You can refine those and present them well and find a good market fit for the product, i.e. your professional labor.
Studying how to ideate and to pitch is also fun. It’s not a lecture series or a knowledge dump. It’s a guided tour through a process of self discovery, group relationship building, and global market awareness. Even if you never take your own new endeavor to market, learning how to ideate and to pitch could and should change your life.
Pitching can happen formally or informally. An elevator pitch, a short two- or three-sentence description of your idea, is a pitch format you might use to describe your project to a stranger in casual conversation or to a potential team member at a meetup. It is similar to the log line in a film project. This chapter is designed for students who are developing formal pitches for ideas seeking seed funding. For best results, you should already be acquainted with the lean startup model of product development prior to creating your pitch. Developed by Eric Ries,[1]The Lean Startup stresses the value of customer development as its central thesis. In essence, the book states that the business of lean startups is to learn. You learn by practicing a sort of customer service science. Lean startup teams hypothesize about what product changes might work, and they test those changes on real consumers, a.k.a. users, so that the product is always improving, always moving closer to perfect product market fit. It’s an ideal that’s not often attained, but that’s the goal, and you need to be able to explain that you understand this concept and can put it into practice.
You may have begun (for real or in mock exercises) by self-funding the development of a prototype, a.k.a. bootstrapping, and you should have continued through the “friends and family” stage of financing where you have sought funding via personal networks, i.e. your parents, friends, perhaps a rich uncle.
This chapter assumes you have worked through the ideation phase of product development (see chapter on Ideation) and that you’ll continue to make improvements to your product even as you work on your pitch. Your team demonstrates leadership and change management skills by showing how your product has already evolved in response to customer development efforts. Customer development includes doing essential market research, testing features, and gathering and analyzing design feedback. The best pitches impart these nuts-and-bolts elements by demonstrating that your team has learned from this feedback and also convey the team’s passion, ingenuity, and perseverance. When your team has done as much product development and customer development as you can afford, or as time allows during a class session, you build toward a “big ask,” which may be a meeting with investors, a presentation to a startup competition committee, or a pitch contest, etc. This chapter focuses on preparing you for that big presentation, but it also briefly covers preparing an elevator pitch and writing a prospectus paper.
To narrow the scope of the discussion, this chapter identifies six presentation elements that serve as a starting point for pitch preparation. They are:
• Element 1: Brand identity image and tagline
• Element 2: Problem-solution narrative
• Element 3: Key features and your value proposition
• Element 4: Product-market fit description
• Element 5: Competitive analysis
• Element 6: Financial projections
These are the must-haves for a pitch about ten to fifteen minutes long. Each may be represented by one or more slides if you are crafting a slide deck or by one or more sections if you are writing a prospectus. Depending on your product, presentation type, preferences, and priorities, you should feel free to customize around this framework.
Let’s take a look at this example[2] of a successful pitch deck deconstructed as it relates to these six elements.
Slide 1:
Airbnb started out as “AirBed&Breakfast.” Brand identity is established with a sans-serif typeface, use of color, and a clear tagline: “Book rooms with locals, rather than hotels.”Slide 2: The problem statement is straightforward: Travelers need an affordable alternative to hotels.
Slide 3: The solution statement focuses on the nature of the product, i.e. that it’s a web platform, and on key features and how they create value, both financial and cultural capital. Note that key features and the value proposition are already addressed through three simple slides.
Slide 4: To establish product-market fit, you first have to have a market. The Airbnb pitch deck notes that at the time there were 630,000 users on couchsurfing.com and that there were 17,000 temporary housing listings on Craigslist in San Francisco and New York combined in one week. Thus, there existed a large potential traveler pool and a large pool of people with rooms for lease, but these groups were in need of a unified platform.
Slide 5: The fifth slide details the size of the market and Airbnb’s share, showing potential for growth.
Slide 6: Completing the case for product-market fit, this slide shows the attractive user interface and provides a mini-narrative for how the product works.
Slide 7: This slide shows four years’ of revenue totals as simple math: 10 million + trips x \$20 average fee = about \$200 million in revenues. This is evidence of product-market fit and whets the investor’s appetite for potential future earnings.
Slide 8: This slide shows how Airbnb has already beaten its competition to own the market for certain events and to create partnerships.
Slide 9: Here, investors get the full picture of the competition.
Slide 10: The financial expectations are pretty well established by this point and were explained verbally. What this shows are the barriers to competition expected to help preserve Airbnb’s position and future earnings and growth expectations.
This chapter focuses first on developing the six presentation elements. When the time comes to build slide decks, the order, breakdown, and prioritization of elements is up to you. You are not expected to finish your product before developing your pitch. Rather, it is strongly suggested that you develop your pitch and your product in parallel.
PRESENTATION ELEMENT #1: Brand Identity Image and Tagline
Your presentation slide deck should begin with a memorable brand image. It can be a logo representing your product in a stylized way, or it could be a screen grab of your product if you are particularly happy with the design. It’s often a good idea to create a tagline as well. It helps drive the message home for investors who want to know right away if they see a marketable idea. From a persuasive standpoint, all you are trying to establish with your first slide is that this is a great product that many people need that’s easy to understand and remember.
Your brand introduction should be kept to one slide and should set the aesthetic tone for the rest of the presentation. Establish a color palette and stick with it. If you’re going to use design elements such as borders, background colors, or shapes, use them in your introductory slide. Go with clean, simple design elements. If something doesn’t add to your presentation, leave it out and keep it out in subsequent slides.
As you present the brand image and tagline visually, your talking points should include a brief description of the team. Don’t feel the need to introduce every member right away. The project manager should introduce the concept and herself or himself, and as the presentation moves on other members of the team can introduce themselves when it’s their turn to speak. There’s no correct way to divide up presentation responsibilities. Different courses and competitions will set requirements for the minimum and maximum number of speakers or group members you should have. Just be sure to keep the introduction slide focused and brief. Whenever it is your turn to speak, identify yourself. Mention your role and very briefly discuss your background as it pertains to your role on this project. Holding off on team introductions will keep your pitch moving.
You should start working on branding at the same time you begin product ideation. Establishing your brand identity is like selecting your best photo and description for a dating app. Put only your best face forward. Give investors a single, interesting, lasting image that they can connect to the rest of your pitch.
PRESENTATION ELEMENT #2: Problem-Solution Narrative
Every product solves a problem. Many entrepreneurial media products solve problems that users didn’t know they had. It’s your job to help the investor identify a media-related problem that many people share and then clearly explain in a story or short anecdote how your product solves the problem or, if it is not an outright solution, how it alleviates pain associated with the problem. Look at other problem-solution narratives in advertising and in corporate origin stories for examples of how to craft a quick, compelling problem-solution narrative.
Classic Problem-Solution Narratives
• A young man starting high school lacks muscle mass. He drinks milk and gets stronger, earning the respect of his classmates.
• Young people, pictured in silhouette, walk around a city looking bored with life. Then, they turn on their new MP3 players and start dancing in the streets. Their world is set ablaze in color and sound.
• A man literally turns into Joe Pesci when he gets hungry. He eats a candy bar and turns back into his normal self.
These may not be the greatest stories ever told. You’re not going to get a National Book Award for a Snickers commercial, but these are memorable narratives about people who have a problem that the product in question can solve.
You may want to personalize the narrative as it relates to you or someone on your team. This is common practice, but don’t force it. Often, student media entrepreneurs are caught in a quandary. They tend to come up with products suitable for their demographic that may not be massively appealing, or they come up with products for general audiences (read: people of a different generation). Then students may have difficulties crafting a relatable narrative. Your preference should be for creating a viable product and telling the product’s story as well as you can. Use your research and communication skills to craft narratives with a great problem-solution story. If your product is not for people like you, simply identify the type of person who has this problem or this pain point. Create user or customer personas (see Customer Discovery chapter[3]): “fictional, generalized representations of ideal customers.” Explain how your product is a feasible, meaningful solution for her or him. What motivates them to adopt your product? Tell the story in thirty seconds or less, in three slides or fewer.
By the time you create your pitch, you may have developed a concept and wireframe or some other mockup of a minimum viable product (MVP). Often the best way to present this narrative is to tell the problem-solution story verbally while simultaneously demonstrating on a couple of slides precisely where users need to tap or click to fix the problem. If this is a semester project for class, you may not have a prototype ready yet, but you should work to make your mockup look as much like the “real thing” as possible.
Try out different narratives on potential customers as part of your customer-development research. Keep internal records of which narratives work best. Ask people why these resonate more than others. You usually do NOT want to spend precious time delving into bullet points about key features at this stage. You can tell investors how the product works later on in the pitch. At this point you are simply a brand that solves a problem a lot of people have. Strive to make the narrative relatable and fun.
PRESENTATION ELEMENT #3: Key Features and Your Value Proposition
During your pitch, consider introducing investors to your key features, your value proposition and, where applicable, your user interface (UI) at the same time. Key features are the specific jobs your product or service accomplishes or assists with. A most basic example is that a bowl is innovative in relation to a plate. Both share the key feature that they hold food. A bowl adds another feature by holding liquids comfortably. Many innovative media products add several key features to solve nuanced problems. Limit yourself to developing a small handful of key features at first. Figure out how they will look and feel and be able to show users how your product’s design is easy to use.
One way to think of your value proposition is as the sum of your key features. How exactly are you solving problems, addressing pain points? The bigger the problem and the simpler the solution set, the more impressive your value proposition is likely to be.
At its core, a value proposition is a statement about why someone needs your product or service. How are you making their life better or making them more wealthy, with “wealth” being broadly defined?
Answer this question in your presentation visually while stating it verbally. Show investors your product or your UI and walk them through two or three tasks that can be accomplished easily. This is a chance to show off your key features and to make your potential investors understand your value proposition so well they become excited to invest and to bring this product with these, or similar, key features to audiences.
Demonstrate your UI or your product’s design in two or three slides. You may prefer to simply show a mock-up against a monochrome background so that the product’s design is all that investors notice. This will make the value proposition pop. Alternately, if you want the slides to carry over an existing set of design elements from the rest of your presentation, try to make the color palette, shape, and line selections for your slide background complement your product’s design elements.
Do not feel the need to introduce every feature or to narrate every design choice, but you should show that you have a good sense of design and that your design will make your key features easy to find and use.
A popular tool for creating wireframes is Balsamiq.[4] You can create mobile and/or web app wireframes that incorporate realistic design elements such as buttons, menus, and media players. You can build a wireframe mockup of your application or web application that users can actually click through and try out. If you work with a clickable wireframe, though, double and triple check that it functions properly on the device you will be using during your “big ask.” If you’re not completely sure that the functions will work, use a static mockup and sell it with your enthusiasm and with evidence of thoughtful, thorough research. If you are pitching a tangible media product, e.g. a wearable, you should bring a physical prototype for investors to try out.
Whatever your combination of digital mockup and tangible prototype is, it is preferable to show something basic that helps investors understand key features rather than show an elaborate mockup on which little or nothing works. Stick to the minimum viable product and keep the mockup clear and simple; however, note that certain startup competitions or investors may require working prototype sites or apps.
Tips for crafting great-looking, useful user interfaces are abundant online. They usually come with collections of colors in “color kits”[5] that serve as pre-determined palettes, and they will also include button and menu design styles for you to choose based on the tone and function of your product. Try out completely different approaches to UI on potential customers. Once you have narrowed down their basic color and design preferences using stock design elements, try creating your own color combinations, button styles, and menu designs. Stay within your users’ stated preferences, but apply your own creativity so that you can truly brand your product as your own.
I allude to the term “iterative development” throughout this chapter, but it merits definition here. Iteration in innovation refers to building out prototypes again and again–first for the developers themselves, then for beta testers, and then for a (hopefully) growing audience. At the root of the concept is repetition, which means the process of designing, building, testing, seeking feedback, re-designing, etc. continues indefinitely. Think, for example of a common platform such as Facebook and how many times it has been redesigned since you or the people you know have been using it.
If you spend even a few months using a favorite platform or app, you will likely see iterations of its development. What you need to know during the entrepreneurial pitch process is that iterating can happen while the pitch is being developed. This is normal and expected. You should seek to iterate based on user data and feedback. Iteration is not guesswork, and it’s not merely trial and error. It’s an informed repetitive development process meant to develop a product-market fit by molding the product to an existing market.
PRESENTATION ELEMENT #4: Product-Market Fit Description
In your team’s pitch so far, you have established a brand, demonstrated through storytelling how it solves a problem, and shown that your team is capable of designing an MVP with a combination of user input and your own creative design skills. You have shown investors that you and your team have a valuable idea and the skills to work in a lean startup environment using an iterative process. Now you must demonstrate how you are going to make money.
The next few slides in your deck should present a brief discussion of product-market fit. In two to three slides, show how big the market is, show where your product fits, and show evidence of iterative development according to customer preferences. Your goal is to quickly show the investors where there is an underserved mass market. Then, you must show that your product can tap that market and reach real customers. Every aspect of the market you are entering is fair game for questions from investors. You can head off killer questions by showing a depth of understanding about the market. There may be many solutions in the marketplace. Do not ignore them. Explain why your solution fits best. Explain that you’re working harder than anyone else to serve customers by directly testing their preferences.
Marc Andreessen of investment firm Andreessen-Horowitz calls product-market fit “the only thing that matters.”[6] Specifically, his commentary is about successful startups and whether team, product, or market matters more. He argues it’s the market. Andreessen says: “In a great market — a market with lots of real potential customers — the market pulls product out of the startup [original emphasis].”[7] None of your creative ideation or inspired design work matters if you can’t demonstrate knowledge of the marketplace. Practicing customer development, then, is establishing a process where you allow consumers to pull great products out of your efforts.
Fit your market research into your presentation in under a minute. Emphasize the size and strength of the potential market in a slide. Then, demonstrate that you have conducted careful customer research to learn what potential users want. You should have data from testing general product ideas, key feature combinations, and design elements. You should be able to show quantitative data, probably from surveys, and qualitative data, probably from focus groups. Present the highlights of customer development in a couple of slides.
Investors only want the summary of this data. Present it in a narrative form. For example: “We have found that our users prefer our social media app because their friends are using it, and as the number of friends using our app increases a certain amount, the amount users spend with the app increases in correlation.” If you’re not able to show that level of correlation in your data, at least be able to show that you are building the most popular version of your idea with key features that users preferred over all other potential features they were shown.
The visuals you use are up to you, but you must establish that there is a market for this kind of product and that you’ve sought to achieve product-market fit by developing a product with direct user feedback. That’s what customer development is all about. For the lean startup, it cannot be stressed enough how important customer development is. It’s not enough to show that you have had some good ideas. You need to show that you can bring your product and its customers together. Products evolve, and so do customer tastes, so you need to show that your team can already work on this product in response to user feedback data.
Market Research
Your first task in conducting market research is to define the scope of the media market where your product will compete. If you are working on a journalism startup, define a news niche in terms of geography and topic. If your news product focuses primarily on one topic, you will probably need to cover a wide geographical area, perhaps a national market.
If you are planning to bring news to a geographical region, limit it in a logical way. You might determine a reasonable driving radius around your community and cover the counties and cities within, which is essentially what defines a Designated Market Area (DMA) in broadcast news. You might wish to focus more narrowly on a single metro area or suburb.
Use census data to learn everything you can about the people who live in your coverage area. Read broadly about the history of the area, its economic background, and its economic future. Plug into the local entrepreneur scene long before you launch your media startup because understanding the startup market is your key to understanding the economic future of your area.
Most mass media startups that do not focus on journalism serve as communication platforms, games, or information curation/aggregation services. Service-logistics apps of the so-called “sharing economy” help people providing specific services to coordinate with others who need those services. If your team is pitching this type of app, avoid calling your product the “Uber of” something. Uber has become synonymous with corroded corporate culture,[8] and it has proven to be a high-stakes global gamble for investors. The sharing economy model is a difficult sell because the ideas are cheap and execution is expensive. Whatever your product is, you will need to demonstrate that this particular shared service is needed. You can’t expect to rely on sharing economy research in another sector to justify your concept. Nobody needs the “Uber of toothbrushes,” or do they?[9]
PRESENTATION ELEMENT #5: Competitive Analysis
After working through the first four presentation elements, students sometimes think that their product’s value is self-evident based on its key features, its design, and the strength of the marketplace. There is a tendency to think that because the processes of designing a product and strategizing about customer development are labor intensive those elements should be enough to demonstrate a product’s value, but investors will look for something more. They will want to know that your media product is not already available elsewhere, offered by someone with more experience and an established customer base. You must demonstrate that your product is unique.
Describe your competition as clearly and directly as possible. Name names. Cite links. Clearly and accurately describe their relevant products and their features. Describe in some detail what they do and don’t do. Know your competitors as well as you know your own brand. In the context of where your targeted markets overlap, know them better than they know themselves. Show that you have looked at trade industry publications detailing your competition’s strategies. Show that you have read, synthesized, and summarized up-to-date industry blogs’ take on your competition, and, most important, show that you understand your competitors’ strategy based on their About Page and design blog, if they have one.
Competitive analysis should be presented in about two slides. Pretending not to notice major players in the field will get you laughed off the presentation stage. You need to note in one slide who your key competitors are in the marketplace. You need to explain how your product or service is unique. What key features do you offer that no one else does? When you have similar features, how do you prioritize them or present them in ways that are unique or more affordable or more tailored to a target audience than the options that already exist? Answer these questions for each competitor.
Demonstrate this knowledge in clean, carefully crafted slides with straightforward storytelling. Neither overestimate nor underestimate the competition. When organizing this section of your slide deck, you are going to have to make executive decisions about what to leave in the presentation and what to cut. Use the “iceberg principle.” Present about one-tenth of the research you have done and be prepared to tailor the competitive analysis of your presentation for each investor or competition keeping in mind that competitors and markets are in flux.
Keep the pace quick and have a strategic counter for beating or at least competing with competitors’ strategies. It’s not enough to list their related products and the key features of those products. Identify the brand strategies so that you can anticipate where your competition is headed. You should be able to answer what you would do if someone new entered the marketplace doing the same thing you’re doing. Explain if this can be prevented. If it can’t, explain with substance how you’re performing better than the competition at delivering a similar product. If that is not possible, you need to come up with a different product. Pivot to target a different market or develop a different feature set. It’s essential that you don’t try to pitch a product that’s already available in the same marketplace (potentially from multiple sellers with more resources and experience).
You can present your competitive analysis by going through one competitor at a time and explaining how you will beat each one, or you can go topic by topic, such as “feature set,” “target market,” “user interface,” “supply chain,” “development costs,” “outcomes,” “branding,” etc. and explain how you will best your competitors on each item. This element of your presentation can easily get convoluted. You may not wish to address all of these elements. If you do good customer development work, you can prioritize which of these aspects of the product matter most to them and limit your competitive analysis discussion based on that research. In this way, customer development is doubly important. It tells you how to focus your own product and tells you where to focus your competitive efforts.
Your competitive analysis needs to evolve as you go through the customer development process. Each time you add or remove a key feature from your product, you must research who else is doing something similar and alter or amend your presentation to show that you’re aware of them and have a plan to beat them.
PRESENTATION ELEMENT #6: Financial Projections
In about three slides, explain your revenue model, that is, what your customers, advertisers, underwriters, etc., will be paying and what will they be paying for, as well as the costs to deliver those products or services. One of the best ways to express your revenue model is to work with the Business Model Canvas (BMC) (see Business Models chapter for more on this)[10] to map out how money will flow through your organization. The BMC helps you to picture how your startup fits into its financial ecosystem. It enables or forces you to think about who you’re going to work with and how you’re going to work with them to get the resources you need to provide valuable products or services. It helps you to plan to whom exactly you will deliver those services and how you will deliver them, and it demands that you understand what your costs are and where your revenue will really come from. The BMC will inform your estimation of startup costs and operating costs. From those (revenues, startup costs, and operating costs), you can determine your breakeven analysis according to what your class syllabus or competition guidelines require. Groups in media entrepreneurship classes often go through a dozen business model canvas drafts, or more, as they plan and develop their product and as they conduct customer development. The BMC will help you to decide on a revenue model and express it in visual form, though the actual visualization should be tailored to suit your product.
You must indicate how much of your startup funds you have already contributed, if you plan on seeking other funding sources, and what proportion of the business you are going to hand over to investors for the amount of funding you request. You should probably share only a summary of your plan. Spend no more than three minutes presenting realistic, well-thought-out financial estimates. Again, the iceberg approach may be the best approach.
Investors will want to know what basis you have for your financial estimates and claims. Often, this is the part of the presentation that generates the most questions from the audience. Document your sources for any financial assertions you make and be prepared to hand over more detailed business plans if asked. Make the case that your product is a great investment. Practice with mentors, friends, family members, and your professors so that you can make the strongest possible feasible case for funding.
Pitch Deck Examples
An example of a successful pitch is CardLife featured on this[11] blog post of the 35 best pitch deck examples. It is a tracking company that communicates to users, usually business, how much they are spending on subscription software services. Businesses have a problem. They subscribe to many software solutions. They do so at different times for different amounts for plans that may renew automatically year over year or that may increase in price, sometimes without review. CardLife helps track this expense in order to make it easier for businesses to balance budgets. This is a business that serves other businesses, yes, but it’s also media-related because it gathers, tracks and presents information in a service that’s designed to be easy to use. It’s a time saver and potentially a stress reducer. The slide deck established that this is a problem for businesses by keying in on one number: 93%. That’s the percentage of businesses that fail to keep track of their software and other subscription expenses. In their pitch, they note that 1,000 businesses signed up for their service within six weeks of launch, and they note that they are connecting to a \$10 billion industry. Though they cannot plan on receiving a portion of that particular pie, by being connected to such a large market with continued growth potential, they easily make the case that their business is positioned for future growth. Please review their presentation video and slide deck. It’s No. 15 on this list, which includes several other examples of solid slide decks accompanied by videos of each as they were given by the entrepreneurs themselves at Y Combinator 2017.[12]
Mobile Development Costs
Let’s start with an anecdote: In our entrepreneurial media management course at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville, guest judges came one semester and quoted wildly different costs for app development. One estimate was based on an alert app that let students know when on-campus athletic events are being held. Students budgeted tens of thousands of dollars in their plan to build a fully functional app, but the guest judge said he had proposals for similar alert services on his desk that would cost the university about \$2,000.
At a pitch competition later the same semester, a different team proposed to a different set of judges to build a new social media platform that would visualize posts and group audiences into “cliques” enabling social media managers to send targeted message to only certain “cliques,” in real time. One judge happened to have served as an adviser to a military contractor who wanted to develop its own social media platform. He had a front-row seat to the proposal, and his company quoted a base price (with a development team of dozens of software developers) at \$20 million. Thus, the class was left with a range of costs for “app development” somewhere between \$2,000 and \$20 million. The best way to estimate costs for an app is to look for something with a similar feature set and find out how much seed money it got in its earliest round or rounds of funding.
FOLLOW UP
Question and Answer Preparation
Preparing for question and answer sessions with potential investors is something of a challenge because every investor is different. You should anticipate likely questions and be prepared for “wild card” questions by having an open mind and by practicing your pitch in front of different audiences. Vary the age of your pitch audience. Get test audiences that vary in income level and education. Sometimes you are not pitching to the investor but to the investor’s idea of who the consumer for this product must be. Once you have practiced presenting in front of various audiences, you should identify a few likely questions and prepare well-researched answers. You need not promise the world to an investor. But you must be prepared to indicate your plans for improvement, or be able to explain why something that seems like it should be done is not yet done. You should identify known weaknesses in your pitch and prepare reasonable answers regarding your plans to improve upon shortcomings. You may plan to conduct further research where more information is needed, or you may have identified key features that need to be altered or replaced. If you have identified something that needs doing and that isn’t done yet, that may not be a deal breaker as long as you have a reasonable plan for making changes and you show that you are prepared for change.
Staying Connected
You should also strategize for staying in touch with any potential investors. Task a point person with collecting and organizing investors’ contact information. Make note of each investor’s investing background and interests and take detailed and careful notes about their feedback regarding your pitch. Do your research. You should know any potential investor’s history and strengths and weaknesses. Treat an investor’s individual concerns as the most important keys to your success. Making it work with one real investor ready to cut a check is more important than developing a perfect product pitch for future potential investors.
Generally, cold calls to angel investors are not appreciated. Work carefully immediately after an investor expresses interest in your proposal to open a line of communication. Follow the investor’s preference, which may be for asynchronous communication such as email or SMS, or they may prefer to speak via video chat or by phone.
One goal, perhaps the goal of an initial pitch is to gain enough interest on the part of an investor that she or he wants to hear a second, personalized pitch in the near future.
You are not going to meet your “soulmate” investor the first time out or in any of the first ten times making your pitch. Shoot for a 1 in 100 rate of success at setting up a meeting with a funder. That means that for every 100 contacts you make, one of them might consider funding your business.
There is often a two-step flow to reach an investor. You may need to pitch a surrogate who can get you a meeting with the right investor. As a baseline, you, as a representative of your startup, ought to have an up-to-date LinkedIn profile. You should have a professional Twitter account where you follow and connect with investor networks, and you should plan on attending events with investors and other entrepreneurs through Eventbrite and Meetup.
Show up early to events. Stay late. Strategically attend paid events where investors are the invited speaker for a better shot at meeting the right investor. The “right” investor is the one who shoots you down but who knows three or four other investors who are more likely to be interested in your idea or your brand.
Be where other startups are, such as co-working spaces, and consider creating a recruiting profile for your startup on AngelList. You need to be easy to find and ready to meet.[13]
If you make your pitch informally 100 times, you will have the opportunity to refine your idea and your informal narrative. You will learn what gets investors excited, how to pace your informal pitch, and you will learn to move away from all-or-nothing formal pitches on the stage to the kinds of informal conversations with connected people who can get you a meeting with the right investor. It is important to learn who the connectors are, who are “all hat and no cattle,” and ultimately you must know what you are asking for: a sit-down meeting with an angel investor who will listen to your idea.
The informal pitch may include a ballpark figure funding goal, but above all else should communicate capability and passion for the idea.
Your first pitch to an investor, according to the odds, will not result in an offer of funding.
The investor will often tell you why she or he is interested in your pitch. Keep this in mind and ask if there are any portions of the pitch that they would like to know more about. Be straightforward and be open to change. Know when to stop selling and listen. Know that you need not point out any flaws in your product when discussing a possible investment. A solid, experienced investor will have noted many or all of the potential flaws, conflicts, and stress points in your product pitch by researching your business before the meet.
Gauging investor interest is important. It is subjective. It takes time and regular, professional communication. You can change mockups and make prototypes with investor input in mind, but you must consider your costs and recognize when an investor is not serious. You do not want to spend more than your startup can afford to alter your product for an investor who is only testing the waters.
How often you communicate with a potential investor depends on their availability, their willingness to communicate, and how many resources you have at your disposal for cultivating relationships. One thing is for sure: You must follow up with potential investors. They will expect you to do so if they have expressed an interest in your proposal.
A few somewhat universal goals you might pursue for communicating with interested investors:
• Establish a pattern of regular communication.
• Encourage the investor to use your prototype.
• Encourage her or him to ask questions and make suggestions.
• Expect to pitch to a potential investor again and again. Expect to make follow-up pitches and progress reports consistently and professionally regularly even after she or he has bought in.
• As you work to secure and reassure investors, your work will likely evolve to include two difficult but essential facets: 1. You will have to be the communicative connector between your customers and investors. 2. You will need to keep innovating even after investors have thrown their weight around.
OTHER TYPES OF PITCH
There are a few other types of pitch you may wish to prepare or that you may be assigned to develop besides the somewhat standard ten- to fifteen-minute slide deck proposal. The following are examples of longer-form and more brief pitch types: elevator pitches, three-minute pitches, prospectus writing, and nonprofit pitches.
Elevator Pitches
The elevator pitch, or Twitter pitch, should land somewhere between a branding statement and a problem-solution narrative. It should take no longer than a minute to deliver, and in most cases it ought to be memorized. The point of an elevator pitch is to earn a chance to make a longer pitch at a later date at the time and place of the investor’s choosing. Giving an elevator pitch is an art. It’s often done informally at networking events. In movies, these types of pitches are given in bathrooms, on the street, in the firm’s lobby as a courtesy, or, yes, in elevators. In reality, you never know when you might need to give an elevator speech. That’s why you always have it memorized.
Be able to tell a potential investor precisely what your product does, why a mass audience would be interested, and where mass revenues are going to come from. All other aspects of the pitch will be in response to questions—if you can manage to get an investor interested. If you’re asked to write one, make it two to three sentences, or a tweet. Write one that’s easy to memorize so that any member of your team can deliver it and any potential investor can comprehend what the brand is, what you do, and how you plan to make money.
Three-Minute Pitches
Two- or three-minute pitches are often used at “pitch days” or “speed dating” events where many entrepreneurs and many potential investors or well-connected people meet to hear what’s being developed. Rather than tailoring a deck for a potential investor or for a competition and then reading the audience during the pitch performance, you may need to take a Swiss Army Knife approach and develop a handful of different short, completely scripted pitches to present to different people depending on their role (e.g. investor or journalist), their field (e.g. tech, advocacy, PR), or their attention span.
When startups attend pitch days in front of prospective investors, there is a formulaic approach to the ask. While you may not need to adhere to a script for a slide deck, a solid three-minute pitch can help you attract vendors and suppliers, woo landlords and advertisers, recruit employees, and win over other advocates. And, yes, maybe even investors someday (at which point you’ll revisit that pitch deck).[14]
Craft pitches that are long enough to incorporate a narrative without missing the essentials of the elevator pitch. Joanne Cleaver, writing for Entrepreneur.com, suggests that the three-minute pitch can be tailored to an audience according to this formula: “Get their attention, tell them the right story, and keep ‘em on the hook.”
Prospectus Writing
A successful pitch presentation might end with an investor asking for your prospectus. “Prospectus” is a tricky term in the startup world. Prospectus.com spells out all of its potential meanings:
“A prospectus is somewhat used as an interchangeable term. Often a business plan is referred to as a prospectus, as is the private placement memorandum (PPM). In many cases, the prospectus is a public disclosure document that, like the PPM, is used to disclose the company’s data prior to a public listing of securities (with the goal in mind to raise capital publicly). However, prospectuses are also used in the private placement market and often the term itself is employed in lieu of an offering memorandum or a PPM. Referring to your business plan or your private placement memorandum as a ‘prospectus’ is not inaccurate, but it may not be precise [edited for spelling and clarity].”[15]
Be sure you know what’s being asked of you if someone asks for a “prospectus.” Have your complete business plan ready in case that’s what an investor really wants to see. It’s much more feasible to break down a business plan into different types of prospectuses depending on who’s making the request than it is to try to turn a legal prospectus into a complete business plan.
“Whether you are raising private capital or set to launch a publicly listed company on a stock exchange, a business plan and a disclosure document is required.”[16] Per prospectus.com, the document needs at a minimum the following information:
• Terms of the Offering: The terms should be directed to a targeted audience of appropriate investors.
• Regulation Disclosures: Whatever regulations exist for raising funds need to be indicated and addressed.
• Management Team: Describe who is leading this organization, what each person’s background is, and where they are getting their help from in terms of outside organizational or institutional support.
• Risk Factors: In particular, note any risks associated with the specific field you are trying to enter.
• Subscription Procedures: You need to write up a legal document to explain the terms of the stock or other security your startup is offering.[17]
For this text, a prospectus refers to a summary of a business plan put in writing that might be used as a disclosure document. There are online aids available that can help you write a business plan, which can be streamlined and used as a prospectus. You should make contact with a lawyer before you make any serious pitches to investors. The best advice may be to use the U.S. Small Business Administration’s tools for crafting a business plan as completely as you can, and then based on a thorough examination of the marketplace and your plans, you can then craft a prospectus.
Nonprofit Pitches
Nonprofit startups need to make pitches to request funds, and they may still go through the process of bootstrapping, asking friends and family for money, and eventually going to larger investors (i.e. donors, foundations, grantors, etc.) to try to get their business off the ground. In the vast majority of cases, nonprofit organizations will need to identify various revenue sources apart from the initial grantor or foundation if they plan to stay afloat. Thus, nonprofits often have to be grant-managing machines and great pitch developers too. Other ways that nonprofits bring in revenues beyond getting grants include signing up small donors in person at community events, hosting fundraising galas, crowdfunding, making direct mail requests, and sending phone, email, and text requests.
Potential sources of revenue must be described in great detail in any documentation explaining your nonprofit business plan. Other elements should still be included: branding, a problem-solution narrative, communications plans and tools demonstrating your design sense, an analysis of the “competition,” and financial plans. They need to be addressed in terms of terminology and tone to donors and grantors, but at the end of the day the pitch for a nonprofit business has a lot in common with a startup pitch.
TOOLS TO IMPROVE YOUR PLAN AND YOUR PITCH
The Business Model Canvas mentioned earlier can be used to develop the components of your pitch; however, it shouldn’t be used as a checklist. The sections of the canvas flow into one another and should be considered a strategic whole.[18] Write and edit multiple versions of your business model so that you could make it into a flipbook and animate it if you wanted to.
If your company or university would pay for it, Strategyzer costs \$299 per year and allows you to electronically build within the BMC framework and to generate reports based on what you have proposed.[19]The Value Proposition Design text zeroes in on two points of the BMC—the value propositions and customer segments—and breaks down your analysis and development into smaller units that can be profiled, anticipated, and measured to try to achieve the best product market fit as you further develop your actual product and test it with users.[20]
Canvanizer[21] and BMFiddle[22] allow you to digitally build the BMC over and over again. With some practice, either can be a useful tool for applying virtual sticky notes to the BMC. Neither does your thinking for you, but if you’re looking for inspiration, BMFiddle shares the Skype BMC example.[23]
Regardless of the tool you use, it is essential not to be boring. Present your slide deck to new people consistently. Present it to people with no knowledge of investing or entrepreneurial pitches to see how they respond to the design and the flow of your presentation.
Guy Kawasaki offers good guidelines for using PowerPoint in his 10/20/30 rule.[24] You may have to adjust your presentations for each pitch setting, but these are solid guidelines to start with. Kawasaki says that a slide deck should have 10 slides, the presentation should take about 20 minutes, and the type size should be at least 30-point. Follow these rules to have easily understood PowerPoint presentations that don’t drone on and that conform to investors’ expectations when dealing with startups. The 10-slide structure presented by Kawasaki is a good alternative to the structure presented in this chapter.
PITCHING PRACTICES — WHAT RESEARCH SAYS
Scholars study the art and (social) science of the startup pitch. The discussion here includes brief analyses of research on the use of rhetoric in pitches, the role gender plays in pitch success, and analysis of how entrepreneurs can dress to win. Useful academic research focusing narrowly on entrepreneurial pitches has been done, but the body of pitch research is not nearly as robust as work delving into other aspects of entrepreneurial business management and success.
Plenty of articles have been written about how to pitch. Some may prove useful to you in planning and delivering your pitches, but they usually lack academic rigor. This section is a synthesis of carefully conducted social science research that has gone through peer review. Assumptions were tested. Findings are backed by detailed evidence, and limitations are acknowledged directly in detail.
Successful Presentation Language: Framing the Pitch
Research regarding rhetoric in pitch presentations covers a variety of areas. This is an interesting area of study for scholars of rhetoric because pitch competitions and television shows are fertile ground for looking at what works in contemporary persuasive speech. One key concept is “impression management.”[25] In a recent publication in the Journal of Business Venturing, Parhankangas and Ehrlich examine down to the word “How entrepreneurs seduce business angels.” They looked at what words or types of words helped entrepreneurs actually secure funding and found that there may be optimal points in terms of numbers of words to put in your pitch deck for employing “positive language” (nine words), for self-promotion regarding your ability to innovate (2.8 words), for referencing your own weaknesses (3.5 words), and for “blasting” the competition (3.3 words). This serves as a reminder that these things – referencing your innovativeness, your weaknesses and your competition’s failings – are good to do in a pitch, but you probably shouldn’t overdo it. There seems to be, at least based on one study, a “Goldilocks[26] point beyond which you don’t want to step.
Stay positive, and reference your skills and failings and your competition’s major weaknesses without overdoing it. Another paper on rhetoric and the entrepreneurial pitch looks at how Korean entrepreneurs reconfigured their pitch decks when participating in a competition designed to bring already successful Korean products to American markets. The entrepreneurship program studied here is intense. Program organizers and their staff do “actual market research for each company’s product, and the competition’s winners receive actual business development that has historically led to actual deals.”[27] The authors of this paper probably use the word “actual” so often because they want to stress that this is not a paper about “merely academic” concepts.
They analyzed initial pitch decks and final decks of fourteen teams that completed the program: “a full cycle of activity: application to the program, initial pitches, initial feedback from program personnel, detailed feedback from representative stakeholders in the target market, and revised pitches.” Product claims changed as teams went through the program: “There is a change in wording or details to provide more evidence-based and benefit-oriented language.” At times, questions raised in the feedback process were directly addressed in rebuttal slides showing an engagement in the process that reached beyond trying to perfect the pitch deck. When entrepreneurial pitch development programs are running at top speed, so to speak, entrepreneurs show they can think strategically about their product, their market, and how to communicate to all types of audiences the value of their solution and their approach to solving problems.
Another article, published in IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, analyzed frames used by entrepreneurs and how they are developed.[28] Here, “frame” is a way of talking about something that helps connect your understanding of an object, product, or event with other people’s understanding and values. The article states, “The entrepreneur acquired the most influential frames through stakeholder discussion, applied these frames in a way that stacked and made salient multiple frames beyond the problem-solution frame, and judged frame fit by considering the degree to which catchers took up the frames.” The author calls investors and stakeholders in this study “catchers” to stress that they are the ones pitches are directed to. It’s important that they understand, so it can help to use multiple frames.
Problem-solution is just one frame you can use. What this means for students is that the way you describe your product will probably evolve as you talk about it with stakeholders, and it should probably evolve in ways that are meaningful to them. It’s okay to stack frames if you need to. You can work to come up with different, specific terms that help define your innovation in different contexts for different groups. The example in this paper framed the innovation – a nonprofit organization called Hacker Gals – as a collection of hackers who know about computers, makers who get things done, and women who have unique perspectives in the startup world. The combination of frames helped the paper’s author, who also runs the startup, to communicate better with more stakeholders. Ultimately, more specificity emerged as she reworked her pitches: “Specificity and salience appeared to be, in other words, directly proportional.” Thus, one thread tying all these rhetorical analyses together is that specificity is important in entrepreneurial pitches, but it doesn’t come only from the minds of the pitch team. It comes as a result of working and reworking the pitch with stakeholders and mentors.
Gender and Pitch Success
Lakshmi Balachandra, Anthony Briggs, Kimberly Eddleston, and Candida Brush studied how gender affects the way entrepreneurial pitches are perceived.[29] They did not find that being female absolutely precluded an entrepreneur from finding funding, but they did find that “gendered expectations do make a difference as women entrepreneurs who present masculine behaviors are more likely to be evaluated positively than those who do not.” The authors continue, “Interestingly we find women entrepreneurs have stronger communication skills, but rates of women’s entrepreneurial participation remain weaker than men’s.” The authors suggest that this is because investors, generally speaking, are males who prefer to see so-called “masculine behavior,” characterized as “bold,” “attentive,” “[demonstrating] self-assurance,” “calm,” and “confident,” in women giving entrepreneurial pitches.
The authors go on to say: “Consistent with liberal feminist theory, women do face bias in terms of the masculine stereotype held by the majority of the male-dominated investment community: During the pitch, women should ‘act’ like men and indicate masculine behaviors or they may be penalized by investor audiences to not have the qualities they believe to be consistent with entrepreneurship.”[30]
Students shouldn’t interpret this article simply as a plea to female entrepreneurs to “Pitch Like a Man” in early-stage pitch presentations, to reference the title of this article. Social structures setting the norms for pitch analysis need to change. Investors must become aware of their own biases and retrain themselves to analyze pitches on their own merits rather than on the gender of the people making the pitch. Scholars and advocates are better positioned to demand these changes than entrepreneurs begging for startup funds in an environment where the success rate is very low.
What to Wear
The quality of a pitch presentation is subjective. Investors and judges will notice when a pitch lacks quality, but they might not care to or be able to discern if it was the style of dress or style of presentation that spoiled the deal. Your dress and your performance can obviously influence whether or not your pitch is successful, but there are not many hard and fast rules. Web resources are filled with advice on how to dress and whether or not you should wear formal business attire, business-casual attire, or even casual attire. What’s essential is that you research what pitch competition calls for or what the investor prefers. Just ask how formal the context of the presentation is and dress accordingly. If it’s a competition, look for media from previous events showing how previous winners were dressed.
There’s not a deep pool of academic research on what to wear to your pitch presentation, but scholars have shared a clear idea of what doesn’t work: “Casual dress and nonchalance have a negative influence on investors’ evaluations.”[31] Do the research that allows you to dress to suit the occasion. When in doubt, wear a business suit and jacket. You can always set the jacket aside and lose the tie or your most formal accessories, e.g. Mom’s pearls, if needed.
The Importance of Performance
There is a better body of work on performance and what works. Jeffrey Pollack, Matthew Rutherford, and Brian Nagy reviewed 113 successful pitches from the TV shows Shark Tank and Dragons’ Den (Canada’s answer to Shark Tank).[32]
They had students rate these successful pitches and noted that those who were more prepared received more funding, and they found that perceptions of legitimacy had to be present for this relationship to work. This suggests that merely being over-prepared isn’t enough to secure the most funding. An entrepreneur must be prepared and legitimate to survive the sharks. What comprises legitimacy? In this study, it was a wide variety of concepts ranging from the founder’s level of experience to the business’ likelihood of gaining good media attention. Additionally, showing strong management skills, existing resources, and likelihood of gaining endorsements helped.
Digging Deep Into Performance Types and Practices
Even if investors don’t want to acknowledge it, the quality of the pitch makes a difference. Studies show that investors often say their decisions are based on rational elements of the business and the plan presented to them. However, an article titled “The Impact of Entrepreneurs’ Oral ‘Pitch’ Presentation Skills on Business Angels’ Initial Screening Investment Decisions” suggests otherwise:
“Presentational factors (relating to the entrepreneurs’ style of delivery, etc.) tended to have the highest influence on the overall score an entrepreneur received as well as on business angels’ level of investment interest. However, the business angels appeared to be unaware of (or were reluctant to acknowledge) the influence presentational factors had on their investment-related decisions: the stated reasons for their post-presentation intentions were focused firmly on substance-oriented non-presentational criteria (company, market, product, funding/finance issues, etc.).”[33]
How do you show preparedness? Melissa Cardon, Cheryl Mitteness, and Richard Sudek suggest that it’s essential the pitch team demonstrates that it understands the larger context of the market and social conditions for their product. “Not surprisingly, our results confirm that entrepreneurs seeking funding from angel investors need to have a strong opportunity and be perceived as competent. More important, beyond these factors, entrepreneurs appear to be able to increase their chances of receiving funding if they are able to signal to potential investors that they are prepared, meaning they have thought through the big picture and impact of their product or service and are able to answer questions with confidence and without appearing defensive.”[34]
This suggests that for your pitch performance to land, you need to demonstrate not just that you understand how your business model works but that you understand how all similar business models work, what the economic conditions in the related field need to be, and whether those conditions are present.
The research of Sean Williams, Gisela Ammetller, Inma Rodríguez-Ardura, and Xiaoli Li finds (based on a study of a small sample) that different cultural values are evident in the entrepreneurial pitches made in different countries.[35] Even if you’re not presenting outside of your most comfortable cultural sphere, it may be in your best interests to learn about the values of the organization, angel or judges you’ll be pitching to and speak to those values to maximize your success. These scholars considered entrepreneurial values in pairs, e.g. some entrepreneurs tend to focus on the motivation of profits while others focused more on autonomy. Some tend to promote individualism while others show the strength of their networks. Some focus on learning while everyone (in this small study) discussed action. The country-by-country breakdown in this study’s results is somewhat murky, but these pairings ought to be helpful for you to consider what kind of entrepreneur you are. Identify your values and communicate them. Look for investors and competitions that are trying to achieve the same things with their entrepreneurial efforts.
PRESENTATION TOOLS
There is more to life than PowerPoint, but Prezi gives people headaches. If you must use PowerPoint, generate a branded deck format or, perhaps better yet, let the product design lead the way and have a plain deck background. Avoid extensive use of bullet points. Illustrate every number that appears in your presentation. A dollar amount belongs in context. You should either demonstrate expected growth or expenditures or represent your target market, for example, as a small piece of a relatively large mass media pie.
Alternatives to the traditional deck include Perspective by Pixxa, which allows you to represent and animate data, and Haiku Deck, which includes lots of propriety art elements and a startup pitch template — not for professionals but perhaps good for novices getting right to work. Slidebean is good for producing pitches and testing online because it has built-in support for analytics and tracking. Wideo, an animation development app, can be used to completely stack and time a deck with various animations within and between sides.
Spinuzzi, et al. developed another paper on pitch deck development and noted that in intensive pitch competitions entrepreneurs are quite limited in how they can adjust their decks. Consider yourself lucky if you can develop your product and your pitch at the same time so that feedback on your pitch is simultaneously feedback on your innovation. In the same article, authors identified three ways pitch decks are most often altered. The structure of the deck may change—slides can be added and deleted. The claims and evidence may be clarified or strengthened, and the level of audience engagement may be tweaked. Consider judging yourself on these three areas as a good, overarching, holistic approach to determining what, if anything, you can improve on as you work to perfect your pitch.
Resources
See Startup Funding: Why Funding[36] for resources on pitching.
Mark Poepsel, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville in the Department of Mass Communications. He researches media sociology and leadership in journalism organizations and teaches courses in media management, media entrepreneurship, graduate research methods, broadcast writing, introductory writing, and introductory theory. In 2016, he was a fellow at the Scripps Howard Journalism Entrepreneurship Institute, and he was a Scripps Visiting Professor in Social Media. Reach him on Twitter at @markpoepsel.
Leave feedback on this chapter.
1. Ries, Eric. The Lean Startup: How today's entrepreneurs use continuous innovation to create radically successful businesses. (New York: Crown Business, 2011). ↵
2. "Airbnb First Pitch Deck," Pitch Deck Coach on Slideshare, https://www.slideshare.net/PitchDeckCoach/airbnb-first-pitch-deck-editable. ↵
3. Ingrid Sturgis, "Customer Discovery," Media Innovation and Entrepreneurship, press.rebus.community/media-innovation-and-entrepreneurship/chapter/customer-discovery/. ↵
4. Balsamiq, https://balsamiq.com/. ↵
5. Alex Ivanovs, “Top 35 Free Mobile UI Kits for App Designers 2017,” colorlib, March 9, 2017, https://colorlib.com/wp/free-mobile-ui-kits-app-design/. ↵
6. Marc Andreessen, “The PMARCA Guide to Startups. Part 4: The Only Thing That Matters,” Pmarchive, June 25, 2007, http://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part4.html. ↵
7. Ibid. ↵
8. Mike Isaac, “Inside Uber’s Aggressive, Unrestrained Workplace Culture,” The New York Times, February 22, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/22/technology/uber-workplace-culture.html. ↵
9. Julie Schott, “Is Quip the Uber of Toothbrushes?” Elle, August 7, 2015, http://www.elle.com/beauty/reviews/a29700/quip-toothbrush-subscription/. ↵
10. Strategyzer, “Business Model Canvas Explained,” YouTube, September 1, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoAOzMTLP5s. ↵
11. "35 Best Pitch Decks That Investors Are Talking About," Konsus, https://www.konsus.com/blog/35-best-pitch-deck-examples-2017/. ↵
12. "35 Best Pitch Decks From 2017 That Investors Are Talking About," Konsus, https://www.konsus.com/blog/35-best-pitch-deck-examples-2017/. ↵
13. Hernan Jaramillo, "11 Hacks to Get Meetings With Investors in Silicon Valley,” HackerMoon, January 12, 2015, https://hackernoon.com/11-hacks-to-get-meetings-with-investors-in-silicon-valley-14b4851ab3e8. ↵
14. Joanne Cleaver, “3 Steps to the Perfect 3-Minute Pitch,” Entrepreneur, March 20, 2015, https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/242523. ↵
15. Ibid. ↵
16. “Business Plan vs. PPM vs. Prospectus,” Prospectus.com, https://www.prospectus.com/business-plan-vs-ppm-vs-prospectus/. ↵
17. Ibid. ↵
18. Alex Osterwalder, “Tools for Business Model Generation,” Stanford eCorner, February 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GIbCg8NpBw. ↵
19. Strategyzer App, https://strategyzer.com/app. ↵
20. "Value Proposition Design," Strategyzer, https://strategyzer.com/books/value-proposition-design. ↵
21. Canvanizer, https://canvanizer.com/new/business-model-canvas. ↵
22. Business Model Fiddle, bmfiddle.com/. ↵
23. Example from Business Model Generation, BMFiddle, bmfiddle.com/f/#/local. ↵
24. Guy Kawasaki, "The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint," GuyKawasaki.com, https://guykawasaki.com/the_102030_rule/. ↵
25. Annaleena Parhankangas and Michael Ehrlich. “How Entrepreneurs Seduce BusinessAngels: An Impression Management Approach.” Journal of Business Venturing. Vol. 29.4. July 2014. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusvent.2013.08.001. ↵
26. "Goldilocks Principle," https://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldilocks_principle. ↵
27. Clay Spinuzzi, Scott Nelson, Keela S. Thomson, Francesca Lorenzini, Rosemary A. French, Gegory Pogue, Sidney D. Burback, Joel Momberger, “Making the Pitch: Examining Dialogue and Revisions in Entrepreneurs’ Pitch Decks.” IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication 57 no. 3, September 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/2152/25712. ↵
28. Stacy J. Belinsky and Brian Gogan, “Throwing a Change-Up, Pitching a Strike: An Autoethnography of Frame Acquisition, Application, and Fit in a Pitch Delvelopment and Delivery Experience,” IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 59 no. 4. October 2016, http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7592403/. ↵
29. Lakshmi Balachandra, Anthony Briggs, Kimberly Eddleston, and Candida Brush, “Pitch Like a Man: Gender Stereotypes and Entrepreneur Pitch Success,” Frontiers of Entrepreneurship Research, 33 no. 8, June 2013, http://digitalknowledge.babson.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2634&context=fer. ↵
30. Ibid. ↵
31. Louis F. Jourdan Jr., “The Relationship of Investor Decisions and Entrepreneurs’ Dispositional and Interpersonal Factors,” Entrepreneurial Executive, 17 no. 1, January 2012. ↵
32. Jeffrey M. Pollack, Matthew W. Rutherford, and Brian G. Nagy, “Preparedness and Cognitive Legitimacy as Antecedents of New Venture Funding in Televised Business Pitches,” Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice. 36 no. 5, September 2012, [1]https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233733878_Preparedness_and_Cognitive_Legitimacy_as_ Antecedents_of_New_Venture_Funding_in_Televised_Business_Pitches. ↵
33. Colin Clark, “The Impact of Entrepreneurs' Oral ‘Pitch’ Presentation Skills on Business Angels' Initial Screening Investment Decisions,” Venture Capital: An International Journal of Entrepreneurial Finance, 10 no. 3, July 2008. ↵
34. Melissa S. Cardon, Cheryl Mitteness, and Richard Sudek, “Motivational Cues and Angel Investing: Interactions Among Enthusiasm, Preparedness, and Commitment.” Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, October 2016, http://www.effectuation.org/?research-papers=motivational-cues-angel-investing-interactions-among-enthusiasm-preparedness-commitment. ↵
35. Sean D. Williams, Gisela Ammetller, Inma Rodríguez-Ardura and Xiaoli Li. “A Narrative Perspective on International Entrepreneurship: Comparing Stories From the United States, Spain, and China,” IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 59 no. 4, December 2016, http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7736039/. ↵
36. CJ Cornell, "Startup Funding: Why Funding?" Media Innovation and Entrepreneurship, press.rebus.community/media-innovation-and-entrepreneurship/chapter/section-2-why-funding/. ↵ | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/Media_Innovation_and_Entrepreneurship_(Ferrier_and_Mays)/08%3A_Pitching_Ideas/8.01%3A_Pitching_Ideas.txt |
Amy Eisman
How to avoid the dreaded blank stare during a live presentation. ‘Good ideas die all the time,’ one expert reminds us.
From the Field
What makes a compelling, memorable presentation? What will make investors sit up and take notice?
Most experts say the first thing a startup presenter should do is tell a good story. You have to be engaging, even entertaining, explains Tom Davidson, former senior director of PBS Digital, now in product development at Gannett.
Executive coach and author Peggy Klaus calls that “painting images about how this product or company could impact the audience.”
Klaus, president of Klaus & Associates, has seen thousands of presentations — from executives and entrepreneurs, to private bankers and nonprofits. She tells clients to keep the audience in mind by embracing fictional radio station WIFT-FM — where the call letters stand for what’s in it for them?
“Most people who start a speech or presentation think about what I want to say, what is my point,” Klaus says. “That is a narcissistic way of looking at it. What are their goals and objectives?”
Insiders admit the soul of a good pitch presentation is really common sense. Don’t dare read your slides. Be confident and concise. And of course practice, practice, practice.
“People think they can wing it because they’ve been verbal since 18 months,” Klaus says. “This results in a terrible meltdown situation.”
Below, the experts weigh in on the perfect pitch:
Your parents were right.
“Maintain eye contact with your audience,” says Jan Schaffer, who has funded 220 media entrepreneurship and innovation projects as Executive Director of J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism. “Walk around. Be at ease. Show some personality without being obnoxious.”
They were right about this, too.
Introduce yourself, says Schaffer, who teaches media entrepreneurship at American University and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. Don’t forget to tell your listeners who you are. Your audience won’t always be classmates.
Be armed.
Have one or two sentences that show that you, as the founder, have a firm grasp of the opportunity, says Ju-Don Marshall Roberts, startup advisor and coach and now Chief Content Officer for WFAE.FM. Convey enough passion to show you are the one to pull this off.
Davidson emphasizes that you simply can’t let the investors, humans like the rest of us, get distracted. If you don’t know an answer, tell them an exact time you will get back to them with the response.
Define your opportunity.
Will the market sustain the product? Have you explained how your idea is different from a similar one? “Good ideas die all the time,” Roberts says.
Equally critical: Convince funders that this is a business, not a hobby, Schaffer says.
Bring a solid team.
“I’ve seen a lot of pitches where you think, ‘This is a great idea, I wish someone else was doing it,’” Roberts says.
Memorize your pitch and don’t read your deck.
“Likewise, don’t read from your laptop or cell phone,” Schaffer says.
Klaus has seen so many presentations that a question about biggest mistakes momentarily stumped her. “There are so many. Where do I begin?”
She identifies some of the top presentation mistakes as using jargon, causing death by PowerPoint, speaking longer than seven minutes before interacting with the audience, and being condescending or arrogant.
Klaus also warns against promising future results and cautions that conditional language is preferred. “With our numbers, we see a future where we can … “
Klaus warns that young people’s nerves often get the best of them. They end up talking quickly or speaking with an upward inflection (making statements sound like questions). They fidget. They twist their hair. They slap their thighs.
Klaus says young presenters have a particular challenge that interferes with the enthusiasm our experts say is critical. “A lot of young people feel if they show passion and excitement they will come off as too exuberant or too young,” says the author of Brag! The Art of Tooting Your Own Horn Without Blowing It. “It is actually the inverse — that young people feel, ‘If I am really serious, they will think I am really smart.'”
In the end, make a video of yourself while practicing your pitch. Yes, we know you hate seeing yourself perform. But if even you can’t stand watching you, why should an investor have to listen?
For examples and pitching resources, see this chapter.[1]
Amy Eisman is director of media entrepreneurship at the School of Communication at American University in Washington, D.C. An innovator in journalism education and consultant, she held previous editing positions at AOL, USA Today , USA Weekend , and others. She is a former Fulbright lecturer and chairs the MJ Bear Fellowship Committee for ONA. Reach her on Twitter at @aeisman.
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1. CJ Cornell, "Startup Funding: Why Funding," Media Innovation and Entrepreneurship, press.rebus.community/media-innovation-and-entrepreneurship/chapter/section-2-why-funding/. ↵
8.03: Looking Ahead
Looking Ahead
You’re in business! Now, how to connect with your target market efficiently? Read Marketing Your Venture to Audiences for an overview of content marketing and analytics, an important and low-cost component of any startup’s marketing efforts. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/Media_Innovation_and_Entrepreneurship_(Ferrier_and_Mays)/08%3A_Pitching_Ideas/8.02%3A_From_the_Field-_The_Perfect_Pitch.txt |
Overview
You’ve identified a problem, need or opportunity and you’ve developed your solution to it as an entrepreneurial venture. You now have a minimally viable product or service. This chapter will talk about how to market that product or service to your target audience in order to find users and customers.
Your Audience: Users vs. Customers
The first thing to keep in mind is that media entrepreneurship is different from traditional entrepreneurship. You may be marketing to two distinct groups–users and customers–and you may want them to take different actions.
Think of a restaurant you frequent. The people who go in to eat are the end users of the product and also the people who pay for that product. The restaurant’s users are also its customers, so it only needs to market to one audience.
Now think about a technology venture like Facebook. Facebook makes its platform free to its users but charges advertisers to market to those users. This is much more similar to the traditional model for content and media businesses in which the core product (news) is given away free to an audience whose attention is then sold to the advertisers.
That’s not to say that as a media startup you can’t charge your users–you might have premium news or subscriptions, branded tchotchkes, events they can attend and hopefully countless other streams of revenue.
Your users may be just users of the product, or they may also be both users and customers to you.
The point is, if your customers and your users are different, you may need to reach them with different approaches and messaging.
For the purposes of this chapter, though, we’re going to focus on marketing your business in a way that attracts and engages an audience that uses your product, because whether that audience is paying you or inspiring others to pay you, without an audience, you can’t monetize.
Audience Acquisition
You might ask, why do you need an audience if they are not paying you directly, or not paying you yet? Traditionally, in media, the size of an outlet’s audience is important because it determines how much it can charge for advertising. Nowadays as a media startup, you probably want to also charge the audience for something–whether that’s a membership, events, a subscription to premium content, or something else. Either way, the larger your audience, the more revenue potential. Even if you’re grant-funded, you’ll want to prove to funders that your work matters and is worthy of more funding. The size of the audience that sees your work is one measure you can use to demonstrate impact.
Quantifying your audience is a measure of reach. The depth of their interest in you (which may be measured in terms of the length of time they spent with your content, whether they shared it, and other metrics) is known as engagement.
When you’re marketing your venture, it’s important to know whether it is more useful to your business goals to get a large quantity of audience members, or audience members who are passionate about your business and engage deeply.
In either case, it’s important to find an audience that is a match for your brand. This is called your target audience. The Customer Discovery for Content and Tech Startups[1] chapter discusses how to identify and target your intended “market segment,” whether that is demographic, psychographic, behavioral, or geographic. It also discusses how to perform market research and develop user personas, or buyer personas.
AIDA Models and Conversion
Ever heard of an AIDA model? The initials stand for attention, interest, desire, and action. The terms were originally used to describe how advertisers moved prospects or consumers down a pipeline or sales funnel from hearing about your product to being interested in knowing more about it, to wanting to get it, to actually buying it. For many businesses nowadays, including content businesses, this journey happens online. It’s called a “conversion funnel” in the e-commerce context.
AIDA funnel
Even as a journalist, your media outlet has an AIDA funnel that should matter to you. Ideally you probably want readers and visitors to subscribe to the media outlet as their conversion. But even if a user or audience member is not making an actual purchase or if your story doesn’t advance that end goal, chances are there is an action you want them to take (sign up to receive your column in their inbox each week, for instance). That action is still called a conversion even when it doesn’t involve a purchase.
Conversion, whatever form it takes, is a “bottom of the funnel” activity. A user is unlikely to do a bottom of the funnel activity without being aware of your company and becoming increasingly interested first. Sometimes, this does all happen in the span of a moment, in which someone comes to your landing page and converts by signing up to your email list. More often, movement through the funnel happens through multiple contacts with your company over time. For example, someone might see a boosted post from you on Facebook, but not take the action to go to your website. Another day, they might see another post and this time click through to go to your site, an investigative reporting site. There, they fill out the opt-in form to join your email list. They forget all about you for awhile, but now they get your biweekly emails. A few weeks later, they click on a link from one of them to a really good story about something that impacts them directly. In this action, they realize why you are important to them. A few weeks later, they get another email from you with information about a crowdfunding campaign you are running. They click to make a small donation.
Figuring out what conversion means for your organization and how to move audiences through the funnel should be the goal of your marketing.
Content Marketing
The great thing about a digital business is that all you need to start off is some talent, a great business idea, some paperwork, a website, a way to transact business, and some content marketing. You don’t have to be rich to start a business nor do you have to spend thousands on advertising to get people into your physical doors. If you sell to people online, you can market to them there too. Content marketing is one of the main ways digital organizations acquire audiences. And content marketing costs only your time if you know how to do it yourself. Content marketing is a common way to avoid needing a million-dollar advertising budget.
Content marketing is the David to advertising’s Goliath. And the Internet is the great equalizer. Today, you as a startup media organization and The New York Times have equal opportunity to acquire an audience because the Internet allows you to reach a niche audience in ways previously not possible.
Content marketing can be even more effective than advertising at growing a digital audience. Think about the advertisements you see–they’re often an unwanted interruption pushing you to want to buy something. Content is different. It pulls you into something you are already interested in, reminds you of your needs and wants, and subtly markets a solution to those needs in an enjoyable, soft-sell package, complete with a call to action.
The type of content you do will be different if you are a news outlet, in which case you will probably rely on amazing news content to market your outlet, than if you are a consultant, in which case you will probably produce content that positions you as an expert in the type of work you do, or if you are marketing a platform, in which scenario you’ll probably do content that helps your target audience solve problems they have that your platform can help them solve.
Marketing Strategy, Competitive Analysis and Content Strategy
Once I’ve said the word content marketing, it’s tempting to take that to mean, “Okay, I just need to create some blog posts.” But that’s going straight to tactics and bypassing strategy, and marketing starts with strategy. You have to first ask and answer the following questions:
• Who are you trying to reach?
• What are their needs and problems?
• What content might you provide that meets those needs?
• Where is your potential audience now?
• How will you distribute it through channels that reach them?
• And how will you measure / know whether your marketing was effective and iterate if not?
NewsCred offers one methodology for content marketing programs. It breaks down content marketing into five steps:
• documenting strategy
• producing and distributing content
• refining based on insights gleaned through producing and distributing content
• converting visitors to leads and customers
• and connecting metrics to business outcomes
You can read more in their white paper[2] (free if you sign up to their site).
Even though some people find creating content fun, that’s not why you’re doing it. You should be doing it to meet the business objectives. Content as marketing inevitably involves research and data to help you with decision making.
How do you decide what type of content to do? After all, if you’re launching your own startup, chances are you have lots of other core things you need to be doing (building the product, building a revenue model around it, etc.) in addition to marketing it. So you’ve got to decide where to put your resources.
Here’s a process that will help you decide where to put your efforts.
• First, develop an overall marketing strategy that takes into account your Goals, Strategies, Measurable Objectives and Tactics, as well as KPIs (key performance indicators by which you will measure success).
• Conduct a SWOT analysis to help you understand your brand’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in the marketplace.
• Then, conduct a Competitive Analysis of your competitors’ content to see what your closest competitors are doing.
• Finally develop a Content Strategy that shows where you might compete.
Let’s say you are creating a brand-new political news outlet targeted to progressive millennials.
• Your goal might be to become the go-to political news source brand with this audience.
• Your measurable objective might be to get X # of subscribers to your outlet’s daily newsletter.
• Your strategy to do that might be to do things that make your brand prominent on college campuses.
• One tactic might be to do paid social that markets your newsletter signup to a targeted audience on an appropriate social network. Another tactic might be to sponsor relevant events on college campuses and give away cool swag with your brand on it in exchange for on-site email signups.
• Your key performance indicators (or KPIs) in this example would be the number of signups to your newsletter.
Exercise
Put together a one-page marketing plan for your venture. Include high-level goals for the marketing you do, strategies, measurable objectives (X number of new users, X percent growth each week, X new followers on Twitter, etc.), and the tactics you will pursue to achieve these goals.
Now that you know what you’re focusing on and why, check out what the competition is doing and conduct a competitive analysis. There are two levels of competition here: the peer competitors you know about who do something very similar to what you do (other professional political news outlets in the example above), and the competitors you might not have thought of as competitors, but who are competing for your audience’s attention in search results on the Internet (for instance, a random but hugely popular blogger you may never have heard of).
You can use a program such as SEMRush or SpyFu to compare yourself to the competitors you know about and discover the competitors you weren’t aware of.
Use such programs to:
• Discover which topics in your expertise are popular and what topical niches are not being filled by your competitors.
• Unearth the search terms that commonly land people on your website or blog and your competitor’s.
• Surface other websites that also compete for those same search terms.
• See which variations of relevant search terms draw the highest number of searches.
• See what Google adwords terms your competitors have paid for and presumably find valuable from in attracting an audience.
Knowing the terms that are relevant to your enterprise that a good swath of people are searching for will give you the insights you need to develop a content strategy–i.e., what niche are you going to write about, that people are interested in but that is not already well-served by a similar competing company.
Here are some questions to ask as you approach this:
• What relevant search terms are your competitors ranking for?
• What does that information lead you to believe about what their audience is interested in and the demographic characteristics and interests of that audience?
• How does that match or diverge from the audience you want to reach?
• Which of your competitors’ words do you also want to rank for?
• Which of those are most difficult to compete for? Are they worth it given your budget and goals?
• What other words get traffic and provide an opportunity they haven’t considered or capitalized on?
These and similar lines of inquiry should lead you to some preliminary conclusions about the content that might engage your target audience–what topics do they care about and seek out, what information do they need, and most importantly, which of those are not covered ad nauseum elsewhere. Where can you provide a fresh and needed perspective?
If your venture is a content business, these questions would be used to hone the direction of the content that is your product, and marketing that product would become more of a question of how to distribute that content you’re doing as a product into the right channels to reach people who might be interested in it.
If your venture is a technology startup, this process would help you learn about the needs of the marketplace and where your competitor’s blog is providing value and where there might be a new niche opportunity to compete.
If you’re a freelance consultant providing a service to a certain type of business, this process will help you shape content your target clients might need and want that differentiates your brand and keeps it top of mind.
SEO
SEO is the topic of countless blog posts, by countless so-called gurus. What follows is an attempt to give an overview of generally agreed-upon principles that content producers should be aware of, not a comprehensive deep dive into the controversial nuances.
Here are the basics of what you need to know.
There are two facets to getting an audience for your (presumably great) content: distributing it into channels where your audience already is; and ensuring its discoverability in the places where audiences might be searching for it: in this case, search engines.
The first thing to understand is that search engines want to show people the most relevant results for whatever they’re searching for. By doing this, they gain eyeballs and become the most trusted authority, and can leverage that status to monetize their engines through advertising and other methods. So they’ve built a variety of complicated proprietary algorithms to ensure they only show the content they think people will find most relevant. This calculation includes the behaviors other people have had on the content–did they linger or did they bounce; did they share it; did reputable experts in the same topical space link to it?
This means that the best way you can optimize your content to be found is by doing amazing content on a top that people are searching for because they want to know. Ideally your posts will also be so good that influencers–leaders in their/your field with large audiences–will link to them. This is the ultimate compliment as they are endorsing you to their audience, and in a way, sending a quality signal to the search engines.
There are lots of search engine marketers who use “black hat” tactics to fool the algorithms into thinking your content is relevant, but using these is dangerous and can get you demoted in rankings. Two examples of black hat techniques are keyword stuffing, packing content full of irrelevant but high-traffic keywords; or cloaking, hiding such keywords in a way where search engines see them but humans don’t.
Again, the best thing you can do to show up in the search results to the right audience, is to create amazing content that is needed or wanted by that audience. What is amazing content? To start with, that means content that solves a problem or serves a need for its audience, content that’s more than just what you had for dinner, content that’s long enough to be worthwhile, and content that delivers on its promises.
The other thing you can do that is within your control is to optimize that content in several ways.
The first is in your meta description. This shows up in search results and when you post on social, and it may encourage or discourage someone from clicking on your post, so it’s an important component of acquiring audience in the first place. When people engage with your content by clicking or lingering on it, that sends a signal that your content is authoritative.
If you use WordPress, you’ll need a plugin like Yoast or similar to edit this area of your post to be tantalizing.
The next is by making sure you use the terms (aka keywords) your audience is searching for (in a natural and relevant way) when you’re writing.
Remember that competitive analysis you conducted? In it, you found out what people were searching for on sites similar to yours and how many people were searching for various relevant topics? You also found out the many variations of relevant terms, and which were most commonly used. Note that similar phrases might have vastly different search volume–“hiking in Phoenix” might get 10,000 searches a month whereas the variation “Phoenix hiking” might only get 500. Even if something gets a million hits a month though, that doesn’t mean it’s a great thing to build your content strategy around. It may have too much competition.
Hopefully you’ve found some words that have a decent audience, but that your competitors aren’t yet leveraging well, that you can use to optimize your strategy. (These should also help you find your outlet’s niche subject matter.)
Here are some of the places you may want to include the keywords you’ve decided to target:
• in your post URL
• in page titles
• in subheads
• near the top of the post
• in image alt tags, image title tags
• in the metadescription
Of course, you never want to overuse or “stuff” keywords into your content, and you certainly shouldn’t hide them (known as “cloaking”). These are black-hat tactics that will get you penalized by search engines.
But if your post is about a certain niche topic or specific person, it should say so, prominently. Save cutesy or abstract headlines or ledes for print. You should also research which variations of terms people are searching for around the topic and be strategic about which ones you use.
The above description focuses on “text” types of content. Of course, there are numerous types of content, such as video and multimedia, and there are different ways to leverage these for SEO. If you’re doing video or audio, optimize the title and description, and consider including a transcript. Also, realize that video and multimedia formats are great for getting other reputable sites to link to your content. But if you’re hosting the videos on YouTube or similar, you will need to think about how to get people back to your site.
There are also some technical things you can do to your site, especially if you are starting out. These include:
• You may need to install a plugin to help you control page titles and your search and social meta description.
• Avoiding having a bunch of 404 errors on pages that have been deleted. (Redirect any such pages to avoid this. Also redirect pages where you’ve changed the URL.)
• Enable an XML sitemap and submit it to Google Webmaster Tools. This will allow you to see when Google thinks your site is giving people a bad experience.
• Use SSL.
• Have good navigation (breadcrumbs) and URL structure.
You can get far more into the weeds with this (and people do), but following these best practices is a good start.
Types of Content
There are many types of content you can deploy as part of a content marketing strategy. Here are just a few of the types of content that can be used for marketing.
Note that content is not always the same as distribution. For instance, you might have a blog post that is designed to be distributed on social, a video designed to be distributed through YouTube, messaging written to be distributed via email, a lecture designed to be delivered at a conference, a podcast for iTunes, an ebook for Amazon, and so forth.
Social media can be a platform on which you create content. But it is also a distribution method for content housed elsewhere.
Each piece of content will be designed to fit the appropriate format for the platform(s) it will be distributed on, leaving lots of room for the same message to be repurposed into different content formats and then distributed into different channels where you can connect with different parts of your audience.
Social Media
Organic Social Media
The Internet is saturated with blog posts on how to use each social media network to best effect. We will not replicate those here. Instead, we’ll give an overview of how to use social media, generally, in the context of a broader marketing strategy for your venture.
Of course, you can create content that is solely meant to live on a social network. Instagram is a great example of a network that lends itself to this. People post awesome images and links are not clickable by default, which decreases the value of using this network to promote things you’re doing elsewhere.
However, when you’re using someone else’s network to post content, you don’t own your audience.
The social network owns the data about that audience, which decreases the value to you in building an audience on social media outlets like Facebook, Twitter, etc. These are what we call “borrowed channels.”
In addition, these borrowed channels all have different algorithms, some of which are specifically designed to demote content that is too obviously promotional rather than personal.
Furthermore, as a social media manager colleague of mine likes to say, social media is like throwing a pebble in the ocean. The odds of people seeing your efforts here at scale are low (if you don’t have lots of resources to devote to this).
For all of these reasons, in the content marketing context, social media is more often used to:
• Distribute, amplify, and bring attention to content that lives elsewhere on your “owned channels” and encourage people to subscribe to your owned channels.
• Expand the audience you reach on your owned channels by targeting a similar audience that wasn’t connecting with you previously.
• Listen to your audience and find out about their needs so you can serve them better.
• Foster engagement with your audience for your brand.
In my experience, when student teams pitch an entrepreneurial idea, they focus on social media as the main way to market their product. But posting on social media in itself does not comprise a marketing strategy. Social media is but one tactic or tool in a much larger toolbox. And the tools you employ should be tied to your venture’s business goals and marketing strategy, with some eye to the resources you have to deploy.
Paid Social Media
Why pay to reach your audience through social media networks? When you pay, you reduce the chance your efforts will be ineffective. For instance, by paying to advertise on these networks, you can ensure that your content reaches a larger audience, reaches more of the right niche audience or gets the right audience to engage with your content, if that’s your goal. Sometimes, you even get better analytics to track the effectiveness of your efforts.
Social advertising offers important advantages over conventional advertising:
• It lets you target a niche audience. It leverages the social network’s data about its users to show your ad only to the people most likely to care about your product, rather than the most eyeballs.
• It’s usually far less expensive than other types of advertising.
• It often allows you to pay only for the people you reach or engage (depending which you choose to optimize your ad for), so there is less waste.
• It gives you clear data and analytics about how your ad performed and lets you A/B test different variables–paid social will show you everything from the numbers of people who saw it and the actions they took on it to the ad variation they preferred. This allows you to optimize your efforts and minimize your expenses in the future.
Social media outlets typically let you choose which goal to pursue with your advertising, which can include:
• Get people to your website.
• Get people into your physical location.
• Get people to buy something from you.
• Build your email list.
• Get people to subscribe to other content you offer.
• Increase your followers, or followers of a certain demographic.
• Target your competitors’ followers and bring them into your fold.
• Get people to engage with your content.
• Generate leads.
• Target a very specific niche.
• And more.
Across most networks, when placing a social ad, you can choose between goals of reach, engagement or conversion. You will be charged accordingly:
• CPM, the cost per 1,000 views, is a measure of reach. This is great if you care mainly about awareness.
• CPC, the cost per click, is a measure of engagement. This is a better metric if you want people to go to a specific link. However, if your website or landing page–wherever you send people from the ad–isn’t set up well to get people to move down your funnel, this is a waste.
• CPA, the cost for an action that you specify, is a measure of conversion. This could include buying something, downloading an app, signing up, or similar.
When Brands Go Social
Social media has a down side too. Whenever you use it as a brand, you should think, “Who might not appreciate this message I’m going to put out?” And think about how those parties might co-opt your content to put out a counternarrative. You should also ask yourself, “Is there anything remotely potentially offensive in this piece of fun creative content I’m about to do?”
Perhaps you heard about Dove’s recent ad fail—a campaign on Facebook depicting a black woman turning white—and its mea culpa afterward.[4]
Or Ghost in the Shell’s backfired viral marketing campaign. The movie put out a hashtag and an image generator to encourage fans to make “I am Major” images that identified with the main character. However, people ended up using the hashtag and generator to call attention to what they saw as whitewashing on behalf of the movie, which cast a white woman in an Asian role, and renamed the character.[5]
Testing, Measuring and Iterating
Once you’ve executed your strategy, it’s important to determine whether it was successful, and how it might be adjusted in the future to better meet your goals.
This is where analytics come in to answer questions like which blog post topics or story topics performed better, which brand imagery did people respond best to, and which CTA (call to action) messaging was most effective in getting people to sign up / subscribe / etc.?
Here are just a few things you can and should test on your landing pages, in your marketing emails, on social, and in paid advertising:
• Text
• Visuals
• Headlines
• CTAs
• The relative performance of different landing pages
So how do you measure the effectiveness of your content efforts? Read on! The next chapter, Marketing Your Venture: Engagement & Analytics,[6] goes further into depth on how to set goals and objectives, measure success, and decide which analytics make the most sense to track and care about.
Training
Elizabeth Mays is the operations and marketing manager for Canadian nonprofit the Rebus Foundation, which is building a new, collaborative model for open textbook publishing through the Rebus Community.[21] She is also an adjunct professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, teaching its first online course in audience acquisition. Reach her on Twitter at @theeditress.
Leave feedback on this chapter.
1. Ingrid Sturgis, "Customer Discovery for Content and Tech Startups," Media Innovation & Entrepreneurship, press.rebus.community/media-innovation-and-entrepreneurship/chapter/customer-discovery/. ↵
2. "Whitepaper: Newscred Methodology: Five Elements of Content Marketing Success," Newscred, https://insights.newscred.com/whitepaper-newscred-methodology-five-elements-of-content-marketing-success/. ↵
3. Tristan Ferne, "Beyond 800 Words: New Digital Story Formats for News," BBC News on Medium, https://medium.com/bbc-news-labs/beyond-800-words-new-digital-story-formats-for-news-ab9b2a2d0e0d. ↵
4. Anita Balakrishnan, “Dove Apologizes After Social Media Users Skewer Soap Ad as Racist“ Cnbc.com, Oct. 8, 2017, https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/08/dove-ad-dove-apologizes-after-social-media-calls-ad-racist.html. ↵
5. Michelle Jaworski, “‘Ghost in the Shell’ Viral Marketing Campaign Backfires,” The Daily Dot, March 14, 2017, [1]https://www.dailydot.com/parsec/ghost-in-the-shell-viral-marketing-backfire/. ↵
6. Jessica Pucci, "Marketing Your Venture, Engagement and Analytics," Media Innovation & Entrepreneurship, press.rebus.community/media-innovation-and-entrepreneurship/chapter/marketing-your-venture-engagement-and-analytics/. ↵
7. Joe Pulizzi, Content Inc., (New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2015) http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/content-inc/. ↵
8. Joe Pulizzi, Epic Content Marketing, (New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2013), http://epiccontentmarketing.com/. ↵
9. The Hubspot Marketing Blog, http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing. ↵
10. The Buffer Social Blog, https://blog.bufferapp.com/. ↵
11. Yoast SEO Blog, https://yoast.com/seo-blog/. ↵
12. Growthrocks Growth Hacking Marketing Blog, https://growthrocks.com/blog/. ↵
13. "How to Use Twitter Ads: The Complete Guide for Business," Hootsuite, https://blog.hootsuite.com/twitter-ads/. ↵
14. "How to Advertise on LinkedIn," LinkedIn, https://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/how-to-advertise-on-linkedin. ↵
15. Snapchat’s Ad Manager: A Beginner’s Guide, AdEspresso by Hootsuite, https://adespresso.com/academy/blog/snapchat-ad-manager/. ↵
16. "Instagram for Business," Facebook Blueprint,https://www.facebookblueprint.com/student/home/show_enrollment/43448847. ↵
17. "Facebook Ads Manager," Facebook Blueprint, www.facebookblueprint.com/uploads/resource_courses/targets/340588/original/build/index.html. ↵
18. "Targeting Core Audiences," Facebook Blueprint, www.facebookblueprint.com/uploads/resource_courses/targets/339376/original/build/index.html. ↵
19. "Targeting Lookalike Audiences," Facebook Blueprint, www.facebookblueprint.com/uploads/resource_courses/targets/340891/original/build/index.html. ↵
20. "Targeting Custom Audiences," Facebook Blueprint, www.facebookblueprint.com/uploads/resource_courses/targets/341016/original/build/index.html↵
21. Rebus Community, https://about.rebus.community/. ↵ | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/Media_Innovation_and_Entrepreneurship_(Ferrier_and_Mays)/09%3A_Marketing_Your_Venture_to_Audiences/9.01%3A_Marketing_Your_Venture_to_Audiences.txt |
Jessica Pucci
Far too often, entrepreneurs focus squarely on conversion and forget about the rest of the funnel.[1] It can sound tempting to measure the success of your business solely by tickets sold, apps downloaded or T-shirts shipped. But evaluating a venture that way neglects the value and impact of your audience—the audience you have now, and the audiences you want but don’t have yet. Is your company really successful if it sells 750 hats at a music festival? To really say one way or the other, you’d need to know what your audience opportunity was first: Did 1,000 people attend the festival (if so, you sold hats to 75% of them, and that’s excellent!), or did 50,000 people attend (if so, you sold hats to only 1.5% of them, and that’s not so excellent, assuming everyone at the festival had a head)? And what about the 200 festival-goers who came to browse your hat booth but didn’t buy anything… yet? What about the 450 attendees who saw your hats around the festival and started following your brand on Instagram? Shouldn’t we include them when we tally up our successes? Don’t they count for something?
Your job as an entrepreneur is not just to make a single sale: It’s to build relationships with audiences who will grow your company. Focusing on a one-time sale will get you just that: one sale. But focusing on audience development—strategic growth and engagement of likely, long-term customers—creates a sustainable business.
Growth and engagement go hand-in-hand. Tomatoes don’t just grow: They need a particular patch of dirt with at least six hours of sun; they need a trellis; they need regular water, pruning and support—and that’s just tomatoes. Other veggies need different care. The point is, you don’t toss down some seeds and expect a harvest. Growth takes research, planning, hands-on care, and recognition that no two crops need the same thing. Gardening isn’t so far from digital audience growth. Just like produce, digital audiences are all different, and all require different forms of nurturing and nourishment to thrive. The way we feed and care for our digital audiences is engagement.
Engagement
Broadly, entrepreneurs and marketers use the term “engagement” to capture the many ways people and organizations identify, listen to, interact with, and activate digital audiences. When a company states it wants to “ramp up engagement,” it usually wants to increase discussion and activity around its brand, content or product. When a company hires an “engagement manager,” it usually intends for that person to manage the connections to and conversations with its audiences, on digital platforms or otherwise.
More specifically, however, engagement is defined as any action taken on digital content. A tweet, for example, is a piece of digital content; engagements with tweets include likes, retweets, and replies. A page on a website is a piece of digital content; engagements on web pages include scrolls, clicks, taps, video views, cursor or mouse movements, and form submissions.
Music is digital content, too; engagements include downloads and listens. All of these engagements are tangible and quantifiable. When we speak of “engagement” in the general sense, we can include face-to-face community outreach, magazine ads, and garage-sale posters. When we talk about “engagement” in the digital sense, we’re referring only to measurable content interactions.
Most organizations recognize that digital engagement is a critical marketing channel, though not all companies engage well. To work effectively—that is, to not only increase conversions, but to build a thriving customer pipeline—engagement has to occur at every stage of the funnel, and every stage requires strategy. Businesses should engage with users who are new to their brand differently than they engage with customers who have been brand-loyal for years. Companies selling baby products should engage with customers differently than a political organization engages. Here are four examples of companies with vastly different identities using digital engagement to achieve organizational success:
Engagement Example 1: Brand Discovery
Your audience can’t engage with you until they know you exist, and brand discovery is one of the things Instagram does best. Here, the gluten-free food blogger Minimalist Baker, aka Dana Shultz, is showing off a vegan taco recipe. Shultz wants to sell cookbooks, of course, but she knows that to do that, she must first build awareness and authority within the food content market by forging and nurturing relationships with audiences who enjoy eating and looking at pretty pictures of food. Shultz has almost 1 million followers, but even a robust Instagram account isn’t likely to directly drive too many users to her blog, or to Amazon to buy her book. It is likely to reach Shultz’s target audiences: people who like to cook, particularly vegan and gluten-free folks. Users will discover the Minimalist Baker account if someone they follow mentions @minimalistbaker, but more likely, they’ll discover the brand by clicking a hashtag in another post—say, #tacos. If someone I follow shares a photo of family taco night and uses #tacos, I may tap that hashtag to see more tacos… and then I’d see @minimalistbaker’s droolworthy photo. As soon as I tap it, I’d find myself suddenly aware of the Minimalist Baker brand. From here, any action I take is an engagement. If I like, save, or comment on any Minimalist Baker post, that’s an engagement. If I share a Minimalist Baker post with my sister, that’s an engagement. If I tap another hashtag—say, #vegan—on any Minimalist Baker post, or if I click on the link in her profile, those are engagements, too, even though performing those actions take me away from Minimalist Baker. None of those engagement actions made Minimalist Baker any money. There were no conversions in this scenario. But what did happen is that I became aware of the Minimalist Baker brand, and perhaps I began to take some small actions with the brand’s content, which officially makes me part of the Minimalist Baker audience, at the top of the Minimalist Baker funnel.
Engagement Example 2: Content Consumption
This image is linked to, not embedded. It is not CC BY.
Here, online magazine Slate wants something a bit more than the typical social media engagement. Slate produced a story about lab-grown meat that the company would like its audience to read. But they can’t see the story in Facebook—they have to click. So Slate combined an eye-catchingly bizarre image with a text hat-trick of novel post, practical headline, and a story description that teases the story (but doesn’t tell all!) to persuade users who view this post to click the cow for more. Now, Slate would absolutely love for readers to like, comment about, and share this article within Facebook—those engagements are great, because they help put this story in front of more people—but it’s also very important to the organization to get users to take the specific “click” engagement action. Doing so brings the user away from Facebook and onto Slate.com, which brings that user further down Slate’s funnel toward conversion. (Conversion, for Slate, may be subscriptions to SlatePlus, its membership-only content experience.)
Engagement Example 3: Group Discussion
NPR hosts a personal finance podcast called Your Money and Your Life, but the star of the show might just be its corresponding Facebook group of the same name. Originally intended as a forum where listeners could ask questions and swap ideas (and NPR could promote the podcast), the group has taken on a life of its own and boasts more than 30,000 members. Within the group—which anyone can join—members join in rich discussions on money advice, credit scores and retirement planning. NPR still shares podcast episodes within the group, but some of the group’s loudest conversations have nothing to do with NPR[2]… which is fine by NPR, because all of the engagement happens within an NPR-created and -facilitated environment. Robust online communities—just like offline groups—are excellent spaces to create or join as an organization. They’re where you can listen, research, network—and build a captive audience for your content.
Engagement Example 4: Video Views and More
This video is linked to, not embedded. It is not CC BY.
This video, a creative PSA on gun violence awareness with a shocking twist, has a clear objective: raise awareness of the warning signs of at-risk behavior. But you only get that message if you complete the entire video—and getting digital audiences to actually complete a video they begin is no small feat. You may notice that Sandy Hook Promise, the organization that created and posted this video, turned off comment functionality. So, truly, the only digital engagements a user can make with this video are to watch it, like or dislike it, or share it. Those are the only physical actions audiences can take. However, it’s Sandy Hook Promise’s hope that engagement around this video will go far beyond those three digital actions: After watching it, viewers can talk it about it at the dinner table, or initiate deeper discussions at school. And hopefully, because of this video, a viewer may be able to prevent a violent tragedy. Those are all engagements, too—and they may be more impactful than a like or a share.
Indeed, there are many types of engagement that are important, but not necessarily digital or measurable: A shoe company can count when a user likes a Facebook post, clicks an ad or actually buys a pair of sneakers, but the company cannot count when the shoes are worn. Wearing a brand is engaging with that brand!
In-person engagement is valuable, too: If you see a band play, you may choose to download their music, follow them on Twitter, or buy a ticket to their next show. You attending the concert wasn’t a digital event, but you and the band were absolutely engaging with each other as they rocked and you listened. Reading a vendor’s poster, seeing a choir sing, clipping a mailbox coupon, and reading a paper newsletter are all forms of engagement. However, some engagements are just easier to track—and thus, easier to grow strategically—than others.
Indeed, offline engagement is still alive and well. There’s an entire discipline of marketing dedicated to physical experiences; “experiential marketing” seeks to connect a brand to audiences directly via physical experiences such as flash mobs, taste tests, competitions, performances, art installations, and other events designed to evoke emotion and interaction. You may have seen the 2012 viral video “A Dramatic Surprise on a Quiet Square[3],” which captured an offline experiential marketing event. The cable channel TNT was launching in Belgium, and to encourage audiences to feel drama—in line with TNT’s tagline, “We know drama”—the channel placed a big, red button in the middle of a quiet town square and waited for a brave soul to push it. When the button’s finally pushed, drama ensues! The bystanders didn’t know it was a stunt at the time, and you can see their expressions of surprise; it was TNT’s hope that participants in the marketing event would forever connect their feelings to the brand, and that the campaign would grow its Belgian audience.
Even good, old-fashioned word-of-mouth is more important than ever: While academics have tuned focus to digital word-of-mouth (think Yelp reviews, comments and sharing), offline word of mouth can still grow and engage audiences. If I recommend my plumber to you in conversation, that’s engagement—and meaningful, high-quality engagement at that!
Engagement for engagement’s sake is fine if engagement alone is your goal. But if you have another goal—that is, if you need to get an audience to do or buy something—you have to use engagement as a stepping stone, one that builds and ushers potential and existing customers through your marketing funnel. It can be difficult to do all of that in a bubble: How do you know if you’re reaching your target customer? How do you know if all the time you spend on engagement is making your organization money? For those answers, we turn to analytics.
Analytics
Digital analytics are the data organizations use to measure the audience’s interactions with, quantify the impact of and inform the messages of our content and brand. Analytics is a collection of individual numbers called metrics that, when analyzed, tell the story of how far our brand or content reaches, how users engage with it, who those users are, where they are in the funnel, and when they take conversion actions. Nearly every digital activity can be recorded and counted, and analytics is the quantitative and qualitative analysis of that activity.
Analyzing your company’s digital performance is a critical step in understanding your overall business performance; understanding when, where and why users convert and how they interact with your brand adds necessary context to more traditional business data like revenue and supply-chain analysis. Analytics also help understand how our products and messages resonate with our audience, and suggest how to pivot our content to build stronger audience connections. But companies also use analytics to understand how digital audiences engage with their competitors—called “competitive analysis”—which helps businesses understand why, say, one furniture brand outsells another. Marketers also use analytics to identify audience opportunity. Before we ever start trying to feed audiences into our funnel, we can use analytics to determine what audiences we should target for our funnel in the first place.
Assignment: Facebook Audience Insights
You can use Facebook Audience Insights–the same tool all companies use to target specific audiences in Facebook–to research audience opportunities.
STEP 1: To access Facebook Audience Insights, you’ll need to be an editor or an administrator of a public Facebook page (a page is different from your regular profile). Don’t have a page? Make one! Visit facebook.com/pages/create and follow the directions to create a page of your own.
STEP 2: Visit Facebook.com/ads/audience-insights to access the Insights tool. Select “Everyone on Facebook” from the initial options; this ensures you can research Facebook audiences from scratch. Right away, you see data that represents all Facebook users; at the top, Facebook explains that the data you see represents all 150 to 200 million monthly active Facebook users in the United States.
STEP 3: Make your potential audience more specific by narrowing it down. Instead of looking at everyone in the country, select a state. Type a state into the “Location” box in the left-hand menu; here, we’ve selected Arizona. Immediately, we see that the data changes a bit: Now, the Insights tool tells us that the data we’re examining represents the 4 to 4.5 million monthly active Facebook users. You’ll also notice that the demographic data has shifted; the blue bars represent data for Arizona users, but the gray bars behind the blue ones represent the same United States Facebook users you started with, so you can compare your new audience to the “typical” Facebook user.
STEP 4: Now, narrow down your audience even further by selecting an age group, a gender or an interest from the options at left. Here, we’ve selected 18- to 30-year-olds with an interest in fitness and wellness; the Insights tool tells us that there are 600- to 700,000 Arizonans ages 18 to 30 who have indicated an interest in fitness.
STEP 5: Now that you’ve identified a “target” audience, explore it. Stay within the Demographics tab and scroll down to reveal information about the lifestyle, relationship status, job type, and education of your audience; think about what learnings you can take from this to apply to your overall marketing strategy. Then, go back to the top and click through the insights in the Household, Purchase, and Location tabs. Which of this data is helpful to you? Do you notice any major differences between “typical” Facebook users and your niche audience?
STEP 6: Finally, click on the Page Likes and Activity tabs. What other pages does this audience like? How can you replicate the success of those pages on your own? In the Activity tab, determine whether the audience you chose is more or less likely to engage on Facebook in the following ways. How can you turn these insights into action and audience growth? Our sample audience tends to comment, like, and click ads more often than typical Facebook users; this is a good opportunity for an Arizona fitness company!
Most of the digital metrics available to analyze can be parsed into two buckets: reach metrics and engagement metrics. Generally, reach metrics explain how widely a piece of content (or a website, or an entire brand or message) was distributed and to whom, while engagement metrics explain how users interacted with that content once they saw it.
Social media metrics make for easy examples. To analyze the performance of a single tweet, we first have to understand its reach: How many times did Twitter serve it to users? How far did it “go”? That data, then, puts engagement metrics in context. What did users do with the tweet once it was shown to them? In twitter, and across most other social networks, the following core reach and engagement metrics are at the heart of social media analytics:
• Reach: Reach defines the number of accounts or users a piece of content was served to.
• Impressions: Impressions represent the number of times a social network has served a piece of content to its users. One person can see a single Instagram, say, four times; that’s four impressions, but a reach of only one.
• Engagements: Social media engagements are any action taken on a piece of social content. Likes, retweets, shares, comments, taps, video views, poll responses—all of these are engagements.
• Engagement rate: Divide the total number of engagements by the total number of impressions for an engagement rate, which describes how “engaging” a piece of content is. In other words, engagement rate describes how likely users are to interact with the given content.
Site and app data are quite different than social metrics, but they’re close cousins. Just as we can divide social content into “reach” and “engagement” boxes, we can do the same with site and app metrics—the numbers are different, but they still help us organize our thinking and analyses around to who is receiving our content and what they’re doing with it. To understand who our site content or app reaches, organizations examine metrics such as:
• Pageviews: A pageview is counted when a user visits a page. It’s that simple! Be careful, though: A pageview is not a user. One person or one user can view a page more than once, and visit several different pages.
• Unique pageviews: Technically, Unique Pageviews (or “uniques”) are the number of sessions during which a specified page was viewed at least once. Uniques are not synonymous with “people” or “users”; one person can view a page on a laptop and the same page the next day using a mobile device… that’s two unique pageviews, but only one user.
• Sessions: A session is a single visit to your site or app; it’s the group of interactions made by a single user within a given time frame. A single session can contain multiple pageviews, clicks, events, transactions, and more. Knowing how many sessions or visits our audience initiates is a critical piece of the puzzle:
• Video views: A video view is counted whenever a user clicks “play” on a digital video—or when a social network or video platform auto-plays a video.
• Geography: Are your users actually from the state, region, or country you hope to do business in? Geography reports help explain whether the people interacting with your content are in your target markets.
• Device: If you know what kind of device—desktop, mobile, or tablet—your audience uses to access you, you can better tailor your website’s design and content to their needs.
• Source: Knowing your audience’s acquisition source—or where your site or app traffic comes from—is as important as knowing who’s showing up. Users can access your site by typing the URL into a browser or clicking a bookmark, or they can find your site via a search engine, a tweet, a Facebook post, an ad, an email, or a link on another website. Source breakdowns tell organizations which of these avenues are driving users to particular pages, which helps organizations understand where to spend their marketing energy.
Understanding who is getting to our site or downloading our app with those reach-related metrics is a critical step in evaluating digital performance—not only do they provide interesting business insights alone, but they set the stage for many other metrics, including engagement metrics. We can’t begin to understand, for example, how many users abandoned an ugly web page until we first know how many people arrived there. Sessions, pageviews, and unique pageviews—as well as segments of those, such as mobile sessions, or pageviews acquired by search engines—are building blocks for engagement metrics that explain how users behave with digital properties once they get there. Engagement or behavior metrics include:
• Average time on page: Time on page metrics help marketers understand how long users spend on each piece of content. It’s often safe to assume that the more time users spend on a page, the more highly engaged they are with that page’s content; therefore, time on page (and, similarly, session time metrics) are good indicators of how engaging content actually is.
• Entrances: Entrances are the number of times users entered a site or app through a particular page; in other words, entrances represent the number of sessions for which the specified page was the first page in a session. It’s one thing for people to view a page at some point during the course of a session, but it’s quite another for a user to actually arrive at the site on a particular page. Entrances help organizations understand what products (or blog posts, or photos) attract users to the site or app in the first place.
• Exit rate: Close to (but not exactly) the opposite of entrances, exit rates tell the story of pages in terms of how often they exit. To calculate exit rate, analytics platforms divide the number of exits from a page by that page’s total pageviews. Essentially, exit rate is a measure of how likely users are to leave a site from the given page.
• Bounce rate: A bounce is a session that includes only a single page–sessions in which users reached a single page and clicked no further. The bounce rate, then, is the number of these single-page sessions divided by all sessions; the quotient is the percentage of sessions that only viewed a single page.
• Conversions: Think back to your digital marketing funnel. A conversion is the action users take that moves them from potential customer to actual customer. Sometimes the point of conversion is a completed sales transaction, but other times it’s an app download, a form submission, a series of steps taken—say, viewing four articles. Marketers can configure their analytics program to report on when and where most conversions take place.
• Completion: Just because a user arrives on a web page or plays a video does not mean they’ll consume every word or frame of content. Completion tells us how many users watched through to the very end of a video, or scrolled all the way down to the bottom of a page. When completions are divided by pageviews or video views, the metric becomes a “completion rate,” which suggests how likely the audience is to complete the content.
Alone, any of these metrics can reveal snippets of content performance: How many times that Instagram post was seen, how many users downloaded that app, how long they watched that video. But taken together, they tell the audience narrative. Individual metrics combine in the art and science of audience analytics to help organizations reach their goals efficiently—and identify who to reach next.
TRY IT: TWITTER ANALYTICS
Below is a tweet from Cronkite News, the news department of Arizona PBS; it’s goal is to get users to click on the link and get to the full story. Use the tweet’s corresponding analytics to answer the following questions:
• How many impressions did this tweet earn?
• How many total engagements did this tweet earn?
• Calculate the engagement rate (remember: that’s total engagements divided by impressions).
• Is the engagement rate above or below the account average of 2%?
• Do the types of engagement this tweet received make this tweet a success? Why or why not?
• What would you change about this tweet to increase its impressions?
• What would you change about this tweet to increase the desired engagement types?
Tweet’s Analytics
9.03: Looking Ahead
Looking Ahead
What does entrepreneurship look like around the world? The next chapter provides an overview of Entrepreneurship Abroad. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/Media_Innovation_and_Entrepreneurship_(Ferrier_and_Mays)/09%3A_Marketing_Your_Venture_to_Audiences/9.02%3A_Marketing_Your_Venture-_Engagement_and_Analytics.txt |
What Is a Digital Product?
The first step to defining the role of a product manager is to understand what is meant by a digital product. With technology’s influence, there are many digital products that a news organization might be developing and maintaining at any time. In the 2016 research paper, “Managing Digital Products in a Newsroom Context,”[1] one interview respondent succinctly articulated this newfound complexity.
“We used to know what a media product was. It was a newspaper or a television broadcast. Now it’s much broader.”[2]
Stories themselves can be digital products when they have interactive or data components. For example, organizations like ProPublica and Texas Tribune have made it their mission to present and visualize data in the service of their stories. ProPublica’s Dollars for Docs[3] project provides an interface to explore financial contributions physicians receive from pharmaceutical companies. Texas Tribune has developed projects that allow users to explore state employee salaries,[4]public schools[5] and Texas prison inmates. ProPublica and Texas Tribune collaborated on the award-winning Hell and High Water[6] project, which used mapping and data to visualize the problem of hurricane preparedness, months before Hurricane Harvey devastated Houston.
But interactive journalism projects aren’t the only digital products a news organization might develop. Some examples of digital products include:
And there are internal projects like content management systems, subscription services, and analytics products that help an organization more efficiently manage their operations. These are just a few examples of the range of digital activities managed by news organizations, with new applications being introduced all the time.
Digital products require a different set of skills than those of a traditional reporter or editor. The complexity and breadth of digital products have elevated the need for managers with unique skills and perspectives. That role falls to someone with a product manager capacity, whether the job title specifically states that or not.
Since 2016, articles have been written and summits convened on defining this new role of product management role as it relates to journalism [11][12][13][14] The role of “journalist” used to be synonymous with “reporter” and “editor.” But now, a new realm of functions and responsibilities has emerged in the service of digital platforms, products, data, and engagement. These are roles as programmers and designers, social media experts, community managers and data analysts, and those who manage and coordinate these resources. In addition to managing the technical aspects of a product, a product manager must also be concerned with their product’s exact role in the strategy of an organization and its life cycle across social media and other platforms, using data to inform decision-making.
Even those in more traditional roles in media organizations need to have a stronger understanding of the product management life cycle. In “The Rise of the Journalist Product Manager[15] Fontoura said:
“A reporter that publishes a feature nowadays needs to understand how that story gets measured, how it’s affected when it goes through a push notification, or when new customization options appear on the CMS. In other words, how does technology and its use affect that story?”[16]
Thus, the importance of a product management mindset for the entire organization is increasingly important. The role of product manager broadly influences an organization’s commitment to innovation and digital culture, making it a valuable and critical function and an emerging career path.
History and Background of Product Management
The concept of product management started in the 1930s in the field of consumer goods marketing, where companies like Procter & Gamble made brands the center of the organization and developed customer-centric strategies.[17] But product development was not often included in this process, as consumer products were the result of the manufacturing function. The focus of product management through most of the twentieth century was on sales, promotion and distribution, using marketing to create demand for the products – toilet paper, laundry detergent, beauty aids – these companies manufactured.
But product development eventually became central to the technology industry, causing the development role to more closely align with customer needs. Product management connects an organization’s products to its mission and values. It has been a function of marketing and engineering departments, but recently has become more central in organizations, with product officers reporting to the top executive in many companies. New roles have emerged with titles like chief product officer, director of product development, and product editor. Other roles, like community manager and social media editor, have product management concepts at their core. Where the product function specifically lies in an organization depends on the type of organization and its product goals.
Product Management in Tech
Product management is an emerging role, defined by continuous innovation, particularly as it is used in journalism. However, this is a fairly mature role in the technology industry. There are courses, websites, books, and articles that describe the product management process.
Articles
At its most basic, product management is the intersection of the user, technology, and business needs of an organization (Figure 1). This role is typically an expert in at least one area, but should be conversant across all three sectors to be effective.
Figure 1. Image licensed CC-BY
This intersection of functions further emphasizes the need for a product manager to be broadly conversant across an organization’s activities. Product management represents a unique role in media companies, where the business and editorial sides have traditionally been viewed as separate and non-interacting functions. But the business and technology climate in the media industry now requires organizations to consider how these functions relate to and affect one another – how technology affects distribution, how users’ habits affect profitability, and how to best engage platforms in the service of both the business’s and audience’s needs.
Project versus Product Management
Sometimes the terms project and product management are used interchangeably. But they are different roles, even if they are handled in some manner by the same person. Project management is specifically focused on delivering project functionality – identifying features, scheduling their execution, and making sure a timeline is adhered to. Projects tend to have a defined beginning and ending. Product management encompasses the broader strategic implications of the entire digital product and its relationship to the organization’s overall strategy. The function can also be described as product leadership or development, although these are often defined as different roles, with product leadership referring to the management of product managers and overall product strategy. Product development specifically focuses on the engineering requirements of the product life cycle.
Methodologies and Processes
Design Thinking
A product manager is responsible for all phases of a product’s lifecycle, from the conception of the idea, through planning, development, testing, the launch and assessment phases, until the product is retired. A methodology that is often used in assisting with the product management process is Design Thinking, originated by the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford better known as the d.School[30] in conjunction with the creativity firm IDEO[31] Design thinking is a process by which problems are better understood and solved by listening to and developing empathy for potential users. It provides methods for inspiring creativity in a structured manner and quickly developing a prototype for testing and gaining feedback. Design thinking employs various techniques, including brainstorming problem approaches and quickly prototyping a set of solutions that can be tested with users. (You can read more about this process in the Ideation chapter[32] of this book.
Figure 2. Design thinking process.
The Design Thinking Process
The main purpose of Design Thinking (Figure 2) is to develop empathy for those affected by a problem or issue. This is best done by talking directly to those affected, rather than making unsubstantiated assumptions. Interviewing people and digging into their specific issues will allow for better solution development.
One technique for better understanding a user’s needs is the Five-Whys Method. When asking an interviewee about his or her problem, they are not likely to initially reveal their real issue. One must dig a bit deeper to gain a better understanding of the real issue. For example, if the interview reveals that a person has trouble keeping up with local politics, one ask can a series of “why” questions to get to the heart of the issue.
1. Why do you have trouble keeping up with local politics?
I’m too busy to pay attention.
2. Why are you so busy?
I work a full-time job and have little time to read the news.
3. Which social platforms do you check throughout the day?
I check Facebook in the morning and use Snapchat with my friends.
4. Do you see political information on these platforms?
No.
5. How would you feel about getting news and information about city government rulings on Facebook and Snapchat…?
And so on. If the interviewer stopped at the initial problem of keeping up with local politics, one might make the assumption the respondent didn’t care or was apathetic about these issues. However, with more probing, one might be able to assess a scenario that would make room in their schedules on platforms they are already using to stay abreast of information that could be important to them.
The next step in Design Thinking is to define the problem. Using the interview data that was captured in the empathy phase, a problem can be identified and crafted into a How Might We…? Statement. For example:
• How might we use video in our political coverage?
• How might we better engage our audience around the issue of diversity in the community?
• How might we attract more young people to our products?
How Might We Statements can be developed from the perspective of the user or the organization, but should always have user needs at the core.
Once a How Might We Statement is developed, it is time to ideate. The ideation phase applies creativity in generating a range of ideas for a solution. The purpose in this phase is to quickly generate as many ideas as possible from people with a range of experiences and backgrounds. Again, these ideas should flow from the empathy interview phase. As an ice-breaker, a Design Thinking session may employ a few exercises that have nothing to do with the actual problem. For example, the first few sessions might focus on improving someone’s “wake-up” process or generating ideas by drawing images that represent and build upon potential problems. There are many other techniques that can be used for inspiring creativity in brainstorming ideas. See the Stanford d.School‘s Tools for Taking Action.[33]
After the ideation phase, it is time to develop a prototype. A prototype can be a very low-fidelity representation of a solution, that can be as simple as a flow chart developed using pencil and paper. It can be a slightly more elaborate sketch that incorporates color and texture using art supplies. Or it can an interactive design created in a prototyping software program like Balsamiq,[34] Proto.io,[35] Adobe XD,[36] or a mock up using a graphics program like Photoshop.
The goal of the prototype is to quickly and cheaply create a solution that can be used to gain feedback from potential users. This leads to the testing phase where potential users interact with the prototype and provide feedback. Sharing the results of these tests across the product team will allow user input to be incorporated into each product iteration. With each series of tests, a more advanced prototype can be developed which will ultimately lead to working solution.
Agile Methodology
Another phrase often associated with product management is Agile Development. Agile methodologies are characterized as more of a philosophy than a process, based on what is known as the Agile Manifesto[37] It values trust in individuals, completion of tasks and responsiveness to change.
Agile Manifesto
“We are uncovering better ways of developing
software by doing it and helping others do it.
Through this work we have come to value:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.”[38]
Agile methodologies are designed to allow products to respond quickly to market needs and changes by being iterative and incremental. Instead of a long, comprehensive development cycle (traditionally known as the waterfall method), products are broken down into smaller pieces or sprints, each creating a deliverable. Communication between product team members is usually handled by daily scrums, or short, stand-up meetings, that allow collaborators to check in on a regular basis.
During a scrum meeting, team members specifically address only three questions: 1) What have you completed? 2) What are you working on? 3) What would prevent you from completing your next activity? Team members typically stand (no leaning!) for these meetings, so that no one gets too comfortable, and they can quickly move on to their work activities.
Figure 3. CC BY
An agile sprint culminates with user testing that should lead to modifications for the next sprint and be incorporated throughout product development. As with Design Thinking, feedback from the user testing phase is incorporated in each iteration of the product.
Most product management processes adopt practices from both design thinking and agile development. But the main goal is to remain spry, understand and respond to needs, and to adapt to the environment throughout the development cycle.
Roles and Skills
With its overarching responsibility for aligning products across an organization’s functions and mission, the skills required of a product manager are broad and comprehensive. These are a few of the skills that a product manager must demonstrate in order to effectively manage a product team.
Communication – First and foremost, product managers must be great communicators who understand and are passionate about products and audiences. They must be able to lead cross-functional teams and communicate with management across functions. They must also be able to speak to and learn from users to better understand their problems.
Empathy – Product managers must also be able to exhibit empathy, not only for their products’ users, but also the various personnel with whom they collaborate in the organization. They must be able to understand issues through others’ points of views.
Leadership – Across a range of activities, the product role requires leadership ability to lead and motivate cross-functional teams. That means working with people with different communication styles and skills levels, as well as having a high level of understanding across a range of functions at all levels of an organization.
Problem Solving, Innovation and Creativity – Many of the functions a product manager performs will be originated by that position, which means he or she may be the first to encounter it. There is not likely to be a policy or another colleague to provide direction. With the constantly evolving technology environment, product managers are expected to be comfortable and excited about finding creative solutions that can help the product team meet its goals. Product managers must have an appreciation for the ways that innovation and creativity are employed in the digital environment. They must look for new ways to solve problems and new approaches to understanding users’ needs. A product manager must also be able to inspire innovation and creativity in collaborators.
Ability to Execute – A key characteristic of a product manager is a bias toward action. Not only must he or she generate ideas and strategy, but a person in this role must be able to motivate the team to execute deliverables within established deadlines.
Technology Skill – A product manager should have strong technology understanding that allows for strong communication across these key functions. While a product manager will not necessarily use computer programming or design skills, he or she must have a strong understanding of the capabilities of technology and be able to communicate effectively with engineering resources.
Data Analysis – A product manager must understand how to develop and measure objectives and be comfortable making decisions based on data. They must be comfortable in working with metrics and tools for analyzing data.
Journalistic Ethics and Responsibilities – In a media organization, a product manager must also represent the ethics and responsibilities of the media organization throughout the development process. He or she must anticipate how a product will be used and affect the culture in which it is introduced. This is particularly relevant in how an organization guides users in engaging with their platforms and how it uses and shares data generated by their products.
Finally, a product manager must also recognize that their role is emerging and evolving and be able to adapt to changes in technology, processes, and culture.
The role of product manager is a particularly relevant one for mass communication graduates to aspire to in their careers, particularly for those with an emphasis on technology skills. Graduates of mass communication programs who wish to one day become product managers should identify and learn about organizations with a product culture, work on side projects that will enhance their understanding of digital products and processes, and demonstrate their ability to take initiative and exercise continuous learning.
This area offers particular opportunity for journalism and mass communication academic programs to introduce product management concepts into curriculum. The PhDigital Bootcamp[39], held in 2018 in the Media Innovation Lab in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Texas State University, used product management as the organizing concept in assisting educators in proposing and leading innovative curriculum.
At Ohio University, the Digital Information & Innovation course uses product development to walk students through the development and startup of their own ventures.
Conclusion
As digital products mature, product management will need to be comprehended as a core process and responsibility of media, as opposed to a technology sideline, offshoot, or tangential activity. As media organizations receive increased scrutiny for the accuracy and truthfulness of their reporting, the digital projects they create will be expected to demonstrate the same responsibilities and judgment.
The role of digital product management is being fulfilled, at least in some of the most innovative news organizations, by the proliferation of technology products presented by news organizations. The broad range of digital media products – websites, mobile applications, bots, and data interactives – demonstrate an increasing complexity as related to news distribution and audience engagement. There are several themes that newsrooms will need to address in developing a product culture, which include the need to work in cross-functional teams; an emphasis on empathy, problem solving and creating value for users; an attention to data; and the need to recruit and develop resources with a combination of communication skills, business sense, and technology expertise.
Exercises
1. What are some of your favorite digital products and why? Identify the specific features that you enjoy about using these products. For example, what ways can you engage with the product, how is the product interactive, what is the value of the content, and how do visuals function in the product?
2. Create a series of questions to interview people about a problem in media. Talk to at least three people about this problem, recording their responses. Follow up by using the Five-Whys Method for each question. What are the main themes addressed by each of the respondents?
3. Based on your interviews, craft one of the problems into a How Might We…? statement. Using sticky notes, with one sticky note for each idea, quietly brainstorm for 3-4 minutes some potential ways to address the issues. In groups, discuss, review, combine, and categorize each of these ideas and vote on the ones with the most potential. Create a low-fidelity prototype (pencil and paper is fine) to demonstrate your solution.
Cindy Royal, Ph.D., is director of the Media Innovation Lab at Texas State University’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Reach her on Twitter at @cindyroyal.
Editor’s Note: This chapter is new and will undergo its first use and testing in Fall 2018. This chapter is not yet available in the print edition. You can leave feedback using Hypothes.is annotations on the chapter, or contact us.
1. Cindy Royal, “Managing Digital Products in a Newsroom Context,” ISOJ Journal, 2016. [1]http://isoj.org/research/managing-digital-products-in-a-newsroom-context/
2. Ibid. ↵
3. ”Dollars for Docs,” ProPublica.org, projects.propublica.org/docdollars/↵
4. Government Salaries Explorer, Texas Tribune, https://salaries.texastribune.org/?_ga=2.132145678.100188510.1528814790-99308758.1523283366. ↵
5. Texas Public Schools Explorer, Texas Tribune, https://schools.texastribune.org/?_ga=2.132145678.100188510.1528814790-99308758.1523283366. ↵
6. Hell and High Water, ProPublica, https://projects.propublica.org/houston/. ↵
7. NYT Cooking App, New York Times, https://cooking.nytimes.com/. ↵
8. Quartz app, Quartz, https://qz.com/app/
9. Hook ‘Em, Austin American Statesman, https://www.hookem.com/. ↵
10. PAC, ProPublica, www.propublica.org/article/help-us-monitor-political-ads-online. ↵
11. Jeff Sonderman, “Best Practices for Product Management in News Organizations,” American Press Institute, February 2016, [2]https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/publications/reports/white-papers/product-management-best-practices/. ↵
12. Cindy Royal, “Product Management is the New Journalism,” Nieman Journalism Lab, December 2015, http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/12/product-management-is-the-new-journalism/. ↵
13. Burt Herman, “Begun, the Platform War Has,” Nieman Journalism Lab, December 2015, http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/12/begun-the-platform-war-has/. ↵
14. “News Products of the Future: Journalism + Design Leads Critical Conversation,” The New School, February 2016, http://blogs.newschool.edu/news/2016/02/news-products-of-the-future-journalism-design/#.WyKrRVZKjxu. ↵
15. Marcelo Fontoura, “The Rise of the Journalist Product Manager,” Medium, medium.com/thoughts-on-media/the-rise-of-the-journalist-product-manager-782332488b55. ↵
16. Marcelo Fontoura, “The Rise of the Journalist Product Manager,” Medium,April 2016, https://medium.com/thoughts-on-media/the-rise-of-the-journalist-product-manager-782332488b55. ↵
17. Martin Eriksson, “The History and Evolution of Product Management,” Mind the Product, October 2015, https://www.mindtheproduct.com/2015/10/history-evolution-product-management/. ↵
18. Product Management, General Assemb.ly, generalassemb.ly/education/product-management↵
19. Become a Product Manager: Learn the Skills & Get the Job, Udemy, www.udemy.com/become-a-product-manager-learn-the-skills-get-a-job/. ↵
20. Digital Product Management: Modern Fundamentals, Coursera, https://www.coursera.org/learn/uva-darden-digital-product-management. ↵
21. Product Management for Journalists, University of Texas Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, journalismcourses.org/PM1016.html. ↵
22. Mind the Product, https://www.mindtheproduct.com/. ↵
23. RomanPichler.com, https://www.romanpichler.com/blog/. ↵
24. The Black Box of Product Management, blackboxofpm.com/. ↵
25. RIchard Banfield and Martin Eriksson, Product Leadership (O’Reilly Media: 2017), https://productleadershipbook.com/. ↵
26. Brian Lawley, Pamela Schure, Product Management for Dummies (Wiley, 2017). ↵
27. Matt LeMay, Product Management in Practice: A Real-World Guide to the Key Connective Role of the 21st Century (O’Reilly Media, 2017), http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920068785.do. ↵
28. Julia Austin, “What it Takes to Become a Great Product Manager,” Harvard Business Review, December 13, 2017, https://hbr.org/2017/12/what-it-takes-to-become-a-great-product-manager. ↵
29. Laurence Bradford, “8 Tips for Landing Your First Product Manager Role,” Forbes, January 30, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurencebradford/2017/01/30/8-tips-for-landing-your-first-product-manager-role/2/#25d3a96d5546. ↵
30. d.School, dschool.stanford.edu/resources/getting-started-with-design-thinking. ↵
31. IDEO, www.ideou.com/pages/design-thinking. ↵
32. Michelle Ferrier, “Ideation,” Media Innovation and Entrepreneurship, (Montreal: Rebus Community, 2017), press.rebus.community/media-innovation-and-entrepreneurship/chapter/ideation-2/. ↵
33. "Tools for Taking Action," Stanford d.School, https://dschool.stanford.edu/resources/. ↵
34. Balsamiq, https://balsamiq.com/
35. Proto.io, https://proto.io/
36. Adobe XD, https://www.adobe.com/products/xd.html
37. Agile Manifesto, agilemanifesto.org/. ↵
38. Mike Beedle,. et al., “Agile Manifesto,” 2001, http://agilemanifesto.org/. ↵
39. PhDigital Bootcamp, https://www.phdigitalbootcamp.com/. ↵ | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/Media_Innovation_and_Entrepreneurship_(Ferrier_and_Mays)/10%3A_Product_Management/10.01%3A_Product_Management_for_Journalists.txt |
Kat Friedrich is a news editor at Yale University. She runs two startup news sites: Clean Energy Finance Forum,[1] which covers the niche vertical of the solar power industry and the energy efficiency industry deeply; and Conservation Finance Network,[2] a nonprofit partnership site that covers all aspects of ecosystem conservation from cities to oceans. She works at Yale Center for Business and the Environment, which encourages startup green business development.
As an editor who had worked in web-intensive writing roles related to energy efficiency and science education, Friedrich was adept in web editing and online media. She had a master’s degree in Science and Environmental Journalism from The Nelson Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But it is her project-management experience from a prior career in mechanical engineering that serves her most when leading the Clean Energy Finance Forum and Conservation Finance Network site teams, which have grown to 27 and 20 student staff respectively since their inception.
Clean Energy Finance Source was created by Friedrich in 2012 for Clean Energy Finance Center, a national nonprofit. Yale Center for Business and the Environment brought the site on board in January 2014 and expanded it extensively to include new technologies, international news, web interaction, and online tools.
Conservation Finance Network’s web news production began in January 2016 in response to a request from two graduate students, Meaghan McGrath and Logan Yonavjak, who were both at Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. The second site was developed as a branded partnership with Conservation Finance Network, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, DC.
As she started the news sites from the ground up, Friedrich pioneered a reusable model for creating new sites that includes a replicable workflow for team collaboration and a project management system for news production. The web template for both sites prioritizes web usability and user experience.
“The actual website template is one that we’re reusing,” Friedrich said. “Then we’re also reusing our processes. Then we’re also reusing our journalism training materials. All of that can be used for any new website that we decide to branch off with.”
She was also systematic in building an industrial-engineering process for the content production –documenting team workflows, developing editing checklists, compiling writing worksheets, creating ethics guidelines, mapping marketing goals, and pursuing process improvement.
“If you have an industrial-engineering process, it’s almost like you can visualize the product going through the factory,” Friedrich said. “You have different things happen to it at different workstations. It moves along. The news goes here. The news goes there. The story idea comes in here. The story idea comes out there. There’s kind of a machine-shop aspect to how this is all put together.”
Friedrich stays informed about online media techniques through her role as a local co-organizer for Online News Association Western New England. Also, to learn from experienced editors about staff management, Friedrich participated in a training at the American Society of News Editors Emerging Leaders Institute in Chicago in 2016. This program helps news editors from underrepresented groups advance in their careers.
Despite these reliable workflows and team structures, any news editor has to deal with their share of good old-fashioned newsroom unpredictability and manage a full inbox.
“As editor of these sites, I’m continually catching new ideas and sending them here and there. So there’s an aspect that’s like being a dispatcher for a taxi company where you will have a call come in and say ‘OK, this taxi’s here and now you need to send it there,’” Friedrich said. She dispatched taxis in the evening during her second year of college.
Friedrich said a process-focused approach can pay off from a marketing perspective too, helping you to track the performance of your content. She put a shared spreadsheet in place where the team tracks when pieces get a signal boost or show high performance. She also watches newsletter, article and report performance using various online tools. Every week, she observes coverage that similar publications are doing. She also tracks attendance at the projects’ webinars and events.
Friedrich said these audience-behavior analytics are a form of feedback on your news product.
“You have to be attuned to your audience in order to see whether your process actually is working because if you don’t have your analytics data in hand, you don’t know if your process is working or not,” Friedrich said, explaining that companies who manufacture products use product feedback to retool their engineering processes.
Friedrich offered some recommendations for other editors who want to be process-efficient as they create startup news outlets:
• Start with a manageable and small number of verticals. You can expand to others later.
• Be realistic about assignments. Assess the amount of time it takes to do them right. Figure out manageable goals. Commit to your goals in a time-efficient way.
• Start with a manageable volume of content – and don’t forget to budget time to promote it. “If you’re producing stuff that’s really good, and you’re letting people know about it enough, you don’t have to produce a ton of content to have a positive splash.” | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/Media_Innovation_and_Entrepreneurship_(Ferrier_and_Mays)/10%3A_Product_Management/10.02%3A_From_the_Field-Process_Engineering_Helped_Build_a_Replicable_Model_for_Two_Sta.txt |
Betty Tsakarestou
Journalists, legacy media, digital publishers and platforms, communicators, branded content creators, and social innovators have reinvented the profession by creating and testing new business models as niche and specialized journalism startups. In so doing, they have offered novel news experiences and publishing environments, served underserved communities, empowered contributors to build their own digital brands, offered more relevant content to their communities, and explored new opportunities for audience engagement. They have advanced new storytelling approaches with the help of big data; have integrated immersive virtual reality and Internet of Things (IoT) technology; and have designed journalistic new products and services related to key questions and challenges such as fact checking for non-specialists, filter bubbles, and the impact of personalization of the Internet.
While in many European countries legacy newsrooms are still laying off journalists, online publishers and some legacy media companies are revamping for growth and diversifying their strategies by investing in digital startups according to a Financial Times analysis.[1]
“Following the examples of Time Warner and Comcast, European companies have sought to structure their venture arms like independent funds – with partners judged on the financial value of the portfolio companies, rather than on looser strategic value to the parent company.”
At the same time, across Europe, journalism startups are creating the first “pockets of innovation” by introducing alternative business models, getting public attention, and raising or crowd-sourcing funds.
Take a first glimpse of some notable cases:
In Germany, Republik,[2] an open-source cooperative digital magazine to be launched in January 2018, reclaims the role of journalism to reinforce Democracy. Republik co-founder Christof Moser, a journalist and professor, succeeded in raising \$2 million.[3]
Innovative Journalism Startups from Netherlands[4] are focusing on quality journalism. Blendle employs an “iTunes” model for news.[5]De Correspondent[6] is getting ready for its U.S. presence while more media startups are taking tech press influencer Charmaine Li’s attention: Piano Media in Austria, PressPad in Krakow, Sellfy in Riga/ Latvia, Movellas in Copenhagen and London, Ghost, ShareWall, ReadWave, and Reedsy in London, Liberio in Berlin. In Athens, Press Project [7] is one of the few independent investigative journalism and data reporting startups that fill the vacuum of failing legacy media.
When you look at the global heat maps of the emerging dynamic startup ecosystem, innovation starts to be geographically and culturally diverse and unevenly distributed. We can get an overview and a very informed perspective of the emerging and dynamic startup ecosystems all over the world through the lens of Startup Genome the Global Startup Ecosystem Report 2017.[8] In 2011 a devoted team of researchers, entrepreneurs, and data mavericks launched the Startup Genome project. Inspired and driven by the mission to help building the entrepreneurial ecosystem, they conduct and publish annually primary research with 10,000+ startups and 500 partnering companies to inform local startup leaders about success factors to measure the ecosystem’s lifecycle, to provide in-depth insights by continent or startup city, and to produce a global startup ecosystem ranking.
Startup Genome examines nine factors that determine how cities become key players[9] and catalysts into enabling vibrant startup ecosystems:
1. funding,
2. market reach,
3. global connectedness,
4. technical talent,
5. startup experience,
6. resource attraction,
7. corporate involvement,
8. founder ambition and
9. strategy
As the CEO of Startup Genome states in their mission statement: Startup founders are driven by their pathos to create a positive change in our world, to participate in a world movement and a revolution in search of innovative solutions, and to experiment with the new business model canvases for making a great idea into an impactful service to people and to their communities. This entrepreneurial ethos is representing a cultural shift about the potential of startup entrepreneurship to bring positive change, to have a desirable impact by the communities, cities, and people in producing solutions.
Says J.F. Gauthier, Founder and CEO of Startup Genome:
“There is a revolution going on — the global startup revolution. We are changing the world together. All of us startup leaders, and all of us working in different parts of the ecosystem. We are challenging the status quo, putting new ideas to work, and holding fast to the belief — the knowledge — that anyone, anywhere should be able to participate in this revolution. The work of startup leaders in spreading this culture of meritocracy and equality is never finished and we are all helping each other, paying it forward, and expanding boundaries of startup culture.”
Let’s see the panorama of the top 20 global startup ecosystems to learn more about the cities and continents that are closer to your own interest and entrepreneurial journalism focus. The Startup Genome Top Global 20 Startup Emerging and Established Entrepreneurial Cities and Ecosystems List allows you to compare 2017-2015 rankings for each city.[10] Here’s a snapshot of the 2017 rankings.
1. Silicon Valley (unchanged)
2. New York City (unchanged)
3. London (up from #6)
4. Beijing (new entry)
5. Boston (down from #4)
6. Tel Aviv (down from #5)
7. Berlin (up from #9)
8. Shanghai (new entry)
9. Los Angeles (down from #3)
10. Seattle (down from #8)
11. Paris (unchanged)
12. Singapore (down from #10)
13. Austin (up from #14)
14. Stockholm (new entry)
15. Vancouver (up from #18)
16. Toronto – greater Waterloo area (up from #17)
17. Sydney (down from #16)
18. Chicago (down from #7)
19. Amsterdam (unchanged)
20. Bangalore (down from #15)
While Silicon Valley keeps its leadership above any other ecosystem, it is no longer the number one pool of talent, losing its long-uncontested dominance over the Asia-Pacific region and Europe. Government initiatives are playing a significant role in both Singapore and Beijing by creating a friendly entrepreneurial business and cultural environment.[11]
According to Gauthier: [12]
“For the first time we can all see the comparative strengths of Beijing and Shanghai with the rest of world. Beijing’s amazing performance at creating large scale-ups is confirmed with its second place in our performance factor, and third place overall, but the lack of global connections of its startups was also clear. Shanghai takes a surprising eighth place overall with its strong early-stage funding, how it attracts talent and resource from all over the world, and how globally connected its startups are.”
African startup cities are on the rise. Even though they have not made it to any of the prominent ranks of the Global Startup Eccosystem report, they are competing for their share in tech, innovation, and sustainable startup solutions. Cape Town in South Africa is the largest startup ecosystem in the continent, which still needs to build up its global networking and connectedness, followed by Johannesburg and Lagos in Nigeria.
Innovators and Startup Entrepreneurs in Europe: Are They Lagging Behind Silicon Valley?
If you are a regular reader or visitor to TechCrunch, a leading technology website founded in 2005 to cover news about startup companies, founders and investors, then you might as well be following a recurring topic, the comparisons of the U.S. and European startups and innovation ecosystems. Back in 2010, Alan Gleason, a guest contributor to the TechCrunch European startup section gives his theories on why Europe lags the U.S. in technology startups”[13]
Gleason writes as an insider, who has gained a considerable experience in consulting with U.S. startup entrepreneurs. He asserts that there is an uncontestable structural gap, a disparity, between the two continents when considering their capacity to enable and scale up globally-successful technology-led innovative startups and develop tech giants like Google, Facebook, YouTube, or Apple. He takes the Silicon Valley model (see sidebar) as the benchmark to assess the dynamism and the potential success of entrepreneurial ecosystems that follow a different path of development outside of United States. In 2010, the U.S. enjoyed a “semi-monopoly” position worldwide in generating startup companies.
Let’s follow Gleason’s analysis from 2010 about the structural and cultural triggering factors that created this capacity gap for innovation in entrepreneurship between the U.S. and Europe.
Gleason identifies six structural and cultural factors that are at play:
1. Location: Europe seems to lack the “hub network effect” of Silicon Valley’s model as an ecosystem attracting innovating entrepreneurs from all over the world, venture funds, and top engineers. Europe has mainly developed “pockets of innovation” in metropolitan cities across the continent.
2. Talent: Silicon Valley’s model as an ecosystem that attracts a diverse pool of talent of innovating entrepreneurs immigrating from all over the world is compared with European mobility of talented and highly skilled people that in the latter case are not translated into a critical mass of successful startups.
3. Market Size: Gaining traction as a startup and making profitable new product launches is considered a safer venture in the U.S. market rather than Europe on the basis of perceived cultural homogeneity (language, culture) and common currency versus a more culturally diverse Europe despite the fact the European overall population is almost double the United States’ size.
4. Support Systems: Compared to the West Coast ecosystem in the U.S., Europe lags in creating access to capital ranging from early-stage funding, seed and angel funds to venture capital funding rounds, along with a supportive business environment offering multiple options for legal and communication advice and professional services along with a pro-entrepreneurship strong media presence. Most notably, compared to the U.S., in Europe there are fewer investors and funding schemes to help tech startups go to market and scale up.
5. Attitude to Risk and the “Fail Fast” Mindset: Risk-taking or risk-aversion is one of the most culturally debated issues in the startup ecosystems and hubs all over the world. The United States fosters a more entrepreneurial mindset, open to more risk, to experimentation, and to “failing fast.” This entrepreneurial mindset becomes a pivotal point in Europe as it attempts to develop global reach and impact.
6. Media: Media and blogs covering technology, entrepreneurship, startup news and innovation topics, founders and funders’ thinking and methodologies have created a new positive and forward-thinking public imagery and culture that encourages new ventures and initiatives. Again, the most influential blogs mentioned such as Mike Arrington, serial entrepreneur and founder of TechCrunch or Jason Calacanis (who defines himself as a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, podcaster, and writer) are featuring the fervent U.S. entrepreneurial scene while Mike Butcher has been one of the more influential voices writing for the TechCrunch European section.
Another difference between the European mature ecosystems and Silicon Valley is that that European startups are mainly (55 to 75 percent) B2B oriented while in U.S. the vast majority (two out of three startups) are consumer-oriented businesses.
In conclusion, European tech startups and entrepreneurs must overcome some structural limitations in three key areas:
1. Take smart money only as an investment to scale and expand into your investors’ global networking capacity and/or their ability to successfully address “go-to-market” challenges.
2. Focus hard on gaining market traction through the creation of awareness of key influencers.
3. Locate your business activity or networking in one of the emerging European hotspots.
The European Commission Seeds Startup Growth
Even with the growth of entrepreneurial ecosystems across the European Union, many entrepreneurs at major tech events such as the Web Summit question whether Europe’s startup culture truly exists. In “Does Europe lack a Startup Culture”?[14], the authors compare the dollars being transferred in the different markets, however, dollars may not provide a fair comparison.
“Debating Europe”, [15] a bottom-up platform co-initiated by multiple partners[16] to bring together European citizens’ voices directly to European policy makers, published in December 2016 an infographic (see Figure 1) based on data issued by Eurostat, OECD, Google, and Forbes. The graphic provides some insight into this recurring question.
According to this graphic: In 2014 venture capital investment in computer and consumer electronics was more than \$24 billion for the United States and \$959 million for Europe. This is the chasm that Europe anticipates as it rapidly builds its own startup culture. In 2015, five European countries attracted the highest venture capital investments in companies developing new products and technologies, as percentage of GDP: Denmark, Luxembourg, Finland, Ireland, and Portugal. Google for Entrepreneurs, a network of 40 tech hubs worldwide, provides financial support, mentorship, and education to European entrepreneurs and facilitates the access to a network of startup hubs across 125 countries all over the world. From “Debating Europe”:
“Young entrepreneurs are quick to identify the factors holding Europe back. Lack of finance tops the list, particularly the venture capital needed to move from startup to scale-up. Then comes red tape – too many European countries impose too many regulatory and administrative burdens; Europe’s digital-single market has failed to overcome fragmentation. Taxes are too high and too complicated. Then there are underlying cultural problems – from a multiplicity of languages to a fear-of-failure mentality.”
To address the funding concern, during Web Summit in 2016, the European Commission announced a “fund of funds”[17] designed to trigger at least €1.6bn in venture capital for startups.” The European Fund for Strategic Investments for small and medium-sized enterprises[18] is one of the many European funding opportunities to mobilize finance in a collective and coordinated way seeking to reverse the low level of investment since the global economic crisis.
“The programme, which was presented today at the Web Summit, has been sponsored by the European Union and set up in cooperation with EIF. Under the Pan-European VC FoF programme EIF is looking to invest, using resources of the Horizon 2020 InnovFin Equity facility, EFSI Equity Instrument, COSME Equity Facility for Growth and EIF’s own resources, in private-sector-led, market-driven Pan-European VC Fund(s)-of-funds (the Fund(s)-of-Funds).”
Figure 1. Infographic copyright Debating Europe. All Rights Reserved. Included with permission here. Download the original here: http://www.debatingeurope.eu/2016/12.../#.WWl-KoqQw0r
Startup Europe
The European Commission is taking the lead in this global and networked-innovation-driven world where entrepreneurship and innovators address and provide entrepreneurial solutions. These startups are often aligned with the United Nations’ 17 interconnected Sustainable Development Goals[19] (SDGs) to address effectively the challenges they entail “to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure that all people enjoy peace and prosperity.” These goals are at the core of twenty-first-century societies for making positive and impactful change by 2030. The European Commission, by actively contributing and supporting SDGs and the 2030 agenda,[20] strategically positions Europe to pursue a leading role in the new reshuffle of dynamics among global financial and tech robust players.
The twenty-first century international consensus advanced also by United Nations (UN) SDGs seems to be that it is all about entrepreneurship and sustainable innovating solutions-makers around the world. A United Nations “Solutions Summit”[21] in 2015 brought together policy makers, innovators, investors in the private sector, and civil society leaders, together with technologists and scientists to partner and co-create impactful “solutions-in-progress.” Entrepreneurs and cross-disciplinary innovators are taking the lead across the world to imagine and develop impactful positive solutions to the biggest global challenges.
“Everyone has a role to play in advancing the Global Goals, and innovators and entrepreneurs are central to finding the solutions needed to achieve these goals,” said Kathy Calvin, president and CEO of the United Nations Foundation. “The Solutions Summit is a catalytic gathering of some of the best and brightest who have developed innovative approaches to the world’s most vexing issues.”
In 2011, the European Commission initiated Startup Europe[22] as a “One Stop Shop,” providing information, tools, legal advice, and networking for startups in Europe with the goal:
• To connect all European Startup Ecosystems based in different cities and key players and ecosystem builders such as investors,[23]accelerators,[24]female entrepreneurs,[25]corporate networks, universities,[26] and #EUTech Writers[27]
• To help startups to enter other markets such as Silicon Valley, Africa, The United Arab Emirates, and India[28]
• To celebrate entrepreneurial successes by launching awards and other events such as Tech Allstars, Europioneers,[29] and StartUp Europe Awards[30]
The EU response[31] has prioritized catalyzing a risk-taking and experimentation culture in Europe by launching the project “FACE Entrepreneurship” and EXCEL, a European Virtual Accelerator to address local limits on access to co-founders, resources, expertise, and markets.
One of the key factors in forming successful and sustainable innovation startup ecosystems that will incubate and support world-leading ventures is to establish strong synergies and collaboration between the universities and the innovation startup hubs. Stanford University and its role in building Silicon Valley[32] has been one of the most influential paradigms around the world, a benchmark that inspired both scholarly research[33] and extensive media coverage in the quest of replicating Silicon Valley model[34] in other regions and cities in the world.
In Europe, a longstanding barrier to creating continental cities as startup hubs has been the weak or missing collaboration between the academic community and the business-startup ecosystems. The European Commission, by launching the Startup Europe Universities Network,[35] is aiming to connect academic institutions and community to the business and scientific parks setting the framework for enabling collaborative forums, sharing of information and resources, and catalyzing synergies and collaborations.
And taking a it step further, Erasmus+ Program[36] provides more funding opportunities to help teachers prepare primary and secondary pupils to be entrepreneurial and creative. The Exchange programs for Young Entrepreneurs[37] nurtures the entrepreneurial mindset at an early age in an attempt to change the cultural paradigm to funding.
What might be the impact of combined institutional initiatives taken by the European Commission[38] to “Startup Europe” in creating a more innovation- and startup-friendly environment? Through tax incentives, startup visas, legal context, and advisory services infrastructures built by the European Commission, along with the bottom-up initiatives of the startup ecosystem leaders, entrepreneurs and policy makers hope this European mix will attract more talent, venture funding, and help create global startup brands. The European Startup Initiative[39] takes an active role in facilitating the debate around where Europe’s hottest startup hub is evolving by designing the first data-driven report on startup locations and mobility in Europe as well as a startup heatmap on the perceived quality of the startup hubs in Europe.
Cities as Startup Ecosystems
In the last decade, entrepreneurial ecosystems are proliferating across Europe. Cities such as London, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Madrid, Dublin, Manchester, Milan, and Copenhagen were listed according to Social Media Week as the top “10 European Cities to Watch in 2017”.[40]
These cities are emerging as pockets of growth[41] in different European regions, competing for the innovative local and international talent, for digital and mobile creative class, and for investors’ money.
A 2016 Venture Beat article makes a good point when it stated that “So While Europe Might be a Single Market, It’s Definitely Not a Single Tech Scene.”[42] This is a challenge for Europe to invent and establish a sustainable innovation and entrepreneurship model.
Many of Europe’s unicorn startups,[43] a term coined by Aileen Lee, founder of Cowboy Ventures[44] that describes companies that are valued at \$1 billion or more, are based in London. Collectively they raised \$2.9 billion in 2015, according to London & Partners. “That’s 75 percent of all VC money in the UK”[45] and even Brexit has raised concerns that a startup exit will follow. Yet, London still has a competitive advantage as it offers a lighter regulation[46] framework. Analysts estimate that even post-“Brexit,” London will continue to be one of the flourishing startup scenes. Paris is emerging as the second European metropolis investing in startups. The French Government has been the most active venture investor in small and medium digital businesses within their broader strategy for digital “France 2030.”[47]
Paris is getting ready to impress the world by revamping and launching in 2018 Station F[48] (formerly known as la Halle Freyssinet), a 34,000-sq-meter startup campus and co-living space with the goal to gather the whole entrepreneurial ecosystem in the same space. This ambitious project seeks to create the “world’s biggest campus.”[49]
“We’re talking about a startup campus because we’re actually very similar to a university campus,” Station F director Roxanne Varza[50] said in an article in TechCrunch. “We’re expecting about one thousand startups in this space.”
The city of Paris and the French Government, not Berlin, are set to become the beneficiary of any post-Brexit startup fallout, according to some analysts. The government is aiming to make France a “Digital Republic”[51] by supporting digital startups and providing the “French Tech Ticket”[52] to attract international startups.
Germany’s capital Berlin has for many years been considered a European mecca for startups.[53] The city has successfully appealed to international professional and artistic creative class talent, converting this success into a booming startup hub. The city is a great example on how to be “inviting” to international talent to relocate, by offering a reasonable cost of living combined with an open culture[54] to learning, to experimentation, to change,[55] to sharing knowledge and to collaboration that can attract and retain diverse entrepreneurial and creative talent. Compare this aspect of Berlin city culture to the rising costs of living in Silicon Valley, where exorbitant housing costs make it inaccessible to new talent, whether international or domestic. Berlin is also investing into lively community meetups that can “help foster individual success.” Government and political support[56] created with a “grassroots inclusive feel” supported by “The German Startup Association–The Voice of Startups in Germany” [57] make the case for Berlin startup ecosystem.
Stockholm in Sweden[58] is a new entrant in the startup cities world, earning a reputation as a “unicorn factory” and in a league of its own with unicorns such as Skype, Minecraft, Klarna, Spotify, and King. And who doesn’t know MySQL, Kazaa, uTorrent, and Piratebay?
According to the article, “The country is leading the 2016 ranking in a number of industries, including gaming, music-tech, and sport-tech, giving much bigger economies such as Germany, UK, Spain, Italy, and France a run for their money.”[59]
Looking at the South of Europe, Spain is becoming a considerable leading startup player, with two cities in the forefront. Barcelona and Madrid are both attracting international investment and global digital players like Google and Amazon who are establishing their presence in the innovation-driven cities.
Besides the capital cities, we also see vibrant and scalable and high-performing ecosystems growing fast in Lausanne (Switzerland), in Ghent (Belgium), in Krakow (Poland), and in Porto (Portugal).
Will these distinct cities-based tech and innovation hubs operate independently or will they become a collaborative network of connected hubs? This is a real bet and challenge for Europe. We will have to see in coming years how these European “pockets of growth” across multiple cities and regions will establish an entrepreneurship model that will fare and compete successfully with the Silicon Valleys or emerging Asian ecosystem(s) as analyzed in Startup Genome Global Startup Ecosystem Report 2017[60] and the Asia Startup Ecosystem[61] accelerator.
If you wish to explore more in depth the commonalities and what differentiates the unicorns from around the world, take 15 minutes to read a very well-documented post on Startup Grind by Alex Stern, published on February 27, 2017 on “Revisiting the Unicorn Club.”[62] In it, he covers all continents, all countries, and sectors.
The Digital News Initiative Innovation Fund (DNI Fund)
In an attempt to further explore the emerging media innovation hubs around Europe and the corporate actors that take action to enable such an approach, it is worthy to look into The Digital News Initiative Innovation Fund (DNI Fund).[63] The fund is a partnership between Google news publishers in Europe to support high-quality journalism through technology and innovation with the goal to enable and nurture sustainable news ecosystems, collaboration and dialogue between the tech and news industries. Among the founding members are prominent legacy media companies such as The Guardian, The Financial Times, Die Zeit, El País, Les Echos, La Stampa, and organizations such as Global Editors Network, European Journalism Centre, and NRC Group.[64] DNI Fund was launched in 2015 andhas invested more than €70m to more than 350 projects in 29 European countries.[65] DNI seems to have a quite balanced distribution of its fund among the participating countries. As an indication, here are the number of funded projects by country: Austria (9), Belgium (10), Czech Republic (7), Denmark (6), Finland (9), France (9), Germany (9), Greece (7), Sweden (9), Switzerland (9), and the United Kingdom (9).
The DNI Fund Projects offer innovative journalism and media entrepreneurial solutions to a wide spectrum of media-related challenges.
• In Austria, De-Escalation Bot[66] is figuring out how to de-escalate negative emotions online.
• In Belgium, Wave[67] offers interest-based listening experiences through connected cars, virtual assistants, and other smart technology devices. Likewise, in Greece, the Connected Cars, Connected Audience, News Ecosystem[68] Project is a prototype developed at Aristotle University. It’s investigating the ways connected and self-driving cars will impact news organizations. In Switzerland, NZZ Companion App[69] will provide personalized, geotargeted, niche news based on a user’s preferences.
• In the Czech Republic, Mural[70] makes visual storytelling easier for online journalists.
• In Denmark, PoliWatchBot[71] helps citizens better understanding their political process through public data.
• In Germany, Tagesspiegel Causa[72] is a website for debates.
• In the United Kingdom, Project Arete[73] is developing a highly transparent “digital advertising trading platform.”
• In Finland, Woodpecker Findings[74] employs gamification to serve millennials.
And there are others. You can tour more DNI FUND projects at digitalnewsinitiative.com/dni-projects/ (filter by country and then DNI Fund Projects).[75]
Media Entrepreneurship Education Around the World
One key lesson for building successful entrepreneurial ecosystems both from Silicon Valley as well as from the European Commission strategy is to actively involve the academic, scientific, and research communities as co-creators and enablers.
This is the path that many leading academic institutions in the U.S. have followed very actively over the last ten years by introducing entrepreneurial journalism and media innovation programs[76] into their journalism, media, and communication programs to help students as well as to train professionals in entrepreneurial thinking, skills, tools, and methodologies…and to innovate.
Initiatives to introduce media entrepreneurship compared to those in U.S. are modest.[77] The journalistic traditions in Europe that separate journalism production from the business and market side of media companies are still strong in many countries. European academics are still skeptical of the new “hybrid” and porous concept of bringing both editorial and financial sides together into collaborating and re-defining the purpose and the impact of journalism.
According to one article,[78]
“In attempting to create an overview corralling the various outlooks and initiatives related to entrepreneurial journalism in Europe, one thing remains clear: There is no common understanding of the phenomenon and its ramifications. Some view the transformation as a new window of opportunity for ambitious journalism, while others merely consider it a new name for the old game of freelancing.”
In 2012, the entrepreneurial journalism U.S. educational model found its first early advocates in Britain and Baltic countries’ universities. Entrepreneurial journalism courses are offered as part of journalism academic programs or professional training initiatives in France, Germany, Switzerland, and the Ukraine.
As an indication of the growing international interest and demand for media entrepreneurship education, a post on Quora, a question-and-answer, crowd-sourcing knowledge and information platform, asks “Which colleges and universities offer entrepreneurial journalism programs?”[79]
In response to this request, Pierre France, Quora community member, posts a document with a list of entrepreneurial journalism courses offered in their U.S. Universities, with a few in Europe, in Canada, and in Mexico (list updated 21 July 2014).[80]
Greece: An Emerging Ecosystem
“Create more value than you capture”- Tim O’Reilly
Athens, Greece, even though is not featured in any of the top startup cities rankings, has gained publicity for succeeding in building a vibrant startup culture and ecosystem in a crisis-ridden economy[81] that has been retracting since 2010, despite a long period of political and financial uncertainty and the unemployment rate climbing around 25%.
The last ten years, Athens has enjoyed the bottom-up birth, growth, and impact of enabling disruptive change and innovation out of the vision and the passion of a very small group of techies and bloggers, who are well connected locally and internationally with pioneering tech communities.
Open Coffee Club Greece- Greek Startups Are Here [82]
In 2007, a new generation of Greek tech startup entrepreneurs and digital innovators self-organized as a movement around the Open Coffee Club Greece to take action and support. Their goals were to:
• Create a network of people with common interests to support relationship building and collaboration.
• Cultivate a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship.
• Spread new technologies with an emphasis on the web.
Adopting the model of the global Open Coffee Club Network they kept organizing with great success.[83] Monthly Open Coffee meetups in Athens bring together “nerds and marketers, bloggers and journalists, venture capitalists and developers, entrepreneurs and [public relations practitioners], who shape and help shape the Greek startup scene” and invite participants to “create [their] own network and become part of this new informal and interactive community.”[1][84]
These pioneers followed closely the three waves of the Internet revolution[85] and the emerging startup movement and were familiar with the global debates and developments, particularly in Silicon Valley. They became the first ambassadors for disruptive startup innovation during the second wave of the app economy and mobile revolution (2010-2015) building their own startups. They purposefully collaborated, in a non-collaboration-friendly culture, to building a very active Athens startup ecosystem. They worked to connect the hubs of innovation and they launched the first funding schemes (Open Fund,[86]Marathon VC[87]) and tools to enable the first promising local founders with the potential to scale their businesses internationally. They invested in building trust and social proof[88] (a psychological principle marketers use to build trust around brands and products) as the most important currency for impact and success.
Within a turbulent political and social landscape and an anti-entrepreneurial mindset prevailing for decades in both the political class and the society at large, Athens startup founders created a strong case of disruptive and impactful innovation where they were able to reverse the current attitudes and trigger a “startup fever” among youth, business, and institutions, followed by the reluctant political class.
Startup incubators, co-working spaces and innovation labs, Startup Weekend events, and hackathons were initiated by startup founders, social entrepreneurs, foundations, philanthropic and cultural institutions, NGOs, museums, embassies (the U.S. Embassy and the Embassy of Netherland being among the most active ones), business associations, international initiatives, digital leading companies such as Google or Microsoft, and companies that invested in empowering young startup entrepreneurship as part of their sustainability policies to spark innovation in their own sectors and supply chains.
The majority of Greek startups are aiming to serve international markets and customers. The local market is very small to sustain a viable startup venture that scales up internationally and has a successful exit.
In 2013 TechCrunch Europe and its editor, Mike Butcher, held their second meetup in Athens, showcasing how the Greek startup community could break the local financial and cultural boundaries and enable some international players.[89]
“In many ways Greece faces the quintessential problems of many European countries: plenty of talent, but a dearth of sources of funding for startups; limited markets at home and the difficulty of reaching out to large international markets like the U.S. Time and again panelists pointed out some of the obstacles that need to be overcome, such as a mismatch in university computer science courses with modern tech startups, and a moribund academic world. That said, it also acted as a showcase for success stories emerging from Greece that hope to show that there is plenty of talent just waiting to be unleashed.”
In the World Bank high-ease-of-doing-business ranking for 2017 indicating if the “regulatory environment is more conducive to the starting and operation of a local firm,” Greece is ranked in the 56th position for starting a new business and fell to 61st for the ease of doing business.[90]
In this unfriendly regulatory environment, international media positive coverage of the successful Greek startups[91] with the potential to turn Greece into a startup hub has been juxtaposed against the counternarrative of all the financial and political coverage about the prospects of the never-ending crisis-torn country.
“It’s been easy to overlook Greece’s tech scene since the country’s recent economic woes eclipsed most of the other news,” wrote Itai Elizur in The Next Web.
“The debt crisis sent most businesses reeling, and, despite declared over in 2015, its negative effects still linger today. The rest of Europe still keeps a close eye on the government’s management of the economy and unemployment still is at 23.6 percent in Q4[92] of 2016.
But despite this grim outlook, I was pleasantly greeted by an energetic tech scene composed of ventures that aim to bring some luster back into Greek entrepreneurship. Greece has at least a couple of major tech success stories that they can be proud of.”[93]
“Could the Greek tech sector save the Greek economy?” asks Cate Lawrence, a contributing writer at Readwrite.[94] How did we reach this high point of expectations of the Greek startup innovators to make such change ,and impact in a country plagued by one of the worst financial and social crises in her recent history?
With an educated and innovative workforce, and great traction with angel investors through structures like EVEA Business Angels Network,[95]Angels Group by StartTech Ventures Incubation Fund,[96] and more recently by Marathon VC,[97] it’s clear that Greece’s startup sector is healthy. With its reputation growing, we soon might see entrepreneurs emigrating to Greece to join the burgeoning tech scene. As a first evidence-based estimation of the size and investments in the Greek startup technology market for the period between 2010-2016, Marathon VC conducted a short study[98] researching available data from public and private sources to track the dynamic and potential of the market.
The study shows that “the [Greek tech startup] market has grown to more than 40 investments taking place every year starting from 2013, with 137 companies receiving 214 rounds in total.” As a general pattern they observe that “local funds and angels participate early, followed by international investors taking the lead in later stage rounds. This also suggests that, as more companies mature, more investments by international players are to be expected.”
Higher Education: Taking the Lead to Teach and Mentor Startup Founders on Media Entrepreneurship
In 2015, I introduced a graduate course on Entrepreneurial Journalism[99] in a newly launched program on Journalism and New Media at my home institution Panteion University. The curriculum change developed as a result of my participation on the Study of U.S. Institutes on Journalism and Media at Ohio University the same year, which focused my personal research project on developing a curriculum in the field after studying, benchmarking, and creatively adapting the best U.S. academic and training practices in this innovative field in my local academic and professional journalism context.
In 2016, with the support of U.S. Embassy Athens and in collaboration with the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism, we organized the first Athens “Startup Weekend on Entrepreneurial Journalism[100] as a community outreach activity. We invited mid-career journalists in legacy media and online publishers, communications professionals who are experimenting with introducing intrapreneurial-branded journalism, and native advertising projects as well as university students.
Both initiatives have so far offered valuable insights:
• Value creation and the quest to make a positive change by engaging students, the startup ecosystem, legacy media, and online media into collaborating to imagine and design innovative journalism startups, proved a stronger transformative experience to overcome long-standing suspicious attitudes to entrepreneurship and to empower people to start their own journalism independent or intrapreneurial projects.
• The co-creation educational and learning model of inviting key stakeholders from the local and international ecosystems to contribute as mentors at the core of the program is creating an “accelerator effect” and a fertile environment where all partners and participants are sharing and testing new ideas.
• Local market conditions and academic cultures, despite harsh critics, have been proved to be more fluid and adaptive in embracing a bold entrepreneurial mindset and course of action as the way out of current financial crisis as well as the path for bold https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65NgOzCk1aA exponential growth and innovation.[101]
Exercises
Try This!
• Organize an international meetup for young journalism entrepreneurs and make an impact in your community.
• Consult an easy-to-read Mashable article to guide you step-by-step on how to organize a Successful Meetup”.[102]
• Create a meetup[103] now and get into action!
Discussion Questions:
1. Is Silicon Valley or should it be a replicable model for developing successful innovation and startup ecosystems around the world?
2. Discuss how a model of “pockets of innovation” like the one we explore in Europe can provide an alternative “connecting the hubs” approach for scalable innovation.
3. Why might mobility and diversity of talent in the U.S. and Europe have had different impact on developing and scaling up comparable numbers of successful startups?
4. Building on the previous question: What other factors might be critical to help the talent and innovation pools around the world to make their mark? Consider booming innovation and startup ecosystems also in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
5. Discuss the assumption that U.S. market and society is more homogeneous in terms of culture and subsequently, is more attractive and promising for new ventures and investments.
6. Imagine what does not yet exist by working as a team on “What If” questions about the possible futures for media innovation hubs across different cities and regions of the world.
Exercises
Team Activity
Choose a city/region of the world where you want to launch a scalable journalism startup. Organize a discussion and reach an informed decision with your team, all simulating the roles of journalism startup co-founders.
• In this project, you will scale up internationally a journalism startup that taps into the opportunities of the third wave of the Internet revolution (Internet of Everything) with your base in a major city in Europe, Asia, Africa, or Latin America.
• Decide on the city and continent where you will launch your journalism startup, based on what will best enable you to scale up internationally.
• Discuss and evaluate global startup ecosystems and markets.
• Meet and consult with startup ecosystem experts in journalism innovation to get market and investment insights.
• Create alternative options and scenarios based on your assessment of opportunities and risks for each ecosystem.
• Reach an informed decision.
Suggested Readings
• Briggs, Mark. “What Makes a Successful News Startup?” The Quill 99, no. 6 (2011): 27-30.
• “Britain Needs Scale-up Businesses as Well as Start Ups.” Business Review Europe, 2015, Business Review Europe, Nov 26, 2015.
• Chimbel, Aaron. “Introduce Entrepreneurship Concepts Early in Journalism Curriculum.” Newspaper Research Journal 37, no. 4 (2016): 339-43.
• CIOL Writers. “Berlin May Replace London as the Startup Capital of EU after Brexit,” CIOL, June 25, 2016.
• “Commission Gives Boost to Startups in Europe.” European Union News, November 23, 2016.
• Dvorkin, Lewis. “Inviting the Rise of the Entrepreneurial Journalist: True/Slant Is Modeling the Newsroom of the Future by Empowering Contributors to Build Their Own Digital Brands — and by Changing the Role of the Editor.” (Building Community: Journalists’ New Journey)(Viewpoint Essay).” Nieman Reports 63, no. 3 (2009): 22.
• Estrin, Saul, Mickiewicz, Tomasz, and Stephan, Ute. “Entrepreneurship, Social Capital, and Institutions: Social and Commercial Entrepreneurship across Nations.(Statistical Data)(Abstract).” Entrepreneurship: Theory and Practice 37, no. 3 (2013): 479.
• Fullerton, Romayne Smith. “It’s Time to Find a New Business Model … Because without Journalism, Our Democratic System Will Fail.” Media (Canadian Association of Journalists) 17, no. 6 (2016): 8-11.
• Gerosa, Andrea, and Tirapani, Alessandro NiccolA2. “The Culture of Entrepreneurship: Creating Your Own Job.(Report).” European View 12, no. 2 (2013): 205-214
• “Germany: EU Monitor: Startups and Their Financing in Europe.” Mena Report, September 30, 2016.
• Grant, Adam. Originals. How Nonconformists Move the World. Penguin Books. Reprint Edition. 2017.
• Hunter, Anna, and Nel, Francois P. “Equipping the Entrepreneurial Journalist: An Exercise in Creative Enterprise.” Journalism and Mass Communication Educator 66, no. 1 (2011): 10-24.
• “Investment Plan for Europe: EIF and KfW Bankengruppe Sign Agreement in Germany to Provide EU1 Billion to startups.” European Union News, September 18, 2015
• Johnson, Steven. Where Good Ideas Come From.The Natural History of Innovation. Riverhead Books, 2011.
• Kelly, Kevin. The Inevitable. Understanding the 12 Technological Forces that will Shape our Future. Penguin Books. Reprint Edition, 2017.
• Maisonnave, Fabiano. “Covering the Waterfront: Despite a Fraught Political and Economic Environment, Entrepreneurial Brazilian Journalists Are Striving to Revitalize Coverage.” Nieman Reports 70, no. 1 (2016): 14.
• McAfee, Andrew, and Erik, Brynjolfsson. Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing our Digital Future. W.W. Norton & Company, 2017.
• Sarasvathy, Saras D., and Venkataraman, Sankaran. “Entrepreneurship as Method: Open Questions for an Entrepreneurial Future.” Entrepreneurship: Theory and Practice 35, no. 1 (2011): 113.
• “Tech Trailblazers Tech Startup Index Highlights Social Media and Promotional Divide between Europe and US Startup Culture.” M2 Communications, July 09, 2014.
• Vega, Tanzina. “New Journalism Degree To Emphasize startups.” New York Times (1923-Current File) (New York, N.Y.), September 20, 2010.
Additional Resources
Betty Tsakarestou, Ph.D., is assistant professor and head of the advertising and public relations lab at Panteion University, in Athens, Greece. She is co-initiator of Connecting Cities,[115] an exchange scholar of Study of U.S. Institutes (SUSI) on Journalism and Media at Ohio University (2015), branding officer and European co-liaison of the International Communication Division of The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) and a Startup Weekend on Entrepreneurial Journalism[116] organizer. Reach her on Twitter at @tsakarestou.
Leave feedback on this chapter.
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39. European Startup Initiative, http://www.startupheatmap.eu/. ↵
40. Katie Perry, "10 European Startup Cities to Watch in 2017," Social Media Week, May 5, 2017, https://socialmediaweek.org/blog/2017/05/european-startup-cities-to-watch/. ↵
41. Katie Perry, "10 European Startup Cities to Watch in 2017," Social Media Week, May 5, 2017, https://socialmediaweek.org/blog/2017/05/european-startup-cities-to-watch/. ↵
42. Omar Mohout, "10 Things You Didn’t Know About Europe’s Tech Scene," VentureBeat, September 4, 2016, [7]https://venturebeat.com/2016/09/04/10-things-you-didnt-know-about-europes-tech-scene/. ↵
43. Aileen Lee, 'Welcome To The Unicorn Club: Learning From Billion-Dollar Startups," TechCrunch, November 2, 2013, https://techcrunch.com/2013/11/02/welcome-to-the-unicorn-club/
44. Cowboy Ventures, http://cowboy.vc/. ↵
45. Sam Shead, "London Tech Startups Are Taking Almost All the VC Money in the UK," Business Insider, October 8, 2015, http://www.businessinsider.com/london-startups-bag-75-percent-of-uk-investment-2015-10?r=UK&IR=T. ↵
46. Matthew Lynn, "Post-Brexit Britain Will Offer More for Start-ups," The Telegraph, July 11, 2016, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/07/11/post-brexit-britain-will-offer-more-for-start-ups/. ↵
47. Direction Generale des Enterprises, www.entreprises.gouv.fr/node/168501. ↵
48. Station F, https://stationf.co/. ↵
49. Romain Dillet, "With Station F, Paris Will Have the World’s Biggest Startup Campus," TechCrunch, December 5, 2016, https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/05/with-station-f-paris-will-have-the-worlds-biggest-startup-campus/. ↵
50. Roxanne Varza, twitter.com/roxannevarza. ↵
51. "La French Tech," Gouvernement.fr, www.gouvernement.fr/en/la-french-tech/. ↵
52. French Tech Ticket, http://www.frenchtechticket.com/. ↵
53. Abby Young-Powell, "Six Lessons Berlin’s Startup Scene Can Teach London's Tech Entrepreneurs," The Telegraph, August 25, 2016. ↵
54. "Open Culture--A Definition," Center International D'Art Contemporain Montreal, www.ciac.ca/en/open-culture-definition-en. ↵
55. Chris Hirst," 10 Ways to Create an Open Culture," Fast Company, September 5, 2012, https://www.fastcompany.com/1681531/10-ways-to-create-an-open-culture. ↵
56. "Financing and Funding," Make It in Germany, www.make-it-in-germany.com/en/for-qualified-professionals/working/setting-up-a-business-in-germany/financing-and-funding. ↵
57. The German Startups Association, https://deutschestartups.org/en/. ↵
58. Omar Mohout, "10 Things You Didn’t Know About Europe’s Tech Scene," VentureBeat, September 4, 2016, https://venturebeat.com/2016/09/04/10-things-you-didnt-know-about-europes-tech-scene/. ↵
59. Omar Mohout, "10 Things You Didn’t Know About Europe’s Tech Scene," VentureBeat, September 4, 2016, https://venturebeat.com/2016/09/04/10-things-you-didnt-know-about-europes-tech-scene/. ↵
60. ”The 2017 Global Startup Ecosystem Report,” Startup Genome, https://startupgenome.com/report2017/. ↵
61. "2017 Winter Asia Startup Ecosystem," Asia Startup Ecosystem, January 23, 2017, globalstartupecosystem.com/2017-winter-asia-startup-ecosystem/. ↵
62. Alex Stern, "Revisiting The Unicorn Club," Startup Grind, https://medium.com/startup-grind/unicorn-club-revisited-e641f9c80e8d. ↵
63. DNI Fund, digitalnewsinitiative.com/about/. ↵
64. DNI Fund Participants, digitalnewsinitiative.com/participants/. ↵
65. DNI Fund Projects, digitalnewsinitiative.com/dni-projects/. ↵
66. De-Escalation Bot, digitalnewsinitiative.com/dni-projects/de-escalation-bot/. ↵
67. Wave, digitalnewsinitiative.com/dni-projects/wave/. ↵
68. Connected Cars, Connected Audience, News Ecosystem (Round 3), Digital News Initiative, digitalnewsinitiative.com/dni-projects/connected-cars-connected-audience-news-ecosystem/. ↵
69. Companion App, digitalnewsinitiative.com/dni-projects/nzz-companion-app/. ↵
70. Mural, digitalnewsinitiative.com/dni-projects/mural/. ↵
71. PoliWatchBot, digitalnewsinitiative.com/dni-projects/poliwatchbot/. ↵
72. Tagesspiegel Causa, digitalnewsinitiative.com/dni-projects/tagesspiegel-causa/. ↵
73. Project Arete, digitalnewsinitiative.com/dni-projects/project-arete/. ↵
74. Woodpecker Findings, digitalnewsinitiative.com/dni-projects/woodpecker-findings/. ↵
75. "DNI Funded Projects," Digital News Initiative, digitalnewsinitiative.com/dni-projects/. ↵
76. James Breiner, "How J-schools Are Helping Students Develop Entrepreneurial Journalism Skills," Poynter, May 17, 2013, https://www.poynter.org/2013/how-j-schools-are-helping-students-develop-entrepreneurial-journalism-skills/213701/. ↵
77. "Pioneers of Entrepreneurial Journalism in Europe," Media Managers Club, http://mediamanagersclub.org/pioneers-entrepreneurial-journalism-europe. ↵
78. "Pioneers of Entrepreneurial Journalism in Europe," Media Managers Club, http://mediamanagersclub.org/pioneers-entrepreneurial-journalism-europe. ↵
79. "Which Colleges or Universities Offer Entrepreneurial Journalism Programs?" Quora, www.quora.com/Which-colleges-or-universities-offer-entrepreneurial-journalism-programs. ↵
80. "Spreadsheet: Entrepreneurial Journalism Programs in Universities," July 21, 2014, https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AtmTF6sPZvo-EYm6F1CddSaYcxlOZZRulBPhUl1on_U/pub?output=html. ↵
81. Anemona Hartocollis, "Building a Start-up Culture in a Broken-down Economy," CNBC, July 19, 2015, http://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/19/building-a-start-up-culture-in-greeces-broken-down-economy.html. ↵
82. "Greek Start-ups Are Here," Open Coffee, July 18, 2007, [8]http://opencoffee.gr/2007/07/18/declaration/. ↵
83. Open Coffee Club, http://opencoffee.ning.com/. ↵
84. "Open Coffee Athens Meeting VI," Open Coffee, http://opencoffee.gr/2007/11/29/open-coffee-athens-meeting-vi/. ↵
85. Steve Case, "Get Ready, the Internet Is About to Change Again. Here’s How," May 30, 2015, www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/steve-case-get-ready-the-Internet-is-about-to-change-again-heres-how/2015/05/29/d6c87f6c-0493-11e5-bc72-f3e16bf50bb6_story.html?utm_term=.44b24a0cce50. ↵
86. OpenFund, http://theopenfund.com/. ↵
87. Marathon, https://marathon.vc/. ↵
88. Alfred Lua, "Social Proof," Buffer Blog, https://blog.bufferapp.com/social-proof. ↵
89. Mike Butcher, "Witnessing The Rebirth Of The Greek Startup Ecosystem," TechCrunch, Jan 8, 2013, https://techcrunch.com/2013/01/08/witnessing-the-rebirth-of-the-greek-startup-ecosystem/. ↵
90. ”Ranking of Economies,” World Bank, http://www.doingbusiness.org/rankings. ↵
91. Itai Elizur, "The Emergence of an Ecosystem: 12 Startups Turning Greece Into a Startup Hub," The Next Web, April 2, 2017, thenextweb.com/contributors/2017/04/02/emergence-ecosystem-12-startups-turning-greece-startup-hub/#.tnw_05khlPl1. ↵
92. "Greece's Jobless Rate Rises to 23.6 Percent in Fourth Quarter," Reuters, March 16, 2017, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-eurozone-greece-unemployment-idUSKBN16N16O. ↵
93. Itai Elizur, "The Emergence of an Ecosystem: 12 Startups Turning Greece Into a Startup Hub," The Next Web, thenextweb.com/contributors/2017/04/02/emergence-ecosystem-12-startups-turning-greece-startup-hub/#.tnw_05khlPl1↵
94. Cate Lawrence, "Could the Greek Tech Sector Save the Greek Economy?" Readwrite, March 23, 2016, https://readwrite.com/2016/03/23/greek-tech-savior-ct4/. ↵
95. EBEA, http://www.businessangelsgreece.gr/. ↵
96. "Starttech Ventures Introduces Its ‘Sidecar’ Angel Group," Starttech, June 17, 2015, http://www.starttech.vc/blog/2015/starttech-ventures-introduces-its-side-car-angel-group/. ↵
97. Marathon VC, [9]https://marathon.vc/. ↵
98. "Investments in Greek Startups, 2010-2016," Marathon.vc, July 27, 2017, marathon.vc/investments-in-greek-startups/. ↵
99. Entrepreneurial Journalism Medium Publication, https://medium.com/entrepreneurial-journalism. ↵
100. Startup Weekend Entrepreneurial Journalism Athens Greece Publication, https://medium.com/entrepreneurial-journalism. ↵
101. Peter Diamandis, “Exponential Thinking Framework,” YouTube, May 27, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65NgOzCk1aA. ↵
102. Stephanie Marcus, “HOW TO: Organize A Successful Meetup,” June 26, 2010, Mashable, http://mashable.com/2010/06/26/how-to-meetup/#CIbwNz1eAkqX. ↵
103. ”Create a Meetup,” Meetup, https://www.meetup.com/help/article/865540/. ↵
104. Both Sides of the Table, https://bothsidesofthetable.com/. ↵
105. BuzzMachine, http://buzzmachine.com/. ↵
106. Fast Company Technology, https://www.fastcompany.com/technology. ↵
107. Calacanis, http://calacanis.com/. ↵
108. PressThink, http://pressthink.org/. ↵
109. Alex Stern, ”Revisiting the Unicorn Club,” Startup Grind, https://medium.com/startup-grind/unicorn-club-revisited-e641f9c80e8d. ↵
110. Startup Europe, http://startupeuropeclub.eu/about-us/. ↵
111. Startup Europe Map, startupeuropemap.eu/map/. ↵
112. ”The 2017 Global Startup Ecosystem Report,” Startup Genome, [10]https://startupgenome.com/report2017/. ↵
113. TechCrunch, https://techcrunch.com/. ↵
114. @mediastartups, twitter.com/mediastartups. ↵
115. Connecting Cities, https://medium.com/connecting-cities. ↵
116. Startup Weekend Entrepreneurial Journalism Athens Greece, https://medium.com/startup-weekend-entrepreneurial-journalism-athens. ↵ | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/Media_Innovation_and_Entrepreneurship_(Ferrier_and_Mays)/11%3A_Entrepreneurship_Abroad-_Cultural_and_International_Perspectives_and_Challenges/11.01%3A_Entrepreneurship_.txt |
Hodan Osman
China is like a sleeping giant. And when she awakes, she shall astonish the world.
–Napoleon Bonaparte, 1803
By most accounts, China is considered one of the most entrepreneurial countries worldwide. As the second largest economy in the world, it is also home to 53 percent of the world’s unicorns, a term coined by venture capitalist Aileen Lee in 2013 that refers to startups valued at \$1 billion USD or more.[1] The combination of 108 Chinese unicorns in 2017 had a combined worth of more than \$445 billion USD, a figure equivalent to the GDP of the world’s 26th largest economy.[2] Many of these rising unicorns are media and technology startups that are positioned to capitalize on the technological, socio-cultural, and socio-economic changes in the country. A report published in 2017 by Chinese startup database IT Juzi indicated that there were 34 new Chinese companies that year alone, with media companies such as Kuaishou, Kuaikan Manhua “Quick Comic,” and Luoji Siwei “Logical Thinking” dominating the list.[3]
The rapid economic developments in China in recent years have fostered technological innovations that have allowed for a new wave of media entrepreneurship to emerge. While some represent efforts by the state to appeal to the younger generations by funding and endorsing new media outlets, most are business ventures created by media professionals or individual entrepreneurs hoping to reach unicorn scale by succeeding within the Chinese markets that cater to 850 million people under the age of 40.[4] The high penetration rate of mobile phones and the Internet in China make it easy for startups to reach vast markets cheaply by tapping into the market of 731 million Internet users, and 695 million mobile phone users in the country.[5] Tencent, Baidu, WeChat, Youku, Weibo and Toutiao are all examples of explosive media enterprises that have witnessed tremendous growth in China in recent years. These platforms gained popularity with Chinese netizens, a term widely used to refer to Chinese Internet users, not only for giving them a platform to share and access information, but also for enabling users to make money as well. These platforms allowed their users to become their own entrepreneurs through multiple innovative methods.
This trend began with the rise of zi meiti or “self-media” in China, such as Tencent blogging in the early 2000s, followed by the later formation of Weibo, the Twitter-like social media app in 2010, and the launching of WeChat in 2011. While blogging spaces and Weibo accounts became important outlets for civic engagement and political participation, the use of platforms such as WeChat opened up the possibilities for users to make a significant financial income, turning their media participation activities into profitable entrepreneurial ventures.
WeChat, which is currently the most popular messaging app in China, has a platform ecosystem of over 200,000 developers and offers an ever-expanding range of services such as chat, voice and video calls, social media, news, payments, hotel booking, and so on to its almost 1 billion monthly active users.
Communication Social Network Value-Added Services
Illustration of WeChat app functions, screenshot images provided by author.
WeChat was developed by Tencent Holdings, Asia’s most valuable listed company with a market capitalization of nearly \$500 billion USD on the Nikkei Asian stock exchange at the end of 2017.[6] Tencent, China’s largest social network and gaming firm, rolled out WeChat in 2011 as a mobile-only messaging app that would disrupt SMS messaging and work on any phone and any mobile service. It first had only basic capabilities such as text messaging, creating voice clips, and sending photos. Later on, it added features such as video clips and a “find nearby users” function. The app quickly gained popularity and reached 100 million users in less than 14 months after launching, tripling that number the following year to reach 300 million users in 2013. In 2012, the app added voice and video call services, and opened up to national and international commercial brands by introducing public accounts users could follow by simply scanning a personalized QR code. Soon after that, the app introduced more value-added features including games, mobile payments, WeChat stores, and Mini programs. The app now has more than 1 billion active monthly users, and is currently rolling out its services worldwide in a plan to expand globally.
China is considered a mobile-first market, since the vast majority of its consumers joined the Internet on a mobile device before a computer, an important factor that contributed to the popularity of chat apps such as WeChat. However, one of WeChat’s key elements of success was its deep understanding of Chinese digital culture, which carries unique societal norms into the digital space. For example, the platform introduced Hong Bao or “Red Envelopes” — a traditional form of cash gifts in red envelopes culturally considered auspicious — in a digital format as a form of payment between users within the app instead of normal transfers. Combining the traditional Hong Bao with digital instant money transfers became one of the innovative approaches that gained popularity in the country.
With the convenience of online payment portals in China, and the rising number of WeChat users, social networks became important e-commerce hubs. In 2016, Chinese consumers spent \$31.3 billion USD on digital content purchases, including novels, audio, and videos, a 28 percent jump compared to the same period in 2015.[7] To capitalize on the trend of social commerce, facilitating online shopping with the use of user ratings, referrals, online communities, and social advertising on online social networks, WeChat began to open up its platform for developers to build e-commerce stores as early as 2014. By 2016, 31 percent of WeChat users were making e-commerce purchases on the platform according to a report published by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Mary Meeker.[8] Some startup companies embedded entire e-commerce platforms inside WeChat. WeChat Stores or “Wei Dian,” an interface akin to Shopify that connects to the menu of WeChat public accounts and allows one-click-payments for WeChat users, became one of its most popular and convenient e-commerce platforms.
WeChat Stores allowed for users to build well-designed stores for free in a simple-to-follow process that took less than 10 minutes to complete. And while it didn’t allow for product searches like traditional e-commerce sites, it had a successful marketing strategy of linking users from your public WeChat account to your WeChat store. As such, WeChat’s public accounts became important incubators for emerging entrepreneurs and startups that began by featuring innovative media products and services on the platform and offering deals and coupons for group purchases to drive traffic to their stores. For example, Luoji Siwei, or “Logical Thinking,” an online talk show anchored by its founder Luo Zhenyu, started out as a WeChat public account and successfully capitalized on its model. Eventually it secured investment from venture capitalists and completed Series B financing in October 2015, when it was valued at more than \$460 million USD,[9] making it one of the most valuable WeChat-born unicorns.
Since WeChat’s launch, media entrepreneurs in China largely used WeChat as a platform for their businesses instead of developing their own apps or websites. Startups such as Luoji Siwei conducted innovative content marketing by offering creative products, introduced by stories, in a limited quantity and time. It offered a daily 60-second audio from the host at 6:30 am every day, in which he shared interesting perspectives on common issues such as parenting. His WeChat store sold books and other products he mentioned in these talks to 3.5 million followers, and 30,000 paid members. Occasionally, Luoji Siwei launched very successful e-commerce campaigns, such as the Mooncake campaign in which 2.7 million people participated in a game that involved buying and receiving Mooncakes, popular festive delicacies shared as gifts. Later on, Luoji Siwei continued to expand his business offline by offering talks and seminars in popular cities with ticket prices as high as \$2,200 USD as fans rushed to attend these activities.
Another example of media entrepreneurship within WeChat is Uncle Tongdao, a brand that was founded by Cai Yuedong, a 28-year-old illustrator on WeChat. His Uncle Astrology cartoon series about the 12 astrology zodiac signs became an instantaneous hit as they combined the Chinese culture of Tucao or “sarcastically complaining” with the hip culture of astrology. Its success depended on WeChat’s integrated ecosystem that allowed for multiple online and offline revenue streams including advertising, creating customized products, emojis, WeChat shops, and creating an offline presence such as setting up the Uncle Tongdao Cafe and Store in Shanghai, and organizing the astrology gala in Guangzhou where they sold products worth 2 million RMB (approx \$317,000 USD at time of writing). On December 2016, Cai Yuedong went from freelance illustrator to millionaire after he sold 73 percent of his startup Tongdao Culture Studio to Shanghai-listed media company Meisheng for \$25 million USD.
When Tencent first launched WeChat in 2011, no one predicted that the mobile-only messenger app designed to reinvent SMS messaging would in less than five years grow to become one of the world’s largest e-commerce and social media platforms. In China, WeChat eclipses many of the country’s former social media giants such as Renren and Weibo, and within minutes of meeting someone new in China, it is very likely that you will connect on the popular app. Today, teachers communicate with parents through WeChat groups, and some companies even make important staff announcements on their public accounts, making the app an essential part of professional and social life in China. On the other hand, WeChat not only provides space to stay connected with people, it also offers essential services such as news and shopping. Today, we find a WeChat payment QR code stuck to counters everywhere in the country as the app increasingly becomes a popular payment method in transactions from buying coffee to paying utility fees. The app also continues to provide entrepreneurs with innovative new ways of reaching customers and selling their products and services, such as WeChat’s latest Mini Programs–lightweight apps embedded within WeChat that don’t need to be installed, and offer a range of services from hailing rides and food delivery to live-streaming, and coupons for group purchases. Since Mini Programs were launched in 2017, developers introduced more than 580,000 Mini Programs aimed at capitalizing on the large potential of social commerce on WeChat’s network of 1 billion users.
Screenshot illustrating WeChat Payment QR codes any WeChat user can scan to make money transfers. Image provided by author.
Factors for successful WeChat entrepreneurship
Analysis of the above-mentioned examples shows that the success of media entrepreneurship attempts on WeChat depends on the capitalization of the following factors:
1. Monetization through multiple channels – WeChat offers a complex environment that combines social content with e-commerce, and allows for user engagement both online through social media content and offline through QR code scanning.
2. Designing unique products – by designing their own unique products, entrepreneurs on WeChat were able to align their content with products and further enhance user experience and entice user interaction.
3. Ensuring an offline presence alongside the online presence – keeping an offline presence through physical shops or events allows for a better user experience and a more strategic immersion into the daily interactions of users.
4. Grounding a brand and product within the popular culture – the digitization of the red-envelope cash-gifts culture by WeChat, and how Uncle Tongdao playfully allowed for the culture of Tucao “sarcastically complaining” to combine with astrology zodiac signs, are both examples of media and digital innovations that are grounded within popular culture.
5. Commitment to your original voice – in order to ensure long-term user engagement, staying true to your brand and original voice is key in ensuring user loyalty.
Hodan Osman is the executive director of the Center for East African Studies, vice director of The Center for African Film and TV Research, and a research fellow & lecturer at The Institute of African Studies at Zhejiang Normal University. Find her on Twitter at @DrHodanOsman.
1. “It’s the Age of Unicorns and Here’s How China is Ranking,” World Economic Forum, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/07/its-the-age-of-unicorns-and-heres-how-china-is-ranking.
2. “It’s the Age of Unicorns and Here’s How China is Ranking,” World Economic Forum, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/07/its-the-age-of-unicorns-and-heres-how-china-is-ranking.
3. “4 Takeaways from 34 New Chinese Unicorns: It Juzi Report,” TechNode, https://technode.com/2018/01/04/itjuzi-chinese-unicorns/.
4. “China Population,” World Population Review, http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/china-population/.
5. The 39th statistical report on the development of the internet in China, China Internet Network Information Center, 2017.
6. "Tencent and Alibaba Top Asia's Market Cap Ranking in 2017," Nikkei Asian Review, https://asia.nikkei.com/magazine/20180111/Business/Tencent-and-Alibaba-top-Asia-s-market-cap-ranking-in-2017.
7. "Internet Players Cash in on Content Windfall," China Daily USA, http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/epaper/2017-08/03/content_30344557.htm.
8. “2018 Internet Trends,” Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, Byers, https://www.kleinerperkins.com/perspectives/2016-internet-trends-report/. InternetTrends_2016.pdf
9. Eds Picker Colin, Wang Heng & Zhou Weihuan. The China-Australia Free Trade Agreement: A 21st-Century Model. (Oxford, England: Hart Publishing, 2018). | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/Media_Innovation_and_Entrepreneurship_(Ferrier_and_Mays)/11%3A_Entrepreneurship_Abroad-_Cultural_and_International_Perspectives_and_Challenges/11.02%3A_From_the_Field-_T.txt |
Abel Asrat and Rediat Belehu
In January 2016, I started Addis Insight[1] with the aim of becoming a leading digital media platform for Ethiopians across the world. Before starting Addis Insight, I had the opportunity to work as a Wikipedian In Residence and Google Student Ambassador, which gave me the opportunity to identify an area where I could express my passions. When I first started Addis Insight, I had two clear goals: 1) to improve the quality and quantity of content that is available online regarding Ethiopia and its far-flung citizens and 2) to allow the younger generation of Ethiopians to tell their story.
Six months after launching Addis Insight, I won a scholarship in media and communication to attend Ohio University in the Communication Development program. At the same time, I had to make a tough decision about Addis Insight. I was at a crossroads. I had to choose between incorporating Addis Insight as a company or letting it become a website that aggregates news from other news sources. That is when I met Rediat Belehu, a marketing graduate, who was willing to leave her high-paying job and join Addis Insight to run the company as chief executive officer and shareholder while I was out of the country for two years.
Despite having no background in media and communication, our team had the determination to build a media brand that will give our audience insight across several topic areas. To achieve our content goals, we started out by reaching out to subject matter experts in different professions. We believed that many professionals in Ethiopia has not been given a chance to share their expertise. In Ethiopian media, you rarely see an architect, doctor, banker, investor, engineer, or athlete sharing their insight on topics in which they have expertise. As a result, we started encouraging people to share their views on our platform even if they were not journalists or politicians.
Our revenue model was based on three strategies. The first was to target local companies to advertise on our website. Our approach is to show advertising customers that unlike radio, television and newspapers where they may advertise, we can provide them demographic details about the audience that visited and interacted with their ads. The second strategy was to partner with online ad publishers like Google AdSense and the Facebook Ads Network. Unfortunately, our website was flagged by Google AdSense after our website was spammed by Russian traffic. This resulted in the suspension of our ads for over a year. We are still trying to contact Google and fix the issue. The third income-generating model is to provide consulting through social media and digital marketing services for businesses and celebrities. This helped us to build strong relationships with people in the entertainment industry. Because of this effort, we have had more than 24 contributors from various fields and backgrounds, who have contributed a total of 170 articles. Ninety-five percent of our contributors are under 30, and 60 percent of them are women. The approach we used to attract experts to contribute to our website was to first identify a topic area, then research the social media profiles that are trending and driving engagement around it. For instance, we have a business section and for that we looked at people mainly on networks like Linkedin and analyzed the type of content they share with their network and the engagement they drive. After that we approached influencers and pitched the idea that they could gain more readers and create more awareness of the issues they are writing about by becoming a contributor to our website. Even where there was no monetary compensation, we explained the benefits of growing their brand profile on digital platforms. Where applicable, we also offered them an internship and recommendation letter. This approach really solidified our brand recognition through social media, as our content was shared by contributors who are influencers in their social media sphere.
Political polarization between the government and opposition parties means that part of our society is excluded from getting stories that inspire them to become successful in Ethiopia. That is why we launched our “Made In Ethiopia” series. It features change makers in Ethiopia who are building the Ethiopian Dream against all odds. We also gave voice to the first generation of Ethiopian Americans to share their views about identity and their homeland. Some of the initiatives include the inspiring stories of the Yellow Movement, which supports and empowers girls by selling roses; the story of Hermella Wondimu, who built more than 27 water wells at age 28; the story of Abraham, who returned from Dubai and disrupted the car washing business in Ethiopia by using his car washing experience from Dubai. We also happily shared our platform to promote artists, creators, and technology entrepreneurs who wanted to gain the public’s vote during global competitions. Whenever tragedies broke, we did our best to tell a story that would lift our country folk and makes us stronger as a nation. Last year after a garbage landslide at Koshe took the life of 115 people, we did an exclusive interview with one of the survivors from Koshe titled The Koshe Dreamers and it was among our most visited posts.
Lack of experience in the field of media and limitation of resources didn’t stop us from pursuing our dream. In order to sustain, we pitched our ideas to people who we assumed could help in filling our gap. Our story and how young we are as a team inspires others to join our team. In order to solidify our credibility, we seek media partnerships with important brands that are not already partnered in Ethiopia. As a result we were able to forge media partnerships with YouTube, Music In Africa, and the Ethiopian Diaspora Fellowship. But above all we built credibility because we really valued our user experience and consistently improved our platforms and our visitors’ experience. We are the first media in Ethiopia to adopt Facebook Instant Articles and Google Accelerated Mobile Pages that significantly saved data cost for users. We avoided the temptations of clickbait and refrained from monetizing our content by misleading readers with headlines and sensationalized content that is full of gossip.
Just one month after I came to America, the Ethiopian government imposed a state of emergency[2] blocking all social media and restricting any form of public assembly. This was due to an ongoing protest at the time. The social media blockade lasted for 10 months, and the service disruption still occurs whenever there is any protest in the country. This directly affected our reader base in Ethiopia. Also, people were using Virtual Private Network (VPN)[3] to access our website and that distorted our demographic geodata as the readers were rerouted to access social media websites from different country gateways.
Our journey has never been easy, and we were able to sustain our business without making any profit for the past two years. We had to convince advertisers that digital media is the next big thing for Ethiopia even though we were not lucky to get clients as easily as we expected. We had to support our business by bootstrapping and funding from our school stipends and with the generosity of teammates who put in “sweat equity” and worked essentially for free when we couldn’t pay salaries on time. Even after living 16 months in the United States I didn’t adjust my sleeping hours because I had to operate in Ethiopia time (an eight-hour difference ) to help my teammates. I may graduate with my master’s degree in media and communication without my friends, but I make sure to share my school materials and knowledge with my team so that we can all grow in my absence. Our dream is so powerful that we had people like Sergut Dejene, a marketing strategist who left the U.S. to join our team. When we hadn’t developed editorial guidelines for our contributors, people like Hadra Ahmed, a freelance journalist, extended a hand to help us. Full-time students and workers committed their weekends and nights to make sure we don’t lack well-researched and well-written content. We always took the criticism of our readers on our grammar and content as constructive, and responded positively and graciously. We even believe in collaborating with other media and we have learned a lot from people like Tsedale Lemma, who is the founder of Addis Standard, (Addis Standard was a monthly English newsmagazine print that suspended its publication due to challenges related to media law in Ethiopia). We get inspiration from her works and challenged ourselves to improve our content depth and journalistic professionalism.
Because of our team perseverance and our devoted readers, we’ve now surpassed 500,000 unique visitors with 1.5 million views in the past two years. Currently we get 30,000 visitors per month. Despite having a steady growth of visitors, advertisers are hesitant to publish ads on the website. Part of this is due to lack of awareness about the power of digital media. But when our stories are picked up by global media, it gives us a morale boost that very soon the interest from local advertisers will rise.
Finally, as we follow on our second anniversary, we have more than 120 people who have volunteered to become contributors on our website. Our next step will be to secure investment and a bank loan to invest in the human resources we need to operate efficiently. At the same time we are doubling our efforts to get local ads. Even with these milestones, two years in, we had to sell our furniture just to pay our office rent. But as I write this, we just secured our first website ads deal with a chocolate factory in Ethiopia. We are 100 percent confident that we will become the leading digital media platform in Ethiopia, and that is our New Year’s resolution for 2018.
Abel Asrat is a graduate student at Ohio University studying communications, with a background in media, and the founder of Addis Insight. Find him on Twitter at @abelasratt.
1. Addis Insight, https://www.addisinsight.com/. ↵
2. ”Ethiopia State of Emergency 2016,” Wikipedia, https://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopia_State_of_Emergency_2016. ↵
3. ”Virtual Private Network,” Wikipedia, https://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_private_network. ↵ | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/Media_Innovation_and_Entrepreneurship_(Ferrier_and_Mays)/11%3A_Entrepreneurship_Abroad-_Cultural_and_International_Perspectives_and_Challenges/11.03%3A_From_the_Field-_A.txt |
Francine Hardaway
What made Silicon Valley a Hub for entrepreneurs? And why has that become as much of a liability as an advantage?
Silicon Valley grew up in the area between San Jose, California, and San Francisco as a result of Frederick Terman, the legendary dean of Stanford engineering school during the 1940s and 1950s. He created the tradition of Stanford faculty starting their own companies. A number of companies we still reference came out of Stanford during those years, especially Hewlett Packard and Varian Associates.
The transistor was invented and manufactured in Silicon Valley, which gave the area a leg up in the radio and telegraph industries. And the Navy had a base in Sunnyvale. By 1957, Russia’s success with Sputnik unleashed a big space competition, and the U.S. government founded NASA. At the time NASA opened at Moffett Field near San Jose, the only company able to build electronics for the space capsule was Fairchild Semiconductor.
The legend of Silicon Valley from the beginning of the transistor industry is well-known and has been written about and documented.[1] Most of the Valley’s early success came from either components like Silicon chips (from which the Valley got its name) or the hardware into which the chips were placed.
It’s actually fun to learn about the Valley’s history, because the lesson is that the beginning of Silicon Valley was all about men and women, engineers, who had ideas out of science fiction about what technology could enable. Many of those ideas have now come true, like the personal computer and the iPhone, both envisioned by Steve Jobs. And we now wear what was once envisioned in a comic book as the “Dick Tracy wrist radio”–the Apple Watch.
Early engineers were not after money, they were about making things possible that had never been possible before, such as space travel. As a result, they received both government grants and venture capital. Before venture capital became a “thing,” it originated from the financial centers like New York. Arthur Rock, for example, was an early investor in Intel, Apple, and Scientific Data Systems. The first Bay Area venture capital firms, who located on Sand Hill Road adjacent to the Stanford campus, were Kleiner, Perkins Caulfield and Byers, and Sequoia Capital.
If you are interested in the history of Silicon Valley, you might want to watch the HBO show Silicon Valley, which tells you everything you need to know about where Silicon Valley is in the present, and also the fourth season of AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire, which can take you from the 1980s to the rise of the World Wide Web.
We have now reached the point where Silicon Valley is a rich ecosystem where everyone with an idea eventually shows up because it’s possible to sit in a coffee shop and form a team, raise some money, and get started. Numerous accelerators, such as Y Combinator make it easy to get a start, and the cost of starting a company has come down significantly due to Amazon Web Services (cloud-based infrastructure) and software development tools and frameworks.
However, we’re also reached the point where Silicon Valley is a self-parody, with all the downsides of its own success: race, age, and gender discrimination, drug and alcohol abuse, suicide and depression.[2] Its “win at all costs mentality” has spawned excesses of every variety.
Not to mention the fact that it is now possible to start a company anywhere, especially near a university. Let’s give Silicon Valley credit for establishing a culture of entrepreneurship, which is really a culture of resilience, and then understand that for digital media, it’s not Paradise.
As the founder of Stealthmode Partners, Francine Hardaway is a nineteen-year advocate and resource for entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs. She has consulted with more than 1,000 startups and blogs about technology, entrepreneurship, and health-care policy issues at Huffington Post, Medium, and http://blog.stealthmode.com . Reach her on Twitter at @hardaway.
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1. "Pirates of Silicon Valley," Wikipedia, https://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirates_of_Silicon_Valley. ↵
2. Why Silicon Valley is Going to Keep Having Sexual Harassment Lawsuits, Mashable, http://mashable.com/2017/06/08/silicon-valley-harassment/#sRm_EoiXdEqf. ↵ | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/Media_Innovation_and_Entrepreneurship_(Ferrier_and_Mays)/11%3A_Entrepreneurship_Abroad-_Cultural_and_International_Perspectives_and_Challenges/11.04%3A_From_the_Field-_A.txt |
Communication and media permeate our society. At its most basic level, we can think of communication as the exchange of information or meaning – but what does that mean? When are you not exchanging information or meaning? To try and help make sense of the wealth of encounters in which communication might be said to be occurring, we try and categorize communication into different types. Some of these types include:
• interpersonal communication, or one-on-one talking and rhetoric, where we analyse things like tone, body language, and speech
• mass communication, which includes one-to-many and many-to-many communication acts, with a particular interest in mediated communication, such as with the press.
• Organizational communication, where we look at how people organize their information exchanges to maintain and facilitate group behaviour
• Intercultural communication, which looks at the exchange of information and ideas across different cultural groups or subgroups.
But is communication purely a functional and pragmatic tool for the exchange of information, and serves no other function or plays no other role within society? Or is there more than one level to consider when studying the act and role of communication in a social context?
Building on work started by Robert T. Craig, we can generally talk about seven models or traditions of communication – we can look at any communication practice through the lens of one or more of these models to develop a more nuanced understanding of communication in everyday life.
The seven models (adapted from Miller) are:
1. Rhetorical – this model is concerned primarily with communication as a discourse, and tends to concern itself primarily with interpersonal, one-to-one or one-to-few communication acts, such as speech. Post the linguistic turn of the mid- to late-twentieth century, rhetoric has expanded its area of focus to include mass communication that attempts to persuade, such as political communication and advertising. A rhetorical approach to communication might look at who was speaking to whom, in what context, and to what end or purpose (i.e.: to persuade or to change an opinion or belief).
2. Semiotic – this model sees communication primarily as an exchange of signs within a meaning-making system. We will be going into much further depth into the idea of semiotics in a later module, but for now it is just worth noting that semiotics approaches communication in itself, seeing the communication as a sign within a sign system, which employs signs in culturally contextualized combinations to convey meaning.
3. Phenomenological – this model is primarily concerned with communication as an experience. A phenomenological approach would see communication as both a representation and a reinforcement of what the communicators see to be self-evident. A phenomenological approach can take on both interpersonal and mass communications, and may also take under its purvey objects or ideas as sites of meaning-making.
4. Cybernetic – this model views communication as a flow of information. This is not just the pragmatic A sends a message to B type of flow, but also tries to take into account factors which influence and constraint the flow of information, including social factors such as mores and etiquette, technological factors such as channel access and availability, and political factors such as regulation.
5. Psychological or Socio-psychological – this model, as the name suggests, is concerned with the impact of communication acts on the individual, particularly their sense of self in society. This model sees communication as representing certain individual choices made in order to maximize benefit to the individual or group. We’ll come back to these ideas when we discuss symbolic interactionism in the next module.
6. Sociocultural – this model sees communication as a way of replicating and reinforcing (and challenging) the social order. This approach assumes that people in societies have models of how that society should operate; communication acts to build, reinforce, and propagate these models.
7. Critical – this model views communication as a set of assumptions that are open to challenge and negotiation; as you might have guessed, it has strong links to the socio-cultural tradition. Approaches such as Marxist critique are representative of this model.
We can look at any act of communication through any of these models, and uncover something different about the communication itself, the meaning it helps construct and reconstruct, and how that communication and the communicators involved fit within a socio-cultural context.
It’s worth stepping back even further for a moment, and turning your attention to the wider role of communication in everyday life. To do this, it is worth starting with a question: can you imagine a world without communication?
What does it look like?
What might be some of the cultural roles of communication in everyday life? In no particular order, we can talk about the following:
1 Communication tells stories, and perhaps more importantly, they retell stories. Communication, particularly mass communication and the mass media, tends to fall into repetitive and recursive patterns of representation and ideology, ones that often reinforce the dominant hegemony of a culture or society. For example, the narratives around masculinity and sports such as rugby — think of the way stories about All Blacks are constructed and reconstructed in the media.
By using these narrative strategies in our communication patterns, we are engaging in a kind of shorthand that facilitates communication behaviours, signals a shared culture or values system, and indicates an expectation of communicative and ideological symmetry. However, such myths also propagate a particular set of ideas about what is valued within a culture, and what or who is marginalized.
Let’s take a look at All Blacks for example – think of the language that is used to describe them, and the thoughts and feelings it evokes such as: www.nzherald.co.nz/all-blacks...ectid=11168151 or www.nzherald.co.nz/sport/news...ectid=11193344
These sports stars and their games, which are a form of communication, reinforce particular, in this case modern and Western, views about masculinity, which then has an impact on how the readers of these texts understand the masculine in their culture.
We’ll be coming back to sports stars and cultural mythology when we touch on gender in a later module. In the meantime see this http://www.onlineprnews.com/news/142894-1306526248-real-men-wear-pink-ribbon-novelty-athletic-socks.html
2 A second role that communication plays in everyday life is to help maintain social order by taking on a kind of surveillance operation, in that communication demonstrates to a society what behaviours are considered acceptable and unacceptable. This may be through object representation, or it may be through commentary on active behaviours. An example of the former might be soaps. Soaps like Shortland Street plays out, in a mass media, the narratives of types of private lives and decision processes of different groups of people in a palatable, easy to understand and follow manner. It is not by accident that reality TV and soap operas follow the same structural beats. Both are structured to play out long-form ‘life’ narratives, with different characters taking on the role of hero or villain. An example of commentary might be gossip, whether about a sports star, a pop singer, or your neighbours.
Facebook is a great example of this, in that it runs on social communication – on gossip and networking – and people very deliberately structure their behavior on these sites to present the best ‘face’ and thus receive the most desirable commentary and feedback from others. For example, think about how long you spent choosing and setting up your profile picture to use for your Facebook page? Along similar lines, new communication channels and technologies now allow us to extend our interpersonal surveillance, both across space and through time. Whereas once students who went off to college in a way escaped the surveillance of their parents, now their parents can (unless they’ve locked their account) follow their children’s antics on Facebook. Those same antics may then form part of a person’s online profile which is seen by potential employers as they use those same tools of surveillance to get a sense of who you are before they call you in for a job interview.
Either way, this role of communication serves to demonstrate correct social behavior, and the consequences of incorrect social behavior, and to allow social sanctions and feedbacks on our own behavior and decisions.
3 A third role that communication plays is to help us interpret and make sense of information. This has become a particularly important role in the modern communication landscape, as information overload has become an increasingly common part of our everyday lives. Again, new media and electronic communication channels have raised the profile of this role of communication in everyday life. We can see this most clearly in news media, and the idea of agenda setting, but even the use of particular language or even images can also frame a topic or give subtle hints and clues as to how we are ‘meant’ to interpret information according to our culture.
4 This act of interpreting, of governing behavior, and even of storytelling, is of course at its heart a representation of a particular set of values and ideologies that emerge from and are part of a culture. It is very important to remember that no act of communication is ideologically neutral! Ideologies are part of our lifeworlds, part of the assumptions we make and encode into and decode out of our communication practices and behaviours, and so if we are to study communication, we need to address these ideological underpinnings.
5 That’s not to say that we always communicate thinking about these things – they are often covert, assumed and unchallenged parts of our everyday lives. But they exist, even when we think about communication on a basic uses and gratifications level. Uses and gratifications is a very simple theory you may already be familiar with at some level. It hypothesizes that audiences, and communicators in general, are active in why they seek out media and communicative exchanges. These four reasons are diversion, socialization, identity, and surveillance. We may have multiple simultaneous reasons, or we may just be bored and channel surfing. But even those decisions and positions – to be bored, to seek our diversion through television rather than another way, or to settle on a particular channel or show – reflect ideologies and social, technological, and political pressures that are so every day that we don’t even think about them anymore.
So, to recap. Communication is pervasive and an integral part of our everyday lives – we cannot imagine our world without communication. Communication serves a number of concurrent functions in society – pragmatic, normative, ideological and informational. We can approach an analysis of communication at a number of different levels – rhetorical, semiotic, phenomenological, cybernetic, socio-psychological, socio-cultural or critical. We can move between these different levels to uncover different aspects of communicative processes. But in general, it is important to remember that communication serves more than just a functional process of getting information from point A to point B. Communication also propagates what a society considers to be normal or normative behavior. It reinforces the dominant ideologies of a society, and may also create space for new ideologies to come in and challenge that dominant hegemony. We can see these ideological debates being played out as people challenge and critique existing stories and narratives that permeate and propagate through our communicative culture. We can break communication down to the level of the individual sign, or scale it up to see it play out over time across an entire culture, but communication is never ideologically neutral.
In the next section, we’ll discuss how communication fits and is a part of cultural systems.
Discussion Questions
1. Can you identify a time or situation when you are not exchanging information or meaning, and in a wider context, discuss what a world without communication might be like?
2. Find examples of each of the seven models of communication. Give reasons for your choices.
3. In the media or elsewhere, identify examples of competing ideologies that challenge an existing hegemony. Describe their context – political, commercial, social and academic etc – and give a short outline of each, including the media role in communicating the information. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/Media_Studies_101_(Media_Texthack_Team)/01%3A_Reading_Media_Texts/1.01%3A_Analysing_Texts-_Media_and_Theory.txt |
What is communication, why do we communication, how do we communicate, and to what end, are all questions we ask in the study of communication. At its most basic, communication is the exchange of information and meaning. We are constantly communicating, in a wide range of different contexts, such as with each other (interpersonal communication), with different cultural groups or subgroups (intercultural communication), or to large audiences (mass communication), just to name a few. However, to understand communication, we need to understand the place of communication in culture.
Culture as a term is widely used in academic as well as in daily speech and discourse, referring to different concepts and understandings. While the term originally stems from ancient Greek and Roman cultures (Latin: cultura) it has various dimensions today built from the different needs and uses of each field, be it anthropology, sociology or communication studies. For communication studies, we might start by defining culture as a set of learned behaviours shared by a group of people through interaction.
Cultures are not fixed, monolithic entities, but are fluid, always changing and responding to pressures and influences, such as the changing experiences of its members, or interaction with other cultures. However, to its members, the artefacts and even the existence of cultural behaviours and schemas may seem invisible or unremarkable. A culture may even have within it certain subcultures which exist within the main cultural framework of a society, but share within it specific peculiarities or modalities that also set it apart from the mainstream. These subcultures may continue to exist for many years or only a short period of time. They may die out, or may become incorporated into the mainstream as part of this ongoing evolution of culture.
While there are specific differences to each culture, generally speaking, cultures share a number of traits, such as a shared language or linguistic marker, definition of proper and improper behaviour, a notion of kinship and social relationship (i.e.: mother, friend, etc), ornamentation and art, and a notion of leadership or decision making process.
Culture and society, though similar, are different things. Cultures are defined by these learned behaviours and schemas. Societies at their simplest can be defined as groups of interacting individuals. However, it is through this interaction that individuals develop and communicate the markers of culture, and so in human societies, it is very difficult to separate out ‘culture’ and ‘society.’
And thus we come back to the role of communication within culture. The idea of culture as something that is shared means that it is vital to understand culture and communication in relation to one another. The relationship between culture and communication, in all its forms, is tightly interwoven and interlinked. We can see that communication enables the spread and reiteration of culture. Both communications and the media propagate the values and schemas of a culture through the repeated interaction and exchange enabled by the communications process.
Notice the emphasis on repeated there: it is not in single instances of communication that culture is made, but rather in the repeated exchange of information and the reinforcement of the ideals and values it embodies, all conveyed within a particular moment. One way we can think about this complex interplay is by looking at du Gay, et al (1997) notion of the circuit of culture.
The circuit of culture is a way of exploring a product of a culture as a complex object that is affected by and has an impact on a number of different aspects of that culture.
from du Gay et al 1997
Image (c) du Gay et al, 1997
It’s worth briefly going through each of these five variables on the diagram now, and then applying it to a familiar form of communication in culture. This text will return in later sections to deal more deeply with many of the idea’s that this diagram introduces.
Representation – how is the meaning conveyed to the audience, user, or co-communicator? What signs, modes and discourses help convey the meaning – not only the ‘factual’ or informational meaning, but also the social meaning. For example, what does the colour pink represent in your cultural context?
Identity – refers to how meaning is internalized by the receiver or audience. Our identity is shaped by our culture, which creates a range of viable and non-viable identity options that are presented, refined and renegotiated through our communication and exchange of cultural objects. By consuming and displaying certain communicative texts and strategies, we are both claiming certain identity positions, and simultaneously rejecting others.
Production — here refers to the production of meaning. Meaning can be produced and reproduced in a number of ways. An individual may produce meaning about themselves in the way they dress or wear their hat. Apple™ produces meaning about itself in the way they design and build the iPhone™. A terrorist organization may produce meaning about itself by making videos they put on Youtube. This act of meaning production may be unproblematic within mainstream culture, and help maintain the hegemony, the dominance of a particular set of schema or values. Alternatively, this production may challenge dominant beliefs or values in some. A pop culture example of this might have been early Lady Gaga, whose mode of dress was confrontational because it deviated from existing cultural schema about appropriate dress for someone of her class, race, gender and occupation.
Consumption – The flip side of production is consumption. Consumption of texts, whether they be an outfit, a conversation, or a pop-song, reflects cultural values and expectations – conforming to values and expectations leads to unproblematic consumption – it’s what is expected, it fits our internalized schema. Texts that do not fit this schema are confronting, challenging, even shocking. To continue to use Lady Gaga as an example, when she released a nine-minute long music video centered around a narrative of female violence, it was shocking both in terms of its format (which wasn’t standard MTV fare) and its narrative structure.
Regulation – finally, regulation refers to the forces which constrain the production, distribution, and consumption of texts. These forces may be explicit, such as the television broadcasters code of conduct, or they may be implicit, such as the blogger litmus test of ‘would you say this in front of your mother?’
Finally, linking together these areas are these arrows – the arrows are very important, because as du Gay says, none of these variables can really be considered in isolation. It would be like looking only at the tyres to try and figure out why your car isn’t running. So it is important, when considering communication within a cultural context, to remember that there are multiple factors influencing the production of text and meaning. These factors may support the text, reinforce a cultural position, or alternatively, they may challenge or confront a cultural schema.
du Gay’s model is regularly applied to analysing the interplay between communication and culture within one cultural situation. However, with the globalisation of the media and communication landscape, it is becoming increasingly important to think about the specificities of intercultural communication.
Discussion
1. How would you explain what culture is in your own words?
2. Choose a form of communication or a media text, and see if you can apply the five variables du Gay suggests to understand that example. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/Media_Studies_101_(Media_Texthack_Team)/01%3A_Reading_Media_Texts/1.02%3A_Communication_and_Culture.txt |
As mentioned in the Communication and Culture section intercultural communication generally describes communication efforts between different cultural groups or subgroups. Differences between those groups, even if they speak the same language, can create problems and make understanding each other much harder. As globalisation has brought the whole world closer together, business between different cultures happens on a daily basis. To make things run smoothly, intercultural communication skills are crucial.
Intercultural communication research mainly focuses on national comparisons and is hooked in the background of management and organizational theories. One pioneering model is the one Geert Hofstede derived in worldwide studies of different nations along certain characteristics.
Hofstede refers to culture as “the collective programming of the mind distinguishing the members of one group or category of people from others” (Hofstede, 2013). Comparing values, behaviours and organisation for different nations Hofstede developed five dimensions to classify cultural principles. Each dimension builds up between two poles who describe the idealised extremes of it.
Hofstedes original dimensions included power distance (PDI), individualism vs. collectivism (IDV), masculinity vs. femininity (MAS) and Uncertainty avoidance (UAI) (Hofstede, 2001). A fifth definition, the one of long-term vs. short-term orientation or in other words pragmatic vs. normative, was added by Micheal Bonds research in 1991, followed by the definition of indulgence vs. restraint by Michael Minkov (Hofstede 2013). In each dimension the lowest possible score is 0 and the highest is 100.
The following questions give a better understanding of the six dimensions which have been researched to a broad extent in the last couple of years:
Power distance:
• How flat are hierarchies?
• How does a culture deal with inequalities?
• Is societal influence concentrated in the hands of a few or distributed throughout the population?
• How authoritarian is a country’s organisation?
• Are communication efforts interactive?
New Zealand Score: 12
New Zealand’s low score indicates a culture with flat hierarchies and a very low power distance. Communication in organisations is interactive and rather informal.
Individualistic vs. Collectivist culture:
• Does the interest of the group or the individual matter the most?
• Are people only looking after themselves and their immediate family?
• How well are individuals integrated and networked?
New Zealand Score: 86
With the rather high score of 86 New Zealand can be described as a rather individualistic culture with people looking after themselves and their immediate families first.
Masculinity vs. Femininity:
• Which values are aimed for?
• How strong is a society following material values and success in comparison to the quality of life, interpersonal relationships and the concern for the weak?
New Zealand Score: 59
A score of 59 signalises masculinity rather then femininity. People strive to be the best they can be in work or school-related settings with the focus on winning, being proud of their achievements and success in life.
Uncertainty avoidance vs. taking risks:
• Do members of a society feel threatened by unknown situations?
• Are there attempts to control the future or do people just let it happen?
• How high is the willingness to try something new or different?
New Zealand Score: 39
With a score of 39 New Zealand can be described as a pragmatic society that deals with uncertainties in a relaxed and flexible fashion. Originality is valued. People are willing to accept new ideas, give innovative products a try and a not too averse to taking risks.
Long-term vs. short-term orientation (Pragmatic vs. normative):
• How are individuals subordinating themselves for longer term purposes?
• How are the tendencies towards short-term spending and long-term savings, perseverance and quick results?
New Zealand Score: 28
New Zealand is shown to be a normative country with a normative way of thinking. Motivation to save for the future is rather low, therefore the focus on quick results is high.
Indulgence vs. Constraint:
• How freely are hedonist drives as gratifications towards enjoying life and having fun tolerated and allowed?
• Is the gratification of needs restricted by strong social norms?
New Zealand Score: 75
A rather high score of 75 pictures New Zealand’s society indulgent. With it people tend to possess a positive attitude and a tendency towards optimism. Leisure time is regarded as important, also the ability to spend money as one likes and and to follow desires and needs to enjoy life and have fun.
As you can see in the questions above Hofstede’s model is all about comparison. National cultures and their distinct attitudes, behaviours and norms can be seen as specific through boundaries and differences in comparison to others. Although Hofstede’s model is widely accepted in organisational communication and management theory critics argue that most research is not integrated with findings from research that is not concentrating on purely economic and organisational values (Kirkman et al, 2006).
While values change with the developments of society globalization and convergence tendencies of new technologies and communication structures lead to a broader integrated international consumer culture and national values. General tendencies towards a culture of networked individualism are researched and referred to in literature (Castells 1996; Wellman 2002). Still Hofstede’s dimensions seem to be quite stable and remain over time. Changes in technology affect a lot of countries at the same time or with only a small delay and therefore make their relative position amongst the other nations rather stable as every nation shifts in the same direction.
Discussion
1. What can you say about your nation’s culture?
2. How would you classify it in terms of Hofstede’s model?
3. How do you evaluate New Zealand’s scores? Do you agree?
4. Have a look online to compare your estimation with your country’s scores!
5. Compare with other countries you know.
Alternative links
Hofstede youtube channel “Hofstede insight”: www.youtube.com/user/HOFSTEDE.../5/PVbkjobD8ao
Hofstede homepage: http://geert-hofstede.com/ and score results for New Zealand: geert-hofstede.com/new-zealand.html | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/Media_Studies_101_(Media_Texthack_Team)/01%3A_Reading_Media_Texts/1.03%3A_Intercultural_Communication.txt |
Introduction
Ferdinand de Saussure; Image source Wikimedia Commons
Semiotics is the study of signs and their meaning in society. A sign is something which can stand for something else – in other words, a sign is anything that can convey meaning. So words can be signs, drawings can be signs, photographs can be signs, even street signs can be signs. Modes of dress and style, the type of bag you have, or even where you live can also be considered signs, in that they convey meaning. This chapter will introduce the idea of signs, how they function within systems and as tools of communication, and situate signs within codes.
Signs and Signifiers
• Sign Systems
• Semiotics and Communication Processes
• Codes
1.05: Signs and Signifiers
Let’s start with a really simple example. Take a look at these three things:
by Ivan Chew is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Singapore License.
Source: Library of Congress US
These signs all ‘stand in’ for the idea of a tree. But they do so in different ways. We generally categorize signs into three types:
1. Iconic signs – icons are signs where meaning is based on similarity of appearance. So our drawing of our tree stands in for the notion of ‘tree’ based on a crude similarity of appearance.
2. Indexical signs – Indexical signs have a cause-and-effect relationship between the sign and the meaning of the sign. There is a direct link between the two. So a leaf might be an indexical sign.
3. Symbolic signs – these signs have an arbitrary or conventional link. The word tree, t-r-e-e only comes to stand in for the notion of tree because of the conventions of our language. In another convention, the symbolic sign for tree might be ‘arbor’ (German) or ‘木’ (Japanese)
In each case, the sign can be broken into two parts, the signifier and the signified. The signifier is the thing, item, or code that we ‘read’ – so, a drawing, a word, a photo. Each signifier has a signified, the idea or meaning being expressed by that signifier. Only together do they form a sign. There is often no intrinsic or direct relationship between a signifier and a signified – no signifier-signified system is ‘better’ than another. Language is flexible, constructed, and changeable. de Saussure uses the word ‘arbitrariness’ to describe this relationship.
A good example is the word ‘cool.’ If we take the spoken word ‘cool’ as a signifier, what might be the signified? In one context or situation, cool might refer to temperature. But in another, it might refer to something as ‘stylish’ or ‘popular’. The relationship between signifier and signified can change over time and in different contexts.
This is important, because signs are understood and encoded in context. As with the words ‘’cool,’ the relationship between signifier and signified is made meaningful in context. This area starts by looking at signs in isolation, but as you become more confident with semiotics, you will start to look at signs as part of a sign system.
Discussion
1. What is the relationship between a signifier and the signified?
2. What might be an example of an iconic, indexical and symbolic sign for the idea of your pet? | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/Media_Studies_101_(Media_Texthack_Team)/01%3A_Reading_Media_Texts/1.04%3A_Semiotics.txt |
We can look at signs and sign systems in three ways:
1. Semantics – this is the ‘how’ of semiotics, and is concerned with this relationship between a signified and signifier – the sign and what it stands in for.
2. Syntactics – this refers to structural relations. One structural relation in language is grammar, but syntactics in semiotics refers to the formal relationship between signs that lets them build into sign systems.
3. Pragmatics – pragmatics, according to Morris (Morris, 1938), is the relationship of sign to the person reading or understanding that sign.
To explore this, lets look at a very familiar yet very arbitrary sign system – traffic lights.
LED Traffic Lights from Wikimedia Commons, Petey21
If semantics is the ‘how’ of semiotics, concerned with the relationship between signifier and signified, how might we read semantically the traffic light? We might read red as stop, and green as go.
If syntactics is the formal relationship between signs in a sign system, then how might we read the syntax of traffic lights? We might see the relationships between red, amber, and green as three parts of a sign system that also refer to other sign systems (such as white lines on the road, or the shape of a stop sign). These sign relationship then make the structure of traffic lights as a sign system.
And finally, if pragmatics is the relationship between sign and reader, how might we pragmatically read the traffic light? If the light is red, for example, we know to stop.
The last useful concept from basic semiotics that is worth mentioning is the idea of syntactic indeterminacy (Messaris, 1994). Syntactics is the formal relationship between signs and sign systems. But as we’ve noted, sign systems are constantly changing and evolving, with the arbitrariness of the relationship between signifier and signified creating a kind of ‘wriggle room’ for meaning to change and evolve within context. This flexibility in meaning creates space where a sign that means one thing to me might mean something slightly or significantly different to you. Very savvy advertisers often exploit this syntactic indeterminacy to encourage audiences to draw their own meanings from a number of possible interpretations, or to imply rather than overtly state a message (which may turn off the ad’s target audience), as this classic New Zealand ad for ‘Instant Kiwi’ lottery products demonstrates.
We each develop different interpretations of advertisements, or any set of signs, based on our own experience, interpretation and frame of reference. One way to think about the interplay of these factors when looking at signs is to use a semiotic triangle (Ogden and Richards, 1923).
Ogden and Richards (1923) The Meaning of Meaning
There are a number of different versions of this triangle, and you will sometimes see different labels used at each of the points of the triangle (though they might be a different points, they are the same in relation to each other). But generally speaking, there are three main points to the triangle. The first point is the reference, the second is the sign (or sometimes the expression), and the third is the concept. Some versions also put in the centre of the triangle the actor or agent who makes these connections through experience.
This leads us to thinking about semiotics as part of the process of communication.
Discussion
1. Can you apply the semiotic triangle to the ‘Instant Kiwi’ ad linked to above?
2. What is the reference, symbol and thought presented within the sign system of this advert and how do they relate to each other? | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/Media_Studies_101_(Media_Texthack_Team)/01%3A_Reading_Media_Texts/1.06%3A_Sign_Systems.txt |
At this point, it is worth thinking about the two fundamental views of communication, the transmission and the ritual view, and consider how ideas of the sign play out in each.
The transmission view, which was about the functional exchange of information from sender to receiver across space, can utilize signs as a vessel for the exchange of such information. The panoply of signs that surround us are all signifiers, and thus can be seen to at least be attempting to communicate or convey information.
In a ritual view of communication, which is about the idea of culture being developed over time, ideas are seen to be circulating a culture, and again through the use of signs to facilitate the exchange of meaning. What a sign ‘means’ is often determined and refined by culture, even for indexical signs. What meanings are dominant, what symbols correlate to what ideas, is constructed by culture. Again, think of the word ‘cool’ as an example of this in action.
This brings us to the concept of codes. In all the communication you have participated and been exposed to, we have had to ‘read’ and deconstruct the signs presented in context. We all bring to bear on the act of meaning-making our understanding of that context, and prior experiences with those signs to help make sense of the message being transmitted. To continue the example of this Instant Kiwi lottery advertisement, we read that ad referring back to our own personal experiences of exam situations, as well as other media texts that have presented similiar or parallel narratives.
Signs are not presented in isolation, one at a time. We can try and isolate them to study them, but we cannot fully make sense of them without taking into account the context. Signs, how they operate and how they relate signifier to signified, take place within systems that we call codes.
Discussion Questions
1. Take this New Zealand PSA commercial as an example, and think about the codes — the prior texts and experiences and meanings — you as the reader need to bring to bear to understand the message it intends to convey.
1.08: Codes
Codes are so important to the understanding of semiotics that, if a sign does not appear to conform to a code, there is doubt that it is even a sign at all. All codes are systems, but not all systems are codes. These codes are used by both encoders and decoders of signs to help ensure that the message intended is approximate to the message received. We often use contextual cues to let us know what kinds of codes are expected or to expect – for example, an academic textbook uses words and pictures differently than a children’s storybook. They both use signs in the form of words and drawings, but how we approach understanding these signs is quite different.
Some codes, we are quite aware of. For example, iambic pentameter is a form of poetry, which is a code system in which there are certain expectations about the arrangement of word-signs in regards to both their signified/meaning (imagery) and their signifier/structure (rhythm).
Other codes are a little more subtle, and we apply them almost without being aware of it. For example, what is this?
CC-BY-SA by Bgabel @ wikimedia commons
Most people say it is Auckland, but it is more accurate to say that it is a photograph of Auckland. Photography is itself a codification of iconic and indexical symbols, but carries with it its own system of meaning making – two dimensions stand in for three, movement is frozen, time stands still. Photography is said to be a perceptual code, but one that we are so familiar with that we tend to forget it is a code and a set of signs at all.
Part of perceptual coding involves what is foregrounded and what is backgrounded (part of the coding of perception). Chandler provides us with this classic example of foreground coding. What do you see here?
http://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Facevase.png
If you are most familiar with Western visual codification systems, you may not at first see the two faces. This is because, in Western culture familiar with still images, our codification system for such images tends to code darker areas as background in relation to lighter areas (with a few exceptions, related to symmetry and balance). This is how a lot of optical illusions are made, they actually exploit a learned code for visual perception. But such codes exist to account for every type of sign there is.
So in summary, semiotics is a powerful tool for helping to understand and interpret how meaning is constructed and deconstructed in messages. It is now worth stepping back and looking at how semiotics fits into the wider social patterns and ideologies.
Discussion
1. Semiotics is the study of signs, and how these signs ‘stand in’ for anything else. These signs are interpreted and read by readers who utilize their past experience with similar signs and codes. These codes are cultural, and are learned over time and through experience, and therefore can change over time. For example, take a look at these covers and contents from classic issues of New Zealand Woman’s Weekly. What different experiences and codes do the editors expect their readers to bring to bear reading these texts? How are they different to the codes used in the modern editions of the magazine? | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/Media_Studies_101_(Media_Texthack_Team)/01%3A_Reading_Media_Texts/1.07%3A_Semiotics_and_Communication_Processes.txt |
Towards the end of the Second World War, sociologist Paul Lazarfeld added to the media effects research frame the social aspect of human agency. Rejecting the direct influence of the hypodermic needle or magic bullet theory, he introduced an intermediary between the sender of a message and the audience. This intermediary, dubbed an “opinion leader”, was usually a person of influence with greater access to information. They would be seen as an authority able to filter, interpret and explain media messages. It is the credibility of the weatherman that persuades the individual to bring along an umbrella, rather than the factual data from the meteorological department themselves. And it would be the community or religious leader expounding on the messages released by politicians that actually hold sway over the masses. The two-step flow of information paved the way for research into multi-step models.
Paletz,D.; Owen, D.;Cook, T. 21 century American Government and Politics, Chapter 7, adapted from Katz, E., Lazarsfeld, P. Personal influence (New York: The Free Press, 1995)
Another great example to explain the influence of opinion leaders is the world of fashion. Magazines play an important role in showing the trends of the coming season by passing on information from big fashion brands to a wider audience. The reader’s knowledge of next seasons fashions and trends is filtered by the magazines. While this describes a classic two-step flow of communication new technologies have changed the role of the media.
Again in the example of fashion, the magazines provide the audience with a chance to describe their likes and needs through participation in the discussion. Information is flowing in many directions through different media channels and filtering through new opinion leaders, such as fashion bloggers. Clicking through the Australian fashion blog breakfastwithaudrey and its links to other influential bloggers demonstrates how connected they are. Such referencing of each other builds a strong network of opinion leaders for the reader audience to follow.
Magazines and blogs: opinion leaders in today’s fashion industry CC-BY-SA
Interlinking might also occur between different brands, magazines and other bloggers which makes the process more complex and the flow of information more challenging to follow, especially to understand in terms of influence and power. A single user can be influenced by different sources or opinion leaders when following the trends of the season. The shaping of the user’s opinion follows a more complex pattern and flow.
Discussion
1. Pick a point of interest (other than fashion) and create a flow chart of the various sources, pathways and intermediaries that provide or filter information to any interested party. Identify any direct, two-flow and multi-flow conduits of knowledge as well as any other interesting features.
1.10: Gender and politics
Because men have been attributed a certain superiority and power over women for a long time, women have a harder time than men to have the same credibility.
A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://opentextbc.ca/mediastudies101/?p=44
1.11: Limitations of minimal effects model
Conceptually and methodologically, the minimal effects models have limitations. Much of the empirical data was gleaned from research on the media’s impact on voters during elections in the US. Using voting as the dependent variable poses problems. Chiefly, it does not measure effect accurately. While the media may not change a voter’s decision, it can still influence the voter’s support. If, after consuming the media messages, a voter is more convinced than ever, that in itself is still an effect. Sometimes, a voter’s confidence in a candidate may be weakened but not to the point of voting for the candidate’s rival and this effect (of weakened conviction) will not show up in the data. The primary method of data collection for these studies are surveys, and this has been criticised as unreliable, as the voters are required to recall and report their own vote as well as decision making process. Thus, they have to rely on their memory of what are likely to be transient moments. For example, they are unlikely to be aware of what they were thinking of when listening to a political debate or advertisement. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/Media_Studies_101_(Media_Texthack_Team)/01%3A_Reading_Media_Texts/1.09%3A_Two-step_flow_of_communication.txt |
Ideology helps us to explain how unequal and unjust social relations are maintained in society. More specifically, the concept has been central in attempts to explain how economic and social inequalities in capitalist societies are justified and appear to be normal. If capitalism only works in the interests of a small number of people, as many argue, the majority have to be convinced that the capitalist system is natural. So despite the failings of capitalism, such as economic and social inequality, exploitation of workers, and so on, ideology prohibits any alternative perspectives from being taken seriously. Theories of ideology attempt to explain why people who are disadvantaged by the capitalist system seem to make concessions for it.
We encounter ideology in situations in which unequal social relations appear to be normal and difficult to challenge. For example, ideology plays a role in how we might think about situations such as poverty, and emerges in questions such as: are the poor to blame for their poverty? Have they made bad choices? Or is poverty produced structurally by a distribution of wealth that favours an elite social class? Capitalist ideology tends to answer these questions with the view that, like everyone in society, the poor are individually responsible for their own life situation. This means that the capitalist system, which many argue works by concentrating wealth upwards into the hands of the wealthy few, is not the cause of poverty. In this example, ideology takes the form of a dominant social value: individualism. Individualism is seen as good because everyone can pursue his or her own interests, and capitalism is the only system that allows this pursuit.
Ideology has been theorised in three basic ways:
Ideology as false consciousness
In the first, ideology is understood as false consciousness. This means that belief in the system is derived from cultural messages that cover over and obscure the reality of exploitation. We could call this the ideology as ‘rose coloured glasses’ view. For example, we might enjoy owning a number of digital communication gadgets, such as smartphones, tablets, and/or Ipods. The prevailing view is that these digital devices are environmentally clean and green. However, this is far from the reality. These gadgets contain many hazardous materials, such as chromium, mercury, and cadmium. The rapid development of digital gadgets means that devices that are only two or three years old become redundant. This rapid development has produced an e-waste crisis, in which millions of tonnes of e-waste globally has found its way into landfill. In many instances, this e-waste is exported from wealthy nations to dumps in poorer nations. In this example ideology covers over this wasteful and hazardous aspect of digital gadgets, as well as the devastating health effects of the hazardous materials upon the world’s poor. Challenges to ideology, in this first sense, involve exposing the illusion with the truth.
Ideology as a set of social practices
In the second, theorised by the French political philosopher, Louis Althusser, ideology is less an illusion that is vulnerable to truth than a set of practices and ideas that are produced within social institutions such as the church, media, and the school. In this second sense, ideology doesn’t involve conscious thought and false knowledge about the social world. Instead, ideology is understood as a social mechanism that produces subject positions; this to say a place in the social world from which we live our lives. These subject positions include, for example, student, teacher, cleaner, CEO, and so on. The point is that ideology invests such subject positions with social meaning. A teacher, for instance, makes sense of their actual social position by imagining how this relates to the social world as a whole. The teacher’s imaginary can be politically conservative, conformist, reformist, or revolutionary. The point that Althusser makes is that even though our subjectivity is institutionally produced, we feel as though we are free. This is what he calls, “bourgeois ideology”. By this he means an ideology that makes us feel as though the social world is there for us to express ourselves, rather than us being mere functionaries for the system. In this second sense, ideology can never be overcome since it plays an important role in how we understand our place in the world. Progressive social change involves challenging “bourgeois ideology”, that is an ideology that equates freedom to the pursuit of financial gain, with ideologies that promote the common good.
Ideology involving beliefs and fantasies
In the third theorisation, instead of understanding ideology as a problem of knowledge or the imaginary, ideology is thought to involve our beliefs and fantasies. Ideology attempts to assemble a coherent account of the social world by focusing on one aspect of things and taking this as an account of the whole. Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, sets forth this theory. This partial construction works as an object of fantasy, and displaces the real conditions of social inequality. For Žižek, the citizenry no longer believe in the integrity of politicians or that capitalism is the most apt economic and social system, but they act as if they do believe. Ideology today has thus become cynical. The capitalist system has become the grounds for the expression of pleasure and enjoyment. Žižek includes everyday examples to demonstrate this view. Part of the purchase price for a Starbucks coffee, for instance, is donated to help poor children. Along with the product, buying a Starbucks coffee thus involves doing good, and makes the consumer feel that their purchasing produces positive benefits for others, in this case poor children. But Žižek points out that the enjoyment derived from this “ethical’ form of consumption covers over the very capitalist system that produces poverty in the first place. The point in this instance is that ideology works by investing consumption with enjoyment, and even though we know that people suffer and that there is exploitation in the world, the very system that produces this suffering remains unchallenged.
Quotes
Georg Lukács – ideology “appears, on the one hand, as something which is subjectively justified in the social and historical situation, as something which can and should be understood, i.e. as ‘right’. At the same time, objectively, it by-passes the essence of the evolution of society and fails to pinpoint it and express it adequately. That is to say, objectively, it appears as a ‘false consciousness’. On the other hand, we may see the same consciousness as something which fails subjectively to reach its self-appointed goals, while furthering and realising the objective aims of society of which it is ignorant and which it did not choose” (History and class consciousness (1971), Cambridge: MIT Press, 50).
Louis Althusser – “In a class society ideology is the relay whereby, and the element in which, the relation between men and their conditions of existence is settled to the profit of the ruling class. In a classless society ideology is the relay whereby, and the element in which, the relation between men and their condition of existence is lived to the profit of all men (For Marx (2005), London: Verso, 236)
Slavoj Žižek – “[…] we have established a new way to read the Marxian formula ‘they do not know it, but they are doing it’: the illusion is not on the side of knowledge, it is already on the side of reality itself, of what the people are doing. What they do not know is that their social reality itself, their activity, is guided by an illusion, by a fetishistic inversion. What they overlook, what they misrecognize, is not the reality but the illusion which is structuring their reality, their real social activity. They know very well how things really are, but still they are doing it as if they did not know. The illusion is therefore double: it consists in overlooking the illusion which is structuring our real, effective relationship to reality. And this overlooked, unconscious illusion is what may be called the ideological fantasy” (Mapping ideology (2012), London: Verso, 315-316).
Discussion
1. What are the ideologies that inform the role of being a student in a classroom?
2. What are the dominant ideologies (the ideologies that “everyone” accepts) about being a student?
3. Can you think of any alternative ideologies to explain that subject position (of being a student in a classroom?) | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/Media_Studies_101_(Media_Texthack_Team)/02%3A_Culture_and_Contexts/2.01%3A_Ideology.txt |
Discourses, institutions and the social power relations and intra-group tensions and agreements they represent are all very interesting in their own right. But now might be a good time to link this back to communication studies. Why should we care about discourses and institutions? Firstly, discourses and the institutions that produce and propagate them reflect the flow of power and control in society – most of the discourses that we are exposed to reflect the dominant position in society, and conflict between discourses, such as with smoking in the second half of the 20th century, reveal underlying social tensions between those dominant discourses and new and emerging discourses. So looking at discourse and institutions reveals for us who may speak, who might be silenced, and why certain groups, activities or relationships are framed in particular ways – so why might one group frame an individual to be a terrorist and another a freedom fighter could be revealed by understanding the institutional context of the speakers.
Secondly, institutions shape the communicative process. The media, particularly the commercial media, operates within institutional restrictions such as policy, copyright, and broadcast practice. Certain types of language and even types of signs are encouraged within particular institutional contexts, and other types are not. So discourses shape our communication and the types of texts we send, and how we understand the texts and messages we receive – we never communicate in a vacuum, we always bring to bear on our communications our context, our social norms, and our prior experiences.
Finally, an understanding of the discourses and their institutions that are active in a society helps us to come to terms with how communication is operating on a macro-level – so not just looking at individual texts or individual moments of communication, but communication as a whole. A good example is a classroom. If we were to look at a classroom in this way, you would need to think about the wider institution of education, the relationships and expectations it has in regard to teachers and students, and dominant discourses about knowledge and learning. Looking at the classroom this way helps to unpack the classroom-as-institution, and makes clearer the privileges and power it fosters. For example, who can speak and who must listen in a classroom is tied to these institutional relationship and supported by discourses of education that are so deeply engrained in us that many of us do not question it until we see other types of educational institutions and the types of discourses they support.
Discussion
1. What are some current discourses within the Australian, New Zealand and Pacific Regions?
2. Identify the signs and language employed in those debates and consider whether or not they are unique to the particular discourse or institution.
3. Then identify who is ‘speaking’, and who is not, and consider this information in terms of the discourse and institutional contexts.
2.03: Institutions
So what are institutions? We sometimes talk of things like banking institutions, or medical institutions, which sometimes evoke ideas of institutions as places, whereas institutions are really a mechanism of society. We create institutions as a way to govern and maintain society – they are structures that hold together social life. For example, we sometimes speak of the family as an institution. We are not referring to some discrete object when we talk about family – we are interested in the relationships that we have grouped together under the label of family. Different societies have different groupings under that label. For some, it might be the nuclear family. For other societies, it might be the extended family, or some other set of relations beyond notions of biology. What is important to remember is that each institution reflects and supports the values of the society in which it is situated.
Societies build and maintain institutions to create and perpetuate acceptable modes of behavior and interaction that help propagate and stabilize that society. In capitalist societies, banks are considered an institution in that they refer to a relationship of labour and capital. In the economic crashes of the early 21st century, banks were said to be destabilizing. This means that the relationships that form the institutions of banking were seen to be weakening, and as such, we saw a commensurate change in the notions of labour and capital, and their relationships and roles within society.
Social relations that are codified into institutions therefore have within them some measure of power. And this is where we come back to discourses. Institutions produce discourses as part of the interaction of their social relations, and these discourses reflect and reinforce the dominant ideologies that support and maintain these institutions. It is only when these discourses are challenged that we see the institutions challenged, and sometimes this leads to an institutional change which reflects the changing values in a society.
That’s a lot of looping around, so let’s take a look at an example that has a number of different communicative elements. Let’s look at smoking.
Smoking as a social issue and a personal behaviour has now entered the public health discourses. It is now related to and reflects a negative social position – smoking is seen to be socially undesirable, and these negative connotations are framed in terms of health and wellness.
This is a relatively recent change. In the first half of the 20th century, smoking occupied a different institutional position, and was part of a different set of discourses related to relaxation and social desirableness. In the immediate post-war period, smoking was seen as a masculine pursuit, and women did not smoke publicly until smoking as a sign entered into discourses around female enfranchisement and the gendering of power. With the rise of public relations, discourses of smoking as a socially acceptable activity for both men and women were constructed by the early ad men, reflecting a developing institutional idea of feminine power. They even came up with the tagline ‘torches of freedom.’ (Bernays) Smoking was a public performance of power, prestige, and luxury and so the sign of smoking became associated with such discourses.
To propagate the business of smoking (a very profitable industry) as the first negative health impacts of smoking became apparent, the discourses surrounding smoking shifted again, and we started to see the rise of the early medical and health rhetorics to counteract the negative discourses of smoking-related illnesses. So in the advertising around cigarettes from 1960 to 1990, we can see a tension between two competing institutional discourses – smoking as being good for you (social discourse) and smoking as being bad for you (medical/health discourse).
A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://opentextbc.ca/mediastudies101/?p=102
Slowly, over the decades, the smoking-as-unhealthy discourse gained dominance, and smoking shifted more fully to fit into discourses of health and social wellness as the institutional landscape around medicine, the human body and leisure were renegotiated to take into account these new relationships and the new signification of smoking cigarettes.
Now, smoking is something of a social taboo, reflecting the new dominant ideologies around smoking and the relationships that represents between smoking and health, and evoking medical discourses and symbols and language of not only ill-health, but also signifiers of shame and ostracism.
A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://opentextbc.ca/mediastudies101/?p=102
We can see similar trajectories of discourses and institutions regarding race, class and gender throughout history. Over time, as new ideologies gained social power, old institutions underwent a period of disruption, and new institutions, new sets of social relations, were built up in their place.
Discussion
1. Describe what you understand as an institution in your own words.
2. Consider the institutionalised discourse about Maori culture during history. How has it changed over the years? | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/Media_Studies_101_(Media_Texthack_Team)/02%3A_Culture_and_Contexts/2.02%3A_Discourse_Institutions_and_Power.txt |
Nearly all the communication we are exposed to or engage in conform to discursive patterns. Discourses are so ubiquitous that, if you looked it up in a dictionary, sometimes discourses are defined as ‘communication or debate.’ Yet considered critically, discourses are much more interesting and complex than that.
We can start off by thinking about discourses as a form of communication that conforms to or reflects a particular social practice or ideological position. So we can speak of legal discourses, environmental discourses, medical discourses, feminist discourses, etc. All communication conforms to at least one discourse. This is because all communication is encoded and decoded, and as such passes through institutional and ideological filters that shape how the messages are encoded and decoded. Think of it as a kind of spin we consciously or subconsciously put on any message we give off or receive. A famous and basic example of this is news coverage of an attack – do you call the attackers terrorists, or do you call them freedom fighters? Insurgents or soldiers? Broadly speaking, both pairs have similar meanings to each other, but each word conjures up different emotions, moods and tones. Each fits within a different discursive position. If you call them freedom fighters, you are aligning your coverage to the ideology of those who are attacked. If you call them terrorists, you are constructing a more oppositional discourse by evoking signs and language that evokes such ideologies.
But discourses are more than signs. They are also organizing principles that set out the boundaries between different fields and areas and positions. Discourses can also include other forms of communication beyond written and spoken language. For example, what does a white lab coat signify? If you’re in a hospital, it might be part of the discursive system of medicine; in a meatworks, it might be worn by the butcher. These discourses do not operate in isolation but are part of, produced by, and help support institutions.
Discussion Questions
1. What are discourses? Can you think of an example where there are competing discourses?
2.05: Media and Democracy
One key tenet of a liberal democracy, the dominant form of government today, is the separation of powers into the various independent branches of government, usually in the form of the legislature that makes the laws, a judiciary that interprets and applies the law and an executive that carries out the administration and operations of governing. Societies in the past were relatively small and citizens were able to engage face-to-face or via handwritten messages in their deliberation and decision-making process. As populations grew larger participation in a democracy required mediation, i.e. communication is now mediated. The earliest mass media was the newspaper, followed by the radio and television, and today, the Internet.
Because of its emerging function as a watchdog that monitors the running of the nation by exposing excesses and corruption, and holding those in power accountable, the media was regarded as the fourth estate, supplementing the three branches of government by providing checks and balances. The media also plays a more basic role as a provider of information necessary for rational debate. A healthy functioning democracy is predicated on the electorate making informed choices and this in turn rests on the quality of information that they receive. The media, as an institution, has for a long time enjoyed the position as a trusted primary source of news and information. Due to the enlarging population, it has become no longer possible for every citizen to participate directly in the democratic process. This led to the the representational form of democracy where representatives speak and act on behalf of individuals. The media, in this environment, took on the role of being a voice of the people to those in government.
This evolution of the media into a place where the public can participate in the democratic process prompted Dahlgrens (1995) to separate the mediated public sphere into four dimensions in order to understand it better. The media can be studied as an institution. Is the media independent or state owned? Do they serve the public’s interest or a narrow range of interests belonging to the owners of the media? Are government funded and government regulated media institutions used for public service or are they propaganda mouthpieces? When private corporations own the media are they furthering their own commercial interests or the public’s?
In the face of these developments, questions have also been raised about the media’s representation of the public. Because journalists, and by extension the media, are seen now as a representative of the public, questions are raised over whether there is a wide enough range of opinion to represent the public’s interests. As the media becomes increasingly commercial there are also questions about the quality of the news and information, which may be compromised when the media focus more on entertainment to retain their audiences’ attention. Entertainment is often seen as emotive and the antithesis of rational discussion. There are also concerns that the role of the citizens are now reduced to a passive observer whose only democratic function is to cast the final vote.
In the face of these developments, Dahlgren questions the general social structure that is now evolving and the role media play. What are the relationships between the public and the existing social structures? How do the newer, alternative media forms fit into the present environment? What is the relationship between them and the traditional media?
Finally, Dahlgren highlights the issues pertaining to the decline of face-to-face interaction. With the media taking over the space where people used to meet face-to-face, is the traditional social practice of people assembling together threatened? In the face of globalisation people are more dispersed. Can the media mitigate the loss of this human link? Is it essential that this human link be maintained?
Under this section democratic legitimation through the formation of publics and public opinion is discussed. This section will clarify “who is the public?” as well as an introduction of the fundamental model of Habermas’ public sphere.
Discussion
1. The last two paragraphs already draw the attention on the media’s role in democracy. What role should the media ideally play in your opinion?
2. In contrast, what role is the media fulfilling now?
Reference
Dahlgren, P. (1995). Television and the Public Sphere. London: Sage.
Dahlgren, P. (2001). The transformation of democracy. In Axford, B. & Huggins, R. (eds.). New Media and Politics. London: Sage. pp. 64-88. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/Media_Studies_101_(Media_Texthack_Team)/02%3A_Culture_and_Contexts/2.04%3A_Discourse_and_Institutions.txt |
Habermas’ definition of a public sphere is the first and founding trigger to classification attempts of the formation of public opinions and the legitimisation of state and democracy in post-war Western societies. It is widely accepted as the standard work but has also been widely challenged as the concept of the public sphere is constantly developing. To get a good grasp of general criticism and current approaches towards an up-to-date understanding of what and in which ways public opinions are shaped, general terms of the Habermasian model have to be explained.
The public sphere is seen as a domain of social life where public opinion can be formed. (Habermas, 1991, 398) It can be seen as the breeding ground, if you want. Habermas declares several aspects as vital for the public sphere. Mainly it is open to all citizens and constituted in every conversation in which individuals come together to form a public. The citizen plays the role of a private person who is not acting on behalf of a business or private interests but as one who is dealing with matters of general interest in order to form a public sphere. There is no intimidating force behind the public sphere but its citizens assemble and unite freely to express their opinions. The term of a political public sphere is introduced for public discussions about topics connected to the state and political practice. Although Habermas considers state power as ‘public power’ (ibid. 398) which is legitimized through the public in elections, the state and its forceful practices and powers are not part but are a counterpart of a public sphere where opinions are formed. Therefore public opinion has to control the state and its authority in everyday discussions, as well as through formal elections. A public sphere is the basic requirement to mediate between state and society and in an ideal situation permits democratic control of state activities. To allow discussions and the formation of a public opinion a record of state-related activities and legal actions has to be publicly accessible.
Habermas dates the formation of the terms of public sphere and public opinion back to the 18th century. Before the rise of the Bourgeoisie and the creation of bourgeois public spheres the understanding of the term ‘public’ was quite different. Before that time the representation of authority through a lord was called ‘public’ referring to the public representation lords were seen as. This public representation was merely stating their authorities before the people than for the people they governed. Although the basic concept of representation through a government or head of state remained, the attachment to aristocracy was discarded over time. By the end of the 18th century the feudal powers of church and nobility diminished paving the way for the rise of a bourgeois society in Europe. With it the meaning of the word ‘public’ changed as well. ‘Public’ no longer described the representative court of a person and their authority. It came to mean the legitimising regulations of an institutional system that held governing powers. Citizens were now subsumed under the state forming the public. (Habermas, 1991, 401)
Habermas’ liberal model of a public sphere holds a normative claim. This means, that it is describing many idealised issues , pointing towards how a public sphere should ideally be. As such it does not actually exist in modern democracies that are industrially advanced, constituted as a social-welfare state and where masses of people are supposed to form a public. It is an idealistic model of democracy which is shaped through structural changes of society that ended in a transformed understanding of the public sphere. Habermas himself had to admit that the participation of women and the inclusion of minorities is not guaranteed by his model relying on the circumstances of bourgeois society in the early 19th century. In the following interview Jürgen Habermas describes the most important results of many years of his research as well as certain limitations.
A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://opentextbc.ca/mediastudies101/?p=39
Habermas Interview uploaded by Youtube user davidmeme
Habermas and many other scholars have worked to further develop and broaden the understanding of his theories for modern societies. Other theorists and their concepts of the public sphere and related terms such as public opinion can be found in our other posts in the category of Media and Democracy.
Discussion
1. Is Habermas’ public sphere described as normative?
2. Do you think the internet changes the understanding of the public sphere as described above?
Reference
Habermas, J.(1991): “The public sphere” In Mukerji, C.; Schudson, M.(Ed.): Rethinking popular culture. Contemporary perspectives in cultural studies. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press. pp.398-404. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/Media_Studies_101_(Media_Texthack_Team)/02%3A_Culture_and_Contexts/2.06%3A_Habermas%27_Public_Sphere.txt |
Our introduction post about Media and Democracy shows that an existing public is a legitimising ‘must-have’ for democracy. Still, there are varying concepts and understandings of a public. A look at basic definitions and early adaptations of the term might help to understand what this ‘public’ is and who its members are.
One basic understanding of ‘a public’ describes it as groups of people that evolve in response to issues, which are important for the individuals concerned. These individuals are the citizens that elect the state. This early concept has been brought up by John Dewey (1927). In Dewey’s understanding the public as such comes into being when significant issues that affect them negatively arise. Only then do they band together and make themselves heard in the political process.
worldwide protests for more democracy and democratic change Puerta del Sol, Madrid, 20 May 2011, by Julio Albarran under cc-by-nc-sa
However, it needs to be noted that not everyone agrees. Two times Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Walter Lippmann in his books The Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1927) argued that it is a human tendency to view the world through “stereotypes” and thus construct an understanding of the world using partial truths. This makes them incompetent as directors of public affairs and, he contends, the modern world is too complex for ordinary citizens. Therefore the public’s opinion is unreliable, incoherent and thus irrelevant to the political process. In other words, it is practically nonexistent.
While Dewey and Lippmann had an ongoing discourse about their different understandings of the public, its existence and shape is still the centre of debate today. See also the section, Habermas’ Public Sphere.
Discussion
1. Which events in recent history provoked the formation of a public? Can you think of any in Australia or New Zealand?
2.08: Media Effects - Introduction
When 20-year-old Adam Lanza shot more than two dozen students and staff members of Sandy Hook Elementary School as well as his own mother in 2012, an old debate about the influence that violent video games has on young people was reignited. The free online game, Kindergarten Killers, a game Lanza played, was blamed: playing violent games makes you violent. But others argue that it is people with violent tendencies that are drawn to violent games. The question remains: are violent video games the cause of violent behaviour or are they merely the manifestation of violent tendencies?
This is essentially the same argument people have about media effects. Historically, it has been regarded as intuitive that media has a tremendous effect on audiences. Research has shown that establishing causation is not as easy as it seems.
A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://opentextbc.ca/mediastudies101/?p=34
By CommGAP
2.09: The Hypodermic Needle
The view that the media has the ability to mesmerise, influence and even control its audiences has its roots firmly in the early 20th century. Then new communication technology in the form of moving pictures, the gramophone and radio expanded the mass media previously occupied by newspapers.
It might be argued that the First World War was also the first war fought using the media. During a period when public opinion became crucial, the media was used to drum up morale and support, and Britain even established a Ministry of Information to produce the necessary propaganda. The Russians, Germans, Italians and Spaniards deployed similar methods of mass persuasion.
In the intervening years between the two World Wars (1918-1939) this ability of their leaders to seemingly “brainwash” citizens using the media was explained using the “hypodermic needle” (sometimes known as the “magic bullet”) model. This model was very much rooted in the dominant notion of behaviourism, most famously represented by Pavlov’s experiment where a dog was trained to salivate at the ring of a bell.
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In the hypodermic needle model, the concept of conditioning was applied to the mass audience who were seen as passive recipients of whatever message that was injected (or shot) by the media, and who can be manipulated to react in a predictable, unthinking and conditioned manner.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6YNHq1qc44
The classic case study cited to support this view is the famous radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds by Orson Welles on Halloween of 1938. In this episode of a radio drama series aired by Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), the programme was “interrupted” by an urgent announcement of a Martian invasion in progress. The realistic portrayal of the story had purportedly sparked widespread panic throughout the country, and was taken as further proof that the media had the power to control audiences. However, the lack of empirical studies led some scholars to question this model, which was based on many assumptions unsupported by research. Using the example of The War of the Worlds critics pointed out that there was no actual empirical data on how widespread the panic was and suggested that the newspapers that reported it could be exaggerating.
Discussion
1. There are many examples of wartime propaganda in New Zealand as elsewhere, but what about peace time events such as 911 and subsequent institutional responses and attempts to influence populations.
2. Do Local disasters such as bushfires in Australia and earthquakes in New Zealand present another opportunity for ‘brainwashing’ or in any way influence the local populations? Is any perceived ‘panic’ over New Zealand building construction standards driven by the media as well as political agendas, and if so, to what degree are audiences reactive or passive receivers?
3. See this account of the Forgotten Silver (New Zealand) hoax and compare it with Orson Welles and ‘The Martian landing’ of 1938. Are audiences any less gullible? | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/Media_Studies_101_(Media_Texthack_Team)/02%3A_Culture_and_Contexts/2.07%3A_Who_is_%27the_Public%27.txt |
Screen Capture from Albert Bandura film 1961, © under Youtube Standard License.
Because propaganda was again employed extensively during the Second World War, research on media effects received renewed interest by scholars who questioned its exact efficacy. In addition, alarm over the rise in violence after the war accompanied the advent of television, sparking off a moral panic.
However, establishing causation, as pointed out earlier, is extremely difficulty in media research due to the multiple factors that are present. Also most media research relies on content analysis and surveys where the subjects are asked to self-report. This has been criticised as unreliable, and at best can only establish a correlation. In order to demonstrate causation, all other factors must be controlled. Usually this can only take place under laboratory conditions and not in a real-life context where factors are complex and unpredictable. This did not prevent researchers from trying and in 1961 Albert Bandura’s controversial “Bobo doll experiment” demonstrated how, in a laboratory context, children’s behaviour can model itself on adult violence.
However, critics again pointed out that media responses in real-life are socially and culturally entrenched. Audiences actively construct meanings from the media, unlike laboratory animals. Humans also have the cognitive ability to discern and make decisions, and their prior knowledge and experiences shape these decisions. While immediate media effects, such as people carrying an umbrella after rain is forecast can be demonstrated, not everyone goes shopping after watching an advertisement. To accommodate these observations, the term media influences began to replace effects. These observations also led to two new lines of thinking: firstly, what causes audiences to respond positively to the weather forecast, and secondly, what filters audiences employ to inform their shopping decisions?
Limitations of the Minimal Effects Models
Conceptually and methodologically, the minimal effects models have limitations. Much of the empirical data was gleaned from research on the media’s impact on voters during elections in the US. Using voting as the dependent variable poses problems. Chiefly, it does not measure effect accurately. While the media may not change a voter’s decision, it can still influence the voter’s support. If, after consuming the media messages, a voter is more convinced than ever, that in itself is still an effect. Sometimes, a voter’s confidence in a candidate may be weakened but not to the point of voting for the candidate’s rival and this effect (of weakened conviction) will not show up in the data. The primary method of data collection for these studies are surveys, and this has been criticised as unreliable, as the voters are required to recall and report their own vote as well as decision making process. Thus, they have to rely on their memory of what are likely to be transient moments. For example, they are unlikely to be aware of what they were thinking of when listening to a political debate or advertisement.
Discussion
1. If, as the last paragraph suggests, audiences “have the cognitive ability to discern and make decisions, and their prior knowledge and experiences shape” their choices can you identify any examples of advertising that is directed at such a discerning audience?
2. Can you deduce why the advertiser might have chosen such a ‘minimal effects’ model of advertising in the example? | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/Media_Studies_101_(Media_Texthack_Team)/02%3A_Culture_and_Contexts/2.10%3A_Minimal_effects_models_-_the_post_WWII_years.txt |
The media can and does have a strong effect on what people think about. By highlighting certain events repeatedly, they create a sense of urgency about those issues even though this is not always an accurate reflection of reality.
Reality is what is actually happening in the world pertaining to the economy, society, politics and science. The media selectively highlights certain events and gives them prominence. The criteria for the selection depends very much on the ideology of the media editors and their vested interests. By highlighting certain events an uncritical audience will perceive and construct the mediated reality as reality. One example is the royal wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton, which mesmerised the world, including parts of the world that have no connection to the British monarchy. Discerning audiences may well ask why the wedding of two people, who are in no way related to them, is important enough to justify worldwide media attention, or indeed, how and why it might be relevant to them?
The agenda setting theory was formally developed by McCombs and Shaw (1972) when they studied the US Presidential Election of 1968. Their analysis of the news and media coverage found a strong correlation to the opinions held by the voters in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Similar findings were found in the media study surrounding the murder trial of OJ Simpson (Salwen & Driscoll, 1997) and the attempted impeachment of US President Clinton (Yioutas & Segvic, 2003).
These videos explain the agenda setting theory in detail:
A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://opentextbc.ca/mediastudies101/?p=38
From calleno16 under Standard YouTube License
A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://opentextbc.ca/mediastudies101/?p=38
From CSIxxTwee under Standard YouTube License
A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://opentextbc.ca/mediastudies101/?p=38
From MEF via emjay23 under CC License
Discussion
1. Obviously journalists cannot include everything that happens in the world on any given day in their Newspaper TV or internet news program.
2. Investigate a cross section of media sources on a given day – compare how and why the different sources choose, and then mediate, the events for their expected audience.
3. Then consider the question, are they accurately representing the importance of the issues of the day?
2.12: Uses and gratifications model
A more radical shift in focus was to move away from what impact the media has on audiences, towards investigating why or how audiences react to the media. Based on the assumption that audiences are not passive or powerless but instead exercise choice, researchers developed the uses and gratifications model. This explains the process audiences employ when deciding their response to advertisements – do they respond by shopping more, or do they ignore it? The uses and gratifications paradigm views audiences as active seekers of media that best fulfills their needs, or that reinforces their existing beliefs and interests. Using the earlier example, a person looking for a new dress will actively look out for advertisements for sales on dresses, and respond positively to them. A person with no desire for a new outfit will simply ignore the same advertisements.
The earliest researcher in this area was Herta Herzog who, in 1944, identified emotional needs, wishful thinking, and the desire to learn new things as some of the reasons people turn to the media. Later researchers built on Herzog’s work by re-categorising and expanding this set of motivators. Branston & Stafford’s research (2010, p.388) identified and summarised them into five groups:
1. cognitive: audiences make use of the media to learn.
2. affective: audiences seek out media content that satisfies their emotional needs.
3. tension release: media provides a source of relaxation to audiences.
4. personal integrative: audiences tune in to media content that helps them explore issues related to the construction of their personal identity.
5. social integrative: audiences seek out media content that explores issues of relevance to their social identity.
The importance of this model is largely that it dismisses the idea of the media as able to change people’s opinions. What it does is reinforce the status quo, where the media is satisfying audience need and desires.
Discussion
1. Think of Shortland Street and other Soap operas. What are uses and gratifications that watchers might follow?
2. Now think of TV series that you are watching regularly. Why are you watching them? Line up possible uses and gratifications.
2.13: Post-Cold War- strong effects model
In the wake of the Cold War researchers made a U-turn and revisited the idea of a strong effects model. While it was clear from earlier research that the media does not control outcomes in terms of audience action, it was undeniable that the media does indeed affect what and how people think. Two areas where there is strong evidence of media effects are:
After discussing the questions posed under Agenda Setting look at them again but in terms of the degree the particular media sources are attempting (or not) to affect audience opinion on an issue. List any reasons and observations that lead you to that point of view.
Do the same as above but in terms of Media Framing Theories. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/Media_Studies_101_(Media_Texthack_Team)/02%3A_Culture_and_Contexts/2.11%3A_Agenda_Setting.txt |
by Walljet (cc)
Framing occurs when the construction and dissemination of messages acts to highlight, emphasize or obscure some aspects of the message over others. We can do this through language via how we organize and structure information, choose signs out of a polysemic group that have overlapping denotic meaning and even appeals to wider context, and the intertext of prior experience which combines to help guide the recipient towards a particular dominant reading. Framing’s relationship to intertext and context is particularly important to underline, as framing is best seen as a cumulative process, or one in which continued exposure to a certain frame helps to guide and internalize that frame’s intended recipient response. It is often argued that framing is one of the central, if implicit, tools we bring to bear to understand complex and diverse experiences – by framing together experiences or texts that seem similar, we mentally simplify and reduce complexity and can then make decisions about what and how to engage with texts.
Both when talking specifically about frames or about language more generally, it is important to highlight that by language we don’t just mean formal spoken or written language. Any coherent symbolic system can be taken as a linguistic system. Under this broad definition one of our earlier examples, street signs and lights, collectively form a linguistic system.
Because we are exposed to consistent language systems and the frames that encompass them repeatedly, language systems and frames become landmarks, part of our day-to-day system of cues and markers that help guide us to solve problems and come to conclusions as members of a culture.
But how do frames actually work within a cultural and communicative context? Firstly, we can break framing approaches down into two broad categories, episodic and thematic framing. Just as their names suggest, episodic framing is where an issue is approached in terms of a specific event or episode. Episodic frames often position individuals in the narrative as free of any constraint or influence of society – as such, individual actions are not usually considered in terms of wider discourses or institutions.
In contrast, thematic framing approaches an issue as part of a continuing topic or theme, rooted within wide social trends or functions. Episodic and thematic frames have different approaches to an issue and can have a dramatic impact on how that issue is subsequently read and understood. Interestingly, it is argued that news media in particular tends to favour episodic over thematic frames because episodic framing better suits the constraints of broadcast and print journalism (such as a 90 second slot or 200 word articles). However, the emphasis on episodic framing means that news as a whole tends not to encourage a reading of issues that takes into account broader themes, issues, or undercurrents. These might otherwise build collectively into a more textured understanding of an issue. This is a major critique of current news systems.
A great example of this is this interview with Maori commentator Willie Jackson where he tries to position the Tuhoe leaders as “good guys” and does so using an interesting set of language and framing techniques. He positions the accused as ‘not bin Ladin’ types, evoking current global stereotypes about what a “terrorist” is, and instead tries to reframe it as part of a wider conversation about institutional racism — both thematic framing (and reframing) approaches.
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(c) maraetv under Youtube Standard License
Consider that interview (filmed for Maori tv) with this interview from 3News NZ, which isolates another of the accused, Marama Mayrick, but this time takes an episodic frame, positioning the subject, Mayrick, simply as an artist, ‘caught up’ in an event that floats in the news narrative without reference to wider contexts or issues (such as terrorism or racism).
A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://opentextbc.ca/mediastudies101/?p=31
(c) David Farrar under Youtube Standard License
Discussion
1. Identify examples of both episodic and Thematic framing in some news or general documentary media sources.
2. After examining these ask, why would they be presented in the respective manners? Is it because of something inherent in the story or does it satisfy the media presenter’s agenda? Or indeed, can you argue any other reason for the presenting style? | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/Media_Studies_101_(Media_Texthack_Team)/02%3A_Culture_and_Contexts/2.14%3A_Framing.txt |
• 3.1: Political Economies
• 3.2: Political Economies of Mass Culture
• 3.3: The Audience Commodity
Dallas Smythe (1981) is often cited as introducing a further key element to PE approaches to media, inverting the assumption central to prior approaches to PE which focussed upon meanings, messages and information as the central commodity which relates to media. Smythe instead contends that the economic relationship which is the primary driver of media as an industry is one whereby audiences – or more specifically the attentive capacities of audiences – are sold to advertisers.
• 3.4: The Propaganda Model
The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behaviour that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfil this role requires systematic propaganda. - Chomsky and Herman 1988:1
• 3.5: Political Economies of Digital media
PE led approaches to the study of digital media again fall into several distinct areas which approach the production of digital media from disparate areas. While Marxist approaches are again often central, there exist an additional series of approaches which consider the ways in which production of digital media, and of digital commodities in general depart in certain respects from other modes of information access and distribution.
• 3.6: Commons and P2P Production
This post outlines several modes of commons – types of asset which are held in collective or communal ownership rather than as private commodities owned by individuals or individual corporations.
• 3.7: Political Ecologies of Media
Considering issues which arise from the design, production and sustainability of hardware systems has traditionally been considered outside the bounds of media studies as a discipline, which situated within the humanities has been focussed upon the cultural impacts of symbols and messages, rather than exploring the ethics of mining the metals and minerals needed to make cameras and computers, tablets and telephones.
• 3.8: Technologies
One of the features which distinguish media from other types of communication, is that processes of mediation necessarily involve some form of technology. Media technologies take many forms, ranging from the technological apparatus of a pen and paper, through printing presses, film, video, radio, television to digital technologies associated with the Internet. In each case, the technologies which are used involve a complex network of elements.
• 3.9: Technology and Agency
One of the questions which has been debated within media studies since the 1960’s is the extent to which we can understand technology to be something which determines society, or whether technologies are themselves socially determined. Two important theorists who are often used to exemplify both ends of this spectrum are Marshall McLuhan and Raymond Williams.
• 3.10: Technology and the Body
• 3.11: Technology, Time, and Space
• 3.12: Technology and Politics
• 3.13: Globalization and Convergence
• 3.14: Convergence
Convergence is understood as the “flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behaviour of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want.” (Jenkins, 2006)
03: Production and Structures
What is Political Economy?
This section explores various ideas connected to the notion of political economies of media. Political economy (PE) is an approach to studying media whose focus is attenuated towards the ways in which media is produced, distributed and consumed, rather than on analysing the interpretations of the signs and symbols found within texts. The combination of the terms ‘political’ and ‘economy’ which make up PE is an explicit reference to the fact that media texts are produced within specific and historically contingent systems which are not merely an ideologically neutral form of exchange, but are conditioned by a range of complex interactions between nation states, international organisations, legal institutions and frameworks, cultural traditions and heritages, other organisations (such as media corporations), technologies, and economic pressures. In other words, PE focuses upon the ways in which politics and economics are not separate entities, as we often encounter them within educational contexts, but that economics and politics are fields which are best understood as being entangled – meaning that they are functionally inseparable – and that understanding elements of this entanglement is pivotal to understanding the way that any society and culture works. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/Media_Studies_101_(Media_Texthack_Team)/03%3A_Production_and_Structures/3.01%3A_Political_Economies.txt |
Whilst PE has been applied as a way of exploring and understanding the media since the 1960s and 70s, the ways in which it has been used can be characterised as being divided into two fairly distinct approaches which stem from roots in Europe and the USA. Within Europe, the cultural and political tradition of social(ist) democracy entailed that the model of broadcast media such as television and radio were dominated by public service broadcasters such as the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), who were state funded organisations whose services were free at the point of contact and featured no commercial advertising. Consequently, early PE approaches to broadcasting within these countries adopted a Marxist approach which was heavily focused upon the relations between political governance and the media industries, exploring ways that regulation and legislation impacted upon the media whilst also exploring the links between commercial organisations and sections of the press. By contrast, in the USA the lack of a social democratic tradition and politics saw the media organised along strictly commercial lines, which led to PE approaches to media being more focused on the economics of media ownership than their European counterparts.
CC image by Gwydion Williams
In the UK, Raymond Williams was a key figure concerned with the study of media and culture within the university system, and his writing made some important revisions to Marxism which were central to the political economy of culture. Marx’s materialism posited that the socio-economic reality of material experience and commodity production formed the base of society, whereas cultural content such as communications and media were seen as the superstructure which grew out of the base. Numerous Marxist readings of culture subsequently argued that as the economic base determines the cultural superstructure, the superstructure simply presents an ideological reflection of the base. Williams, however, contested these notions, arguing that:
We have to reevaluate determination towards the setting of limits and exertion of pressure, and away from a reflected, reproduced or specifically dependent content. And crucially, we have to revalue ‘the base’ away from the notion of a fixed economic or technological abstraction, and towards the specific activities of men in real social and economic relationships, containing fundamental contradictions and variations and therefore always in a state of dynamic process.Williams 1973 p6
3.03: The Audience Commodity
CC SA image from Wikimedia Commons
Moving from European contexts to those originating from the USA, Dallas Smythe (1981) is often cited as introducing a further key element to PE approaches to media, inverting the assumption central to prior approaches to PE which focussed upon meanings, messages and information as the central commodity which relates to media. Smythe instead contends that the economic relationship which is the primary driver of media as an industry is one whereby audiences – or more specifically the attentive capacities of audiences – are sold to advertisers.
This approach makes sense when moving to the commercialised American media context, as it sharply departs from many European countries which, until the deregulation and privatisations of neo-liberal regimes under leaders such as Margaret Thatcher during the 1980s, were dominated by public service broadcasting, in which there was often no commercial advertising as the media was funded by central governments as a public good with a mandate to both inform and entertain the public. However, when we approach contemporary global media networks, the role of public service media has generally receded, with commercial networks providing a far greater proportion of media content in countries like the UK than in the 20th Century, when there only existed a handful of television channels, and almost half the content was created in house by the BBC.
A very similar broadcasting history can be observed within the New Zealand context. Up to the 1980s the broadcasting scene, in both radio and television, was dominated by the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation, an organization very like the BBC in terms of funding, structure and monopoly power. However, its descendants, TVNZ and RNZ, are competing with commercial interests, for audience attention, funding and content, in a very different media market.
The notion of the audience commodity is useful in conceptualising the PE of media, as it further refines the boundaries of what can be understood as a commodity, but does so in a way which helps to explore exactly why and how a vast amount of contemporary media – newspapers, television, radio, and websites amongst other modes – is funded. These forms are typically free or very cheap at the point of access for the ‘consumer,’ but the economic cost of production is paid for by the insertion of advertising into the media being viewed. The media is thus not paid for by the audience (the cost of a printed newspaper comes nowhere near covering the costs of the paper, printing, journalists, designers, copy editors etc that went into the production of the newspaper, and watching television or surfing the web is usually free) but is funded by the advertisers, who are purchasing the attention of an audience. Buying advertising time during peak hours, or in a more popular newspaper, costs proportionally more precisely because the number of eyeballs the advertising reaches is enlarged.
This economic situation is also of critical relevance to the ideological context of media content. As the media is funded by commercial (primarily corporate) organisations, the materials which are produced by this system are highly unlikely to be overtly critical of corporate capitalism and consumerism. Indeed, there have been notable cases whereby advertisers have threatened to withdraw funding from television networks if particular programs are aired as they are concerned that this will negatively affect brand connotations. An example of this is highlighted in the video below, an extract from the feature-length documentary film The Corporation (dir. Joel Bakan 2004)
A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://opentextbc.ca/mediastudies101/?p=73
Discussion
1. How might we understand the phrase ‘the cost of free media’ with reference to the notion of the audience commodity? | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/Media_Studies_101_(Media_Texthack_Team)/03%3A_Production_and_Structures/3.02%3A_Political_Economies_of_Mass_Culture.txt |
Following Smythe’s exposition of the audience and Jurgen Habermas’s (1991) elucidation of mass media as providing an apparatus whereby elite sectors of society can transform the democratising potential of the public sphere, a series of leftist academic media scholars have attempted to delineate the precise methods by which the mass media operates as a distorting lens which represents the vested interests of economic elites.
Most prominent within this PE-centred approach has been the ‘propaganda model’ (PM) of mass media presented by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media (1988). Chomsky and Herman begin by proclaiming that
The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behaviour that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfil this role requires systematic propaganda. Chomsky and Herman 1988:1
3.05: Political Economies of Digital media
PE led approaches to the study of digital media again fall into several distinct areas which approach the production of digital media from disparate areas. While Marxist approaches are again often central, there exist an additional series of approaches which consider the ways in which production of digital media, and of digital commodities in general depart in certain respects from other modes of information access and distribution.
Some of the early approaches to new/digital media focused upon the ways that the increasingly widespread distribution of networked computers afforded a mode of access which was a radical departure. Previously media had been dominated by broadcast technologies and mass media generally, whereby a very small volume of individuals were entrenched within a privileged position as content creators, and were able to broadcast mediated content from centres out to the millions of citizens who could only receive media. Mass media, then can be understood as both a one-to-many model of communication as well as a one way model, as only those who work in broadcasting can produce media, whilst the vast majority of citizens can only receive information. Such a one-to-many system of communications corresponds to the model of a centralised network.
By contrast, the Internet heralded the arrival of an alternative model, in which any network user was able to connect to any other network user(s), and was able to both send and receive mediated communications. Rather than being a one-to-many mode of communication, the Internet allowed one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many forms of discourse, taking the form of a distributed network. Additionally the hierarchical restrictions to access had seemingly tumbled down, with any citizen who possessed a computer, modem and internet connection able to produce mediated content. This led to a wave of early Internet scholarship which saw the Internet as a technology which contained a vast democratising potential, realising some of the formal elements discussed by socialist theorists of media such as Bertold Brecht (1932) and Hans-Magnus Enzensburger (1970) as necessary preconditions for the formation of a democratic and participatory media and culture, negating the criticisms made by Jurgen Habermas (1991) which posit the media as a fundamentally anti-democratic mode of communication which turned active citizens into passive consumers.
Whereas mass media representation reinforced and re-inscribed the structures of representative democracies, whereby an economic and political elite who have access to the means of media production and distribution are able to disproportionately influence the majority of the populace by means of their wealth (of both power and capital), networked electronic media allegedly creates structures predicated upon non-hierarchical interactions.
Such claims have been tempered, however, by the realisation that while contemporary media technologies have greatly increased the ability of certain previously marginalised groups to effectively communicate their concerns and participate in mediated discourse, the material reality of information technology commodities within the network society, has not seen social inequalities diminish and democratic participation increase. The digital divide exists as one of many divides between the haves and have-nots in contemporary society alongside divisions in wealth, education, health care, and technical expertise. Expecting the introduction of digital communications platforms to enact a process whereby these inequalities simply dissipate in the face of the deterministic properties of new technology is a utopian fantasy. As Espen Aarseth (1997:67) reminds us:
The belief that new (and ever more complex) technologies are in and of themselves democratic is not only false but dangerous. New technology creates new opportunities, but there is no reason to believe that the increased complexity of our technological lives works toward increased equality for all subjected to the technology. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/Media_Studies_101_(Media_Texthack_Team)/03%3A_Production_and_Structures/3.04%3A_The_Propaganda_Model.txt |
This post outlines several modes of commons – types of asset which are held in collective or communal ownership rather than as private commodities owned by individuals or individual corporations.
The first mode of commons I’d like to discuss is the model of common land – what we could think of as a pre-industrial mode of commons, albeit one which still exists today through our shared ownership and access to things like air. Land which was accessible for commoners to graze cattle or sheep, or to collect firewood or cut turf for fuel. Anyone had access to this communal resource and there was no formal hierarchical management of the common land – no manager or boss who ensured that no one took too much wood or had too many sheep grazing on the land (although there did exist arable commons where lots were allocated on an annual basis). So access and ownership of this communal resource was distributed, management was horizontal rather than hierarchical, but access effectively depended upon geographical proximity to the site in question.
A second mode of commons is that of the public service, which we could conceptualise as an industrial model of commonwealth. For example consider the example of the National Health Service in the UK: unlike common land, this was a public service designed to operate on a national scale, for the common good of the approximately 50 million inhabitants of the UK. In order to manage such a large scale, industrial operation, logic dictated that a strict chain of managerial hierarchy be established to run and maintain the health service – simply leaving the British population to self-organise the health service would undoubtedly have been disastrous.
This appear to be a case which supports the logic later espoused by Garret Hardin in his famed 1968 essay the Tragedy of the Commons, whereby Hardin, an American ecologist forcefully argued that the model of the commons could only be successful in relatively small-scale endeavours, and that within industrial society this would inevitably lead to ruin, as individuals sought to maximise their own benefit, whilst overburdening the communal resource. Interestingly, Hardin’s central concern was actually overpopulation, and he argued in the essay that ‘The only way we can preserve and nurture other, more precious freedoms, is by relinquishing the freedom to breed.’ Years later he would suggest that it was morally wrong to give aid to famine victims in Ethiopia as this simply encouraged overpopulation.
More recent developments, however, have shown quite conclusively that Hardin was wrong: the model of the commons is not doomed to failure in large-scale projects. In part this is due to the fact that Hardin’s model of the commons was predicated on a complete absence of rules – it was not a communally managed asset, but a free-for-all, and partially this can be understood as a result of the evolution of information processing technologies which have revolutionised the ways in which distributed access, project management and self-organisation can occur. This contemporary mode of the commons, described by Yochai Benler and others as commons-led peer production, or by other proponents simply as peer-to-peer(P2P) resembles aspects of the distributed and horizontal access characteristic of pre-modern commons, but allows access to these projects on a non-local scale.
Emblematic of P2P process has been the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and Creative Commons movement (this textbook being an example of the latter). FOSS projects often include thousands of workers who cooperate on making a piece of software which is then made readily available as a form of digital commons, unlike proprietary software which seeks to reduce access to a good whose cost of reproduction is effectively zero. In addition to the software itself, the source code of the program is made available, crucially meaning that others can examine, explore, alter and improve upon existing versions of FOSS. Popular examples of FOSS include WordPress – which is now used to create most new websites (including this one!) as it allows users with little technical coding ability to create complex and stylish participatory websites – the web browsers Firefox and Chrome, and the combination of Apache (web server software) and Linux (operating system) which together form the back end for most of the servers which host World Wide Web content.
What is really interesting, is that in each of these cases, a commons-led approach has been able to economically out-compete proprietary alternatives – which in each case have had huge sums of money invested into them. The prevailing economic logic throughout industrial culture – that hierarchically organised private companies were most effective and efficient at generating reliable and functional goods was shown to be wrong. A further example which highlights this is Wikipedia, the online open-access encyclopaedia which according to research is not only the largest repository of encyclopaedic knowledge, but for scientific and mathematical subjects is the most detailed and accurate. Had you said 15 years ago that a disparate group of individuals who freely cooperated in their free time over the Internet and evolved community guidelines for moderating content which anyone could alter, would be able to create a more accurate and detailed informational resource than a well-funded established professional company (say Encyclopaedia Britannica) most economists would have laughed. But again, the ability of people to self-organise over the Internet based on their own understanding of their interests and competencies has been shown to be a tremendously powerful way of organising.
Of course there are various attempts to integrate this type of crowd-sourced P2P model into new forms of capitalism – it would be foolish to think that powerful economic actors would simply ignore the hyper-productive aspects of P2P. But for people interested in commons and alternative ways of organising, a lot can be taken from the successes of FOSS and creative commons.
Now where some this gets really interesting, is in the current moves towards Open Source Hardware (OSH), what is sometimes referred to as maker culture, where we move from simply talking about software, or digital content which can be entirely shared over telecommunications networks. OSH is where the design information for various kinds of device are shared. Key amongst these are 3D printers, things like RepRap, an OSH project to design a machine allowing individuals to print their own 3D objects. Users simply download 3D Computer-Assisted-Design (CAD) files, which they can then customise if they wish, before hitting a print button – just as they would print a word document, but the information is sent to a 3D rather than 2D printer. Rather than relying on a complex globalised network whereby manufacturing largely occurs in China, this empowers people to start making a great deal of things themselves. It reduces reliance on big companies to provide the products that people require in day-to-day life and so presents a glimpse of a nascent future in which most things are made locally, using a freely available design commons. Rather than relying on economies of scale, this postulates a system of self-production which could offer a functional alternative which would have notable positive social and ecological ramifications.
Under the current economic situation though, people who contribute to these communities alongside other forms of commons are often not rewarded for the work they put into things, and so have to sell their labour power elsewhere in order to make ends meet financially. Indeed, this isn’t new, capitalism has always been especially bad at remunerating people who do various kinds of work which is absolutely crucial the the functioning of a society – with domestic work and raising children being the prime example. So the question is, how could this be changed so as to reward people for contributing to cultural, digital and other forms of commons?
One possible answer which has attracted a lot of commentary is the notion of a universal basic income. Here the idea is that as all citizens are understood to actively contribute to society via their participation in the commons, everyone should receive sufficient income to subsist – to pay rent, bills, feed themselves and their dependants, alongside having access to education, health care and some form of information technology. This basic income could be supplemented through additional work – and it is likely that most people would choose to do this (not many people enjoy scraping by with the bare minimum) – however, if individuals wanted to focus on assisting sick relatives, contributing to FOSS projects or helping out at a local food growing cooperative they would be empowered to do so without the fear of financial ruin. As an idea it’s something that has attracted interest and support from a spectrum including post-Marxists such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri through to liberals such as the British Green Party [see also NZ Green Party work and employment policy].
For more details on P2P check out the Peer to Peer Foundation which hosts a broad array of excellent articles on the subject.
Discussion:
1. What kinds of commons exist within New Zealand?
2. What kinds of benefits apart from efficiency might we associate with P2P models?
3. What does the emergence of P2P production say about the relationship between economics, society and technology? | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/Media_Studies_101_(Media_Texthack_Team)/03%3A_Production_and_Structures/3.06%3A_Commons_and_P2P_Production.txt |
At the outset of this chapter, we defined political economy as the study of production, and subsequently considered what it means to study the production of media. Then we looked at how production reveals a set of political relationships which are far from ideologically neutral by looking at a range of issues pertaining to ownership, intellectual property, relationships to government, and funding mechanism. This was especially via advertising, and we considered in some detail how these factors can be understood to influence the content and messages commonly encountered within media texts. However, understanding the production of media and the political issues which arise from media to be limited to the ways in which meanings are generated by the texts which can be thought of as the outputs of media, neglects what could be considered a range of ethical and political issues which relate to the production, consumption and disposal of the technologies which are necessary for media systems to function.
Considering issues which arise from the design, production and sustainability of hardware systems has traditionally been considered outside the bounds of media studies as a discipline, which situated within the humanities has been focussed upon the cultural impacts of symbols and messages, rather than exploring the ethics of mining the metals and minerals needed to make cameras and computers, tablets and telephones. Indeed, early approaches to media and ecology explicitly stated that their goal was:
To make people more conscious of the fact that human beings live in two different kinds of environments. One is the natural environment and consists of things like air, trees, rivers, and caterpillars. The other is the media environment, which consists of language, numbers, images, holograms, and all of the other symbols, techniques, and machinery that make us what we are. Postman 2000:11
3.08: Technologies
Introduction
One of the features which distinguish media from other types of communication, is that processes of mediation necessarily involve some form of technology. Media technologies take many forms, ranging from the technological apparatus of a pen and paper, through printing presses, film, video, radio, television to digital technologies associated with the Internet. In each case, the technologies which are used involve a complex network of elements, whose role within the process of mediated communication has been a source of debate and contestation within media and cultural studies.
This chapter outlines a number of the debates which are central to thinking about technology and mediation, with each section exploring a different area within these debates. Central questions which will be considered from a number of perspectives will include: Can technology be considered an active agent, or are technology’s impacts a result of the ways they are designed, implemented and legislated around? How does technology shape our perceptions of what it means to be human? What is the relationship between technology and the human body? What kinds of roles might technologies and processes of mediation play in constructions of time and space? Finally we will consider what kinds of relationship exist between technologies and politics?
3.09: Technology and Agency
CC BY NC SA Luis Pabón
One of the questions which has been debated within media studies since the 1960’s is the extent to which we can understand technology to be something which determines society, or whether technologies are themselves socially determined. Two important theorists who are often used to exemplify both ends of this spectrum are Marshall McLuhan and Raymond Williams.
CC Author Unknown
McLuhan was a Canadian theorist of media and technology who rose to prominence in the 1960s following the publication of Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, in which McLuhan argued that the vast majority of previous works which explored media effectively missed the point. Whereas traditional explorations of media considered the ways that content and production are shaped by ideological factors, which then condition the readings and meanings of texts, McLuhan argued that this focus upon the content of media was entirely misplaced, as the primary meaning or effect of ‘any medium or technology, is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs’ (1964:16). This leads to McLuhan’s famous declaration that the ‘message is the medium’ and that ‘our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how it is used that counts,’ is merely ‘the numb stance of the technological idiot.’ (1964:26)
McLuhan argued that media and technologies in general were used by humans to extend their bodily capabilities into the environment, with different technologies augmenting the capacities of different sensory organs. For example McLuhan argues that the phonetic alphabet and subsequent technologies surrounding the printing press extended human vision, whilst numbing hearing as communication which had previously been verbal and involved listening had become based upon reading and sight. McLuhan additionally argues that the printing press, and the mode of standardising writing which it introduced was responsible for the rise of nationalism and centralised mode of governance and social organisation. This McLuhan contrasts with electric technologies, which he contends extends the human nervous system, and is necessarily decentralising. McLuhan’s insistence that particular technologies necessarily have specific impacts which are direct results of their form exemplify a type of thought which is described as technological determinism – as the technology is said to directly determine society. The link below is to McLuhan’s seminal Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, and the first chapter provides a useful introduction to his influential mode of thought.
Marshall McLuhan – Understanding Media pp1-22 monoskop.org/images/4/47/McLu...ons_of_Man.pdf
While McLuhan’s statements were initially very well received within both academia and popular culture, his arguments were subsequently critiqued by a range of scholars, the best known of which is the British cultural and literary theorist Raymond Williams.
CC Gwydion Madawc Williams
Williams writes from a Marxist position which is concerned with understanding the power relations which are implicit within forms of mediation, and how these power relations promote particular forms of social relationship which tend to support dominant ideological formations within society. Consequently, Williams was highly dismissive of McLuhan’s notion that the ways that media are used is unimportant, arguing that:
The technical abstractions in their unnoticed projections into the social world, have the effect of cancelling all attention to existing and developing (and already challenged) social institutions If the effect of the medium is the same, whoever controls or uses it then we can forget ordinary political and cultural argument and let the technology run itself’ (1974:131).
This would seem to resonate with how we think about media, whereby readers of the Australian tend to have a different understanding of politically charged issues such as climate change to people who get their news from ABC, and consequently are likely to act in very different ways as a result of their different understandings of the issue.If the technology itself was the primary message, then the differences in content which have been shown by empirical studies (eg Philo and Berry 2004) to affect whether or not people will support actions as important as overseas military interventions, are somehow relatively unimportant. Consequently Williams accuses McLuhan of reducing the effects of the social uses of technology which is designed, implemented, regulated and used in differing ways which have a multitude of impacts, to a simple technological essentialism which effectively ratifies the existing political system, as the crucial motor of social change is not human actions, but technological usage. In contrast to McLuhan’s technological determinism, Williams position can be understood as social constructivism, whereby the impacts of technologies are socially and culturally constructed by the ways in which they are employed by humans. The link below presents Williams’s extended critique of McLuhan.
Raymond Williams – The Technology and the Society pp1-23 www.qiu.ir/Files/110/Document...34a985994e.pdf
Whilst Williams’s argument was largely seen to have refuted the claims of technological determinism within media and cultural studies, the societal shifts surrounding digital technologies and networked computing from the 1980’s onwards have somewhat revitalised some of McLuhan’s claims. The technological changes seemed to be creating some of the types of shift in terms of how we experience time and space. McLuhan was named the patron saint of Wired magazine, a publication which explores various issues surrounding digital technologies from a pro-technology and pro-capitalist perspective.
The issue with the straightforward determinism which McLuhan presented, however, was the claim that ‘electricity does not centralise but decentralises’ (McLuhan 1964:55)This was obviously not true in cases such as the use of national electricity grids or nuclear power stations.The simple deterministic consequences which McLuhan ascribes to particular technologies are overly simplistic, just as Williams’s (1974:133) claim that ‘We must reject technological determinism in all its forms’ is equally an over-simplification. Recently there have been a range of approaches which attempt to construct alternative understandings of technology which suggest a form of soft determinism, whereby technology impacts and affects society, whilst society simultaneously affects and shapes technology (Bennett 2011, Terranova 2004, Steigler 1998, Braidotti 2013) Below is a link to Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social, a text which introduces the approach of Actor-Network Theory (ANT), which is a good example of a soft determinism.
Bruno Latour – Reassembling the Social, Introduction pp1-17 dss-edit.com/plu/Latour_Reassembling.pdf
In this section we have explored a number of theories which explore the relationships between that technology and agency, considering viewpoints which asks whether or to what extent technology and technological changes can be said to construct or determine society, and conversely exploring the range of ways that societies determine technologies. We finished by thinking about how some contemporary approaches have argued that technology and society are mutually co-constitutive, meaning that technology and society cannot be functionally separated and evolve together.
Discussion
1. Do you agree with McLuhan or Williams on the subject of technological determinism?
2. Do you think that technologies which have emerged during your lifetime, such as smartphones and tablets have changed the way that you live? | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/Media_Studies_101_(Media_Texthack_Team)/03%3A_Production_and_Structures/3.07%3A_Political_Ecologies_of_Media.txt |
CC BY Surian Soosay
A second body of literature surrounding technology and mediation relates to the ways in which technology can be understood to relate to the human body. As we saw in the previous section, one way that this relationship has been theorised is Marshall McLuhan’s argument that technology extends the human body into the environment. This approach assumes that that was an essential human body which pre-exists technological relations, which can then be extended through technological prosthesis. The three approaches to technology and the body can be understood as challenging this assumption that being human can be separated from being technological, suggesting in quite different ways that humans and technology cannot be separated, and that being human is also about being technological.
This is quite different from the type of thought which has largely dominated Western philosophical thought for hundreds of years, in which nature, culture, humans and technology are understood as being incommensurate with one another. Inspired by the findings of the science of cybernetics and related systems theories such as chaos and complexity theory, writers like Donna Haraway, and artists such as Stelarc have explored how the couplings of contemporary technologies and the body break down the barriers between nature and culture, human and technology. The links below lead to Stelarc’s online catalogue of performance art projects which visually and conceptually engage with a series of issues surrounding technology and body. The interview with Haraway presents some of the conceptual work around her notion that by the 1980s we had all become cyborgs – part human part machine – and how this alters our understandings of how technology and ethics can be approached.
Stelarc – Projects http://stelarc.org/?catID=20247
You Are Cyborg – An Interview with Donna Haraway http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.02/ffharaway_pr.html
Whilst Haraway and Stelarc provide ways of thinking about how technologies are incorporated into the body, there has been considerable interest recently in the emerging field of biotechnology, in which bodies are not merely augmented through technologies, but are instead modified and mediated at the design stage. Whilst you may be familiar with some of the debates surrounding the use of genetically modified food or the ethics of cloning, the two videos below demonstrate two different perspectives on contemporary usages of biotechnology. Ray Kurzweil provides an optimistic perspective on the variety of ways that biotechnology could be used to enhance various relationships, whilst Paul Root Wolpe examines some of the ethical quandaries which are raised through the possibilities which biotechnologies offers, questions which are going to become increasingly relevant as the technologies mature.
An interactive or media element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://opentextbc.ca/mediastudies101/?p=60
CC BY TED
A final area surrounding technology and the body which has recently gained a lot of coverage in both academic writing and mainstream media, surrounds cognitive neuroscience and in particular the phenomena of neuroplasticity. It is now known that the human brain develops neural pathways according to the type of environment in which it exists. Humans are born with far more synaptic pathways than they will have as adults, as through a process called synaptogenesis the pathways which are not used disappear, whilst those which are used are strengthened. Whilst the traditional debate surrounding humans tended to oppose nature and nurture, we now know that human ‘nature’ is to be plastic, malleable and adaptable to the type of environment in which we find ourselves.
As the texts below from N Katherine Hayles and Nicholas Carr argue, a huge part of contemporary life is experienced through technological mediation. For example it is often thought that children today spend far more time with various forms of media than they do learning from their parents. Consequently, there have been a range of discussions considering what the implications are of this understanding that our relationships with our environment and technologies are altering the wiring of our brains. Both Hayles and Carr suggest that forms of attention are being modified through this process, and that broadly this can be characterised as a shift from sustained and deep engagement with singular texts to a shallow engagement with multiple forms of media, which Hayles terms hyper attention, and connects with the rise in cases of attention deficit disorder.
Nichols Carr – The Web Shatters Focus & Rewires Brains www.wired.com/magazine/2010/05/ff_nicholas_carr/
N Katherine Hayles – Deep and Hyper Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes engl449_spring2010_01.commons.../11/hayles.pdf
Finally, this short video from the conference Paying Attention: Digital Media Cultures and Generational responsibilities highlights a range of ways that contemporary academics theorise the relationship between media technologies, neuroplasticity and economies of attention[S1] .
An interactive or media element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://opentextbc.ca/mediastudies101/?p=60
Paying Attention – A conference concerning the Attention Economy from DCRC on Vimeo.
Video From Vimeo BY DCRC
Discussion
1. List some ways that technologies have impacted upon your body, or the bodies of people that you know
2. Consider what these changes have meant in terms of those people’s capabilities – how have their lives been changed?
3. Do you agree with Donna Haraway’s aim that we are all cyborgs (part biological part technology)?
4. If technology can change our bodies and shape our identities, what does this say about what it means to be human, or about human nature?
3.11: Technology Time and Space
There is a long history exploring the relationship between technology and the ways that people experience time and space. Early theorists to explore this relationship include French philosopher Henri Bergson and German sociologist Georg Simmel. Writing at the start of the 20th Century, Simmel was particularly taken by how the invention of the pocketwatch was crucial to the structuring of time within the newly industrialised cities, how the pocketwatch had allowed time to be quantified in a far more precise way than previous technologies, and how this had ramifications for the emerging industrial economy. In a famous essay entitled The Metropolis and Mental Life, Simmel writes:
If all clocks and watches in Berlin would suddenly go wrong in different ways, even if only by one hour, all economic life and communication of the city would be disrupted for a long time. In addition an apparently mere external factor: long distances, would make all waiting and broken appointments result in an ill-afforded waste of time. Thus, the technique of metropolitan life is unimaginable without the most punctual integration of all activities and mutual relations into a stable and impersonal time schedule. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/Media_Studies_101_(Media_Texthack_Team)/03%3A_Production_and_Structures/3.10%3A_Technology_and_the_Body.txt |
We are frequently exposed to claims that the contemporary media ecology is one in which audiences have been liberated from the passive age of mass media in which media consumption meant sitting down whilst watching and/or listening to material made by professional filmmakers, journalists and television broadcasters. In place of this passive mode of spectatorship, we are told that networked digital media turns audiences into prosumers; a portmanteau of producer and consumer which captures the notion that today’s audiences are allegedly active participants within an interactive digital convergence culture.
Attached to these claims often come arguments that these qualities of interactivity and participation have made contemporary societies more democratic, accountable and open places, that is to say that digital technologies are proclaimed to have a profound effect upon politics. But how do we quantify these claims? What kinds of evidence exists that supports and contradicts these ideas, and what critiques exist which suggest that these claims might be ideologically motivated? This section seeks to introduce some historical and contemporary thought surrounding technology and politics so that we can begin to approach some of these questions.
As we have seen elsewhere in this book, there have been a plethora of ways that media and politics have been historically explored with regards to issues such as Ideology, Discourse, media effects, and the public sphere. Understanding technology’s role in politics also means contemplating technology and agency – considering how and if technology acts as actant capable of setting limits and exerting pressures upon socio-political formation.
In contrast to Jurgen Habermas’s claims that the mass media necessarily entailed the corruption of a public sphere informed by democratic debate, an argument was advanced in various forms at different times by Marxist theorists of media such as Bertold Brecht and Hans Magnus Enzensberger , and which suggested that the issue at hand was the type of technological assemblage available. Brecht explores the notion of political potentials which would be brought forth by a future form of the radio as a two-way mode of communication, which allowed the audience to speak back to the program, and therefore creating a participatory debate rather than a unilateral broadcast. Writing in the 1970s Enzensberger outlines a hypothetical communication network based on reversible circuits rather than centre to periphery broadcasting which would be a minimum precondition (although by no means an ensuring condition) of a socialist rather than a capitalist media structure.
Consequently, when the Internet and the World Wide Web were nascent technologies in the 1980s and 1990s respectively, there was a strand of neo-Frankfurt School media analysis which argued that this new model of many-to-many communication (as opposed to the one-to-many model of broadcast media) would facilitate democratic debate through interactivity and participation, and construct a form of mediated public sphere.
Computers are a potentially democratic technology. While broadcast communication tends to be one-way and unidirectional, computer communication is bi- or omni-directional. Where TV-watching is often passive, computer involvement can be interactive and participatory. Individuals can use computers to send email to communicate with other individuals, or can directly communicate via modems which use the telephone to link individuals with each other in interactive networks. Modems can tap into community bulletin boards, web sites, computer conference sites, or chat rooms, that make possible a new type of interactive public communication. Democracy involves democratic participation and debate as well as voting. In the Big Media Age, most people were kept out of democratic discussion and were rendered by broadcast technologies passive consumers of infotainment. Access to media was controlled by big corporations and a limited range of voices and views were allowed to circulate.
In the Internet Age, everyone with access to a computer, modem, and Internet service can participate in discussion and debate, empowering large numbers of individuals and groups kept out of the democratic dialogue during the Big Media Age. Consequently, a technopolitics can unfold in the new public spheres of cyberspace and provide a supplement, though not a replacement, for intervening in face-to-face public debate and discussion. For instance, many computer bulletin boards and web sites have a political debate conference where individuals can type in their opinions and other individuals can read them and if they wish respond. Other sites have live real-time chat rooms where people can meet and interact. These forms of cyberdemocracy constitute a new form of public dialogue and interaction, and take place in new public spheres, thus expanding our conception of democracy. Douglas Kellner: Techno-Politics, New Technologies and the New Public Spheres http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/Illumina%20Folder/kell32.htm
A similar perspective on the potential for the Internet to form new public spheres can be found in Mark Poster’s interview with Wired magazine about the potential of the Internet to become a new public sphere.
An early activist attempt to create a communication infrastructure along these principles was Indymedia , [see also Aotearoa Indymedia] a movement which grew alongside the anti-globalisation/alter-globalisation movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Angered and frustrated by the corporate media’s reporting of large scale protests and political events, whereby the perspectives of governments, police forces and corporations were regularly presented whilst those of the protesters themselves were rarely heard, an international community of media activists worked on creating a system that would allow people to post news to Indymedia websites themselves. Whilst this sounds somewhat mundane and ordinary now, only 15 years ago, the notion that news could be written by regular people rather than professional journalists was seen as a radical political gesture. Within a few years there were Indymedia collectives and websites in over 150 different countries spread across the globe and the idea that news was something which could be produced by citizens as well as journalists had taken off.
Indymedia, as an organisation formed along anarchist/autonomist lines, with an anti-hierarchical series of Principles of Unity, was hugely successful within activist circles. However, the lack of formal organisation often proved a handicap in making the platform more mainstream. As time went by, there were an increasing number of commercial platforms which enabled users to create their own news on sites like Blogger,Livejournal and WordPress. Unlike Indymedia these sites were not overtly political, but allowed users to curate their own sites or blogs on any topic they wished, and allowed users considerable control over the look, feel and function of their site without requiring the knowledge of any HTML or CSS (the languages used to write content and styles for web pages). Consequently, as the 2000s went on, user generated content moved away from being a radical political act, and became increasingly integrated into the ways that news and media are generated. Commercial outlets such as The Guardian or Stuff.co.nz’s Stuff Nation incorporated user generated stories and comments into online platforms. Major UGC platforms such as Youtube and Blogger have been bought by larger corporations such as Google, and other platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have become multi-billion dollar corporations.
This could be understood as a case of what Brian Winston has described as the law of the suppression of radical potential, whereby the potential to create radically new socio-political relations inherent within new technologies are constrained and suppressed by the range of pre-existing institutions and conventions. These effectively work to re-integrate the technology into an altered but not radically transformed society. Consequently, we can understand that the rise of user generated content and citizen journalism has in numerous cases provided mechanisms for previously marginalised and unheard voices to be heard by millions, in some cases bringing about notable changes.
For example, during the G20 protests in London, Ian Tomlinson, a man unconnected to the protests died whilst walking home from work. The initial police account maintained that there had been no contact between Tomlinson and the riot police, and that an autopsy showed that he died of a heart attack. Four days later, it emerged that a witness had video footage showing Tomlinson suffering an unprovoked assaulted by a police officer, and falling violently to the ground. He walked away, but then later collapsed and died. A subsequent second autopsy revealed that Tomlinson died from internal bleeding. Had there not been the widespread diffusion of video cameras amongst the population, this evidence would not have been captured, and the initial (and factually inaccurate) police account would have stood.
However, whilst this and other examples can demonstrate how the diffusion of media production and publishing tools has made a tangible difference, the dominant modes of UGC and social media are far from the non-hierarchical and non-commercial model that Indymedia sought to introduce. Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Pintrest and Instagram are all commercial entities which exist to make a profit through collating user data which is willingly uploaded as content, and using this to sell highly targeted advertising. Whilst they evidence a departure from tradition media corporations, they have the same economic imperative and so the radical potential of the Internet – to provide a decentralised, non-commerical model of community-orientated communication – is suppressed and re-integrated into capitalism. As Jodi Dean powerfully argues, it can instead be considered an expression of neoliberal capitalism, whose emphasis on being an individual consumer (rather than part of a homogenised mass culture) mirrors the activity found within social media.
A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://opentextbc.ca/mediastudies101/?p=42
Dean’s arguments about communicative capitalism (a term she applies to describe contemporary capitalism) are a huge departure from much of the cyber-utopian discourse which is regularly heard from places such as TED, Wired and mainstream media accounts of technology and politics. There we are more likely to hear that interactive technology has made society more open, accountable and democratic. That networked technology has made society a better, more connected and more enjoyable place for people to live in, rather than being used to maintain material inequalities and relations characterised by exploitation, immiseration and unsustainability. Typical of this type of pro-technology argument is Clay Shirky’s work around social media as seen in the video below.
An interactive or media element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://opentextbc.ca/mediastudies101/?p=42
Shirky’s position contrasts sharply with that of Evgeny Morozov, who explores ways that the technologies which Shirky evangelises about are used by governments around the world as tools for surveillance and spying upon their populations and others spread across the world. Indeed, the disclosures in 2013 from Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee who leaked a cache of top secret documents to the Guardian newspaper and fled the US as he felt morally compelled to inform the world about the extent of the US National Security Agency’s online surveillance apparatus. There are undoubtedly elements of social media and user generated content which support democracy and allow democratic debate to emerge. However, these positive elements are regularly embellished and over-emphasised, as Morozov demonstrates in this extract which explores the use of social media in the failed Iranian revolution in 2009, which was dubbed the Twitter revolution in the West:
This was globalization at its worst: A simple email based on the premise that Twitter mattered in Iran, sent by an American diplomat in Washington to an American company in San Francisco, triggered a worldwide Internet panic and politicized all online activity, painting it in bright revolutionary colors and threatening to tighten online spaces and opportunities that were previously unregulated. Instead of finding ways to establish long-term relationships with Iranian bloggers and use their work to quietly push for social, cultural, and—at some distant point in the future—maybe even political change, the American foreign policy establishment went on the record and pronounced them to be more dangerous than Lenin and Che Guevara combined. As a result, many of these “dangerous revolutionaries” were jailed, many more were put under secret surveillance, and those poor Iranian activists who happened to be attending Internet trainings funded by the U.S. State Department during the election could not return home and had to apply for asylum. Evgeny Morozov – The Google Doctrine www.publicaffairsbooks.com/morozovch1.pdf
Consequently, we can see that there are a range of competing discourses surrounding (media) technology and politics. These range from claims that new technologies transform politics in ways that form more participatory, democratic and just societies, to those which see technologies as tools which are employed to continue centuries of exploitation and inequality.
Discussion:
1. What kinds of technologies can you think of that might enhance democratic participation?
2. What kinds of technologies can you think of that might inhibit democratic participation?
3. What relations do you think exist between participatory media and democracy?
3.13: Globalization and Convergence
Clocks by futureatlas.com/blog/
The Chinese takeaways at a corner of campus, the international aisle in the supermarket, American music imports in national charts, international experience in Europe, a term abroad in South America. It seems like the whole world is moving towards you and just waiting around the corner? Welcome to the benefits of globalisation. With activities focussed on international cooperation and relationships the world is becoming smaller as well as tightly interconnected. Convergence in general and also more specific in the media sector is one of the many effects assign to the globalisation.
3.14: Convergence
Convergence is understood as the “flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behaviour of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want.” (Jenkins, 2006)
So what is it when we are talking about media convergence. First of all, convergence implies changes. These changes can appear within the media system or society affecting the channels and the way information is shared and presented. In a convergence culture one news story or a single piece of information is shared through various channels and across multiple media platforms. Multiple aspects of a topic are revealed in this way as different media types concentrate on different aspects and bring different facets to life.
The term convergence does not only refer to an idealized way of sharing information with a highly engaged and participating audience who shape the information to their own needs. It also refers to motions of concentration and economization within certain branches of the media industry. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/Media_Studies_101_(Media_Texthack_Team)/03%3A_Production_and_Structures/3.12%3A_Technology_and_Politics.txt |
• 4.1: Audiences and Audience Research
This section discusses the different ways we think about receivers, audiences, and users, and how communication and media scholars might approach thinking about and studying audiences. It is worth breaking these concepts down into separate components to try to understand them. However, these concepts are artificial constructs, and the line between receivers, users, and audiences is becoming increasingly soft and blurred and they may have faded in their usefulness.
• 4.2: Researching Audiences
Audience studies have been around as long as there has been commercial mass media – producers needed to prove to potential advertisers that their message was received by a certain number (and later on, a certain type) of people. As such, audience research has ties to ideas about consumer culture. But as metrics and other ways of gathering information grew more sophisticated the demographics continued to be refined.
• 4.3: Consumer Cultures
The term consumer cultures refers to a theory according to which modern human society is strongly subjected to consumerism and stresses the centrality of purchasing commodities and services (and along with them power) as a cultural practice that fosters social behaviors.
• 4.4: Consumerism and Subjectivity
To achieve an appropriate understanding of the processes of consumption, it is essential to consider and analyze the activity of the subjects who practice them. Moreover, it is essential to contextualize the activity of the subjects who perform their choices and behaviors inside a net of power relations that control and organize the availability of goods in the marketplace. Therefore, it is important to consider consumer practices and subjectivities as an autonomous social sphere.
• 4.5: Identity and Fan Cultures
Communication isn’t purely about transmission. It is also about the ritual of communication, about the ongoing socio-cultural interactions that form a core part of the communicative process. So this section looks at questions of identity performance between users in interactions, and starts to explore more deeply how we make and receive messages as social creatures.
• 4.6: Impressions Management
Impressions management refers to the overt and the unconscious strategies we, as social individuals, deploy to try and influence how others perceive us. Impressions management can explain our clothes, our gestures, the ways we speak, the twitter username we choose, or the Facebook picture we pick for our profile. In deciding on which outwards signs to convey, we try to imagine how others would decode and relate to those signs, and thus choose signs which would generate the desired decoding.
• 4.7: Looking-Glass Self
The looking-glass-self draws more deeply on psychological rather than sociological models of the self in society, but like impressions management, it approaches the dynamic self through that self’s place in a social context, surrounded by other selves, other identities.
• 4.8: Dramaturgy
Dramaturgy is a sociological perspective on identity that employs a theatrical metaphor to explore issues of identity formation and reformation. As such, dramaturgy assumes a place, a moment, and an audience to whom the identity is being presented. This places identity formation both in a social context (such as a classroom, a chatroom, a family, etc) as well as at a particular point in time. This implies that identities can shift with varying contexts and moments.
• 4.9: Fandom
Fans are those who identify with the enthusiastic engagement with a text. This text might be a book series, a tv show, a sporting team, or a fashion label. If we think about ways of theorizing identity, we can start to see that “fan” is an identity option that an individual can choose to deploy based on actual or perceived feedback from others. Fandom is often a shared identity performance.
• 4.10: Postcolonialism Race and Ethnicity
• 4.11: Gender
Gender refers to socio-cultural constructs that lead us to think of men and women in a particular way. Gender not only defines people by their biological sex, but it consequently influences our behaviour regarding what is expected of us. Judith Butler, in particular, placed emphasis on gender as a social construction of behaviours determined by culture rather than by biological differences between sexes.
• 4.12: A History of Modern Political Economy
The history of modern political economy traces back to the works of Adam Smith and Dave Ricardo, who writing in the 18th and 19th Century outlined a model which was broadly supportive of the developments of economic markets and free trade, and was based upon a labor theory of value, which suggested that the value of the goods and commodities produced is directly related to the amount of labor which goes into making that product.
04: Audiences and Identity
This section discusses the different ways we think about receivers, audiences, and users, and how communication and media scholars might approach thinking about and studying audiences. It is worth breaking these concepts down into separate components to try to understand them. However, these concepts are artificial constructs, and the line between receivers, users, and audiences is becoming increasingly soft and blurred and they may have faded in their usefulness.
When dealing with one-to-one or one-to-few communication, we usually use the label of receiver to describe those whom the message targets. As articulated in the transmission models of communication, a receiver can also be a sender, but for now, it’s easiest to start with the simplest articulation of a receiver, where a receiver can be defined as anyone targeted for or taking in information or communication. Leaving the reality that receivers often become senders aside, we can still regard receivers as not merely passive sponges of information – they can interpret material, bring to bear their own experiences, and ‘read’ messages in a number of different ways.
In terms of information received, we can generally say that information is decoded in three ways. There is the dominant reading, where the message intended is the message received. There is a negotiated reading, where the receiver accepts some of the intended message, and rejects other parts of it. Finally, there are oppositional readings, where the reader completely rejects the message intended. And of course, there is also the possibility that the message is not received – through miscommunication or a failure to communicate. It is also worth remembering here that communication is never ideologically neutral.
All of this forms the core of Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model. Hall argued that any piece of information can be encoded in multiple ways, and every message has more than one meaning. We refer to this as the polysemy of messages – literally, the ‘many meanings.’ Therefore, communication is always subject to decisions made within the context and systems employed – meaning-making is not natural but cultural. There isn’t such a thing as a ‘right’ way to read a message, only the preferred way within a particular context.
A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://opentextbc.ca/mediastudies101/?p=93
16 Rude and Interesting Gestures around the World – Standard Youtube License (Video uploaded by SkyscannerLtd)
The cultural aspect and interpretation of a message shows in the different non-verbal signs described in the video above. The depend on national, thus cultural backgrounds and might have different meanings in other cultures or might simply not be understood. Also, each gesture would only make sense in a certain context.
When thinking about mass communication, and broadcasting to a large number of people (many-to-many communication), we need to ask whether or not an audience is just an aggregate of receivers. Is there anything special about an audience?
It’s a surprisingly difficult question. A very basic view might see the audience merely as a group of people who are receiving the same message at the same time, whether it be a musical performance or a TV show. But the breadth of communicative options these days quickly exposes the problems with such a simple definition. If one person records a show on MySky™, another downloads the show off a torrent, another watches it when it is first broadcast on ‘free-to-air’ TV, and another buys the DVD, are they collectively still an audience? They’re all receiving the same text, but in different modes and at different times.
We might instead try to think about audiences both as cultural constructs and as responses to particular media or texts. We can define audiences in terms of location (such as the spectators at a rugby game), by population demographics (for example, children), by medium or channel (such as television or Youtube), or by message content (political speeches or soap operas), as well as by time of transmission or reception.
How we perceive audiences has also changed over time, from passive to active to fragmented. We started off in pre-modern times thinking about the audience in terms of the public. Publics, such as those at agora and fora, were generally constrained in time, space and culture. That is, they tended to be in the same place, at the same time, with participants sharing similar values and culture. It wasn’t until the rise of the media and mass communication that audiences started to become more dispersed and hetereogeneous. It is this mass audience that is perhaps more relevant to media scholars.
The mass audience is an interesting phenomena, given how dispersed they are. For much of the 20th century, the mass audience was characterized by a lack of self-generated identity – only with a few rare texts, like certain bands, or shows or sports teams – did people share a common identity in belonging to that audience. For the most part, members of the mass audience, particularly the mediated mass audience, were dispersed across time, space, and culture. Furthermore, what identities they did have were classified by externally generated markers such as demographics, like age, gender (and perhaps most importantly in capitalist media markets,) economic profile.
This era of audience research was very much focused around marketing demographics. Leaving aside public service broadcasting for the moment, a lot of information captured about audiences, and indeed the language we used to describe audiences, came from marketers and program buyers, who determined which mass media texts made it into general circulation based on what kind of audience it would attract (children, housewives, retirees) and therefore what kind of advertising they could sell on it.
Is the idea of the audience still relevant for the 21st Century? A simple test might be to think about what you did last night? With an increasing plethora of channels, modes, and sources of information and entertainment, our existing notion of the mass audience is fractured more than ever.
While the audience still has some use as a concept, particularly as we define the demographics of our audience more tightly, a new concept has come to the fore in communication research. There are a few different labels given to similar concepts, so let’s start with the idea of the user. A user has a number of definitions given the context, but to start with, we can define a user as an active agent who uses available tools to interact with information.
A user is of interest to us because they move through a number of different communicative positions simultaneously. They can be both senders and receivers, audiences and producers, engaged in interpersonal communication that is also public performance. Users form networks, and act as nodes which both pass on and reinterpret information taken in from multiple sources, often other users. Users interact with other users to form networks along which information is not only sent and received, but also modified and interpreted.
These messy networks quickly go beyond any simple, linear model that we might use for understanding audiences. The rise of the user in both the interpersonal and mass communication landscape has been enabled to a large extent by information communication technologies such as the internet and mobile phones. But a lot of the interplay between users that we’ve been seeing reflects other, small scale social networks, such as the pre-modern idea of the village. What has changed is the scale and speed of the network connections, and the idea of memory – an interpersonal network can subjectively remember things. In an electronic network, the exact words, content or message can often be recalled long after the interaction has ceased – a good demonstration of this is searching for yourself online (egosurfing) to find old posts and messages you had long forgotten.
As an aside, it is interesting to use the ritual view of communication as a lens through which to think about the social network of users as a group of communicators. If users can be both senders and receivers, produce and consume (and reproduce) texts, and always have, at least in theory, equal capacity of channel to play either sender or receiver, then the flow of cultural capital is not only sped up, it is also partially removed from the hands of capitalist content producers (i.e. those producing content to sell advertising around or for monetary gain). We’re currently seeing the early shockwaves of this change playing out in the copyright battles of the TPPA, SOPA, PIPA, ACTA and s21a.)
Overall, audiences are a fascinatingly complex concept, and one we’ll return to in the section on fandom. But now, it might be worth thinking how we approach audience research.
Discussion
1. Why has the internet changed the concept of audiences?
2. Find examples that state your theory. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/Media_Studies_101_(Media_Texthack_Team)/04%3A_Audiences_and_Identity/4.01%3A_Audiences_and_Audience_Research.txt |
Audience studies have been around as long as there has been commercial mass media – producers needed to prove to potential advertisers that their message was received by a certain number (and later on, a certain type) of people. As such, audience research has ties to ideas about consumer culture. But as metrics and other ways of gathering information grew more sophisticated the demographics continued to be refined. For example, these are the demographics that TVNZ currently keeps track of for its advertisers.
We can also investigate audiences from perspectives, rather than as mere commodities. For the mass media, a number of different tools are deployed by different groups – such as counting viewers to identify prime advertising space for advertisers. Focus groups are employed to see how the target demographic is receiving a particular text, and adjustments are made accordingly. In-depth research into a population, such as the bronies, attempts to understand the interplay between reception, consumption and community.
These methods have been refined throughout the history of mass media, however, new media presents new challenges. For example, modifications to existing methods, such as a media-use diary where audiences note their media consumption, has to cope with the challenges of a context where most people’s media use hours exceed the hours in the day. This is a consequence of multitasking – for example, listening to music while reading Facebook. The technology itself can be employed to provide information about usage (eg: adwords in google). We can even employ systems, such as eyeball tracking, to identify audience viewing habits within a cluttered media landscape.
Despite these and other techniques, tracking changes in audience behaviour is a challenge. This is as much a consequence of changing concepts surrounding audiences as it is a result of changes in media itself. The idea of the audience must now take into account new concepts of the user and the prosumer, how these interrelate with existing notions of an active audience, and how these change the nature of how we understand texts, readings, and issues of consumption and (re)production.
Discussion
1. Discuss the relative merits of various methods of audience research such as focus groups, in-depth research, media use diaries, surveying population samples and ‘hidden’ online technologies.
4.03: Consumer Cultures
The term consumer cultures refers to a theory according to which modern human society is strongly subjected to consumerism and stresses the centrality of purchasing commodities and services (and along with them power) as a cultural practice that fosters social behaviors. The history of consumer cultures can be traced back and linked to particular periods of discontinuity. The international historiography tends to identify three different periods in the history of consumerism in the last three centuries:
• a first period starting in the 18th century England with the popularization of certain products such as exotic drinks and clothing;
• a second phase in the second half of the 19th century with the appearance of the first department stores where practices of shopping were initiated;
• a third phase starting in the 1950s with the achievement of a mass society, the construction of an Atlantic market and the beginning of the process of Americanization of culture.
Without rejecting the precision of the traditional periodization, the interest in the history and practice of consumption in the last decades by an increasing number of scholars has brought to light new interpretations of consumer cultures. These new perspectives consider the phenomenon in the context of continuity throughout a longer duration. According to these perspectives, it is possible to highlight an onset of consumer cultures in Europe from the period between the 17th and the18th centuries when a profound shift of the economic system occurred due to European colonial expansion.
The circulation of new products, such as sugar, tobacco and chocolate, not only brought a major change in the European mode of production but it also gave impulse to a process of appropriation of such goods as they were available on the market. The consumers approached the market in a variety of ways, strongly influenced by their geographical belonging, gender, social position, religious beliefs and cultural tendency. The consumer cultures that were initiated by the circulation and consumption of these new goods are the product of a process of production of everyday life where the main subjects are the consumers who appropriate the goods. Therefore, we can think about consumer cultures, in part, as contributing to the process of identity formation.
Here is a very precise account of how the consumption of coffee, introduced as a new commodity into Europe as well as elsewhere, has contributed to the creation of a certain intellectual and social culture centered on the space of coffee houses.
The interest in consumer cultures focuses on the aspect of production of everyday life as a source of cultural meaning and expression as well as the constant alteration of the symbolic universe through these practices of signification. However, the study of consumer cultures also engages the analysis of a macro sphere where consumer behaviors are strictly connected to economic and commercial aspects of production. In reference to the experience of consumer cultures in 18th and 19th century Europe, for example, the economic and commercial aspects of production involved the deportation of a labor force and the unrestrained exploitation of natural resources. This gave Europe a predominant position in the market. A similar reflection can be made with reference to consumer cultures in the era of mass society. The Americanization of culture in the aftermath of the Second World War placed America into a hegemonic economic and cultural position that influenced European political systems.
This said, it is impossible not to recognize that the formation of consumer cultures is strictly connected to a system of power that periodically redesigns the map of world relations.
Discussion
1. Can you think of any big brands or companies representing today’s consumer culture?
2. Which one do you consider the most powerful?
3. Where do they originally come from? | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/Media_Studies_101_(Media_Texthack_Team)/04%3A_Audiences_and_Identity/4.02%3A_Researching_Audiences.txt |
Researchers in the field of consumer cultures are interested in studying consumer choice and behavior from a social and cultural point of view, as opposed to an economical and psychological one.
In order to achieve an appropriate understanding of the processes of consumption, it is essential to consider and analyze the activity of the subjects who practice them. Moreover, it is essential to contextualize the activity of the subjects who perform their choices and behaviors inside a net of power relations that control and organize the availability of goods in the marketplace. Therefore, it is important to consider consumer practices and subjectivities as an autonomous social sphere, although strictly related to the sphere of production and commercialization.
Consumer culture researchers do not consider culture as a homogenous system of collectively shared meanings, values and ways of life. In fact, culture is characterized by a multiplicity of ways of production and distribution of meanings and values operated by different cultural groups. In this regard, the term “consumer culture” also points to conceptualizing a commercially produced system of images, texts and objects that different groups appropriate in different ways. They use these to make collective sense of their spaces, experiences and lives, communicating meanings that are often inaccessible to outsiders. Consumers become producers of culture and, in so doing, they also seek to make their own identity as individuals and as members of social groups. Therefore, the marketplace becomes a source of resources which people approach and re-signify to the extent that they can access or not access it as consumers. This opens up new possibilities of communication, as well as relationships to the commodity culture, offered by the marketplace.
In fact, as consumers actively rework and transform symbolic meanings made available by the marketplace, they can also construct their own selves and communities in opposition to commodity culture, by performing practices of consumers’ resistance. The ways through which specific consumers appropriate commercial brands or products to deliver messages of resistance are various and highlights the creative potential that can be involved in consumer practices. In this case we can talk of consumer subcultures that are often engaged in various forms of ‘guerrilla’ resistance in order to state their own ideas and consolidate their group identity. There are innumerable examples of guerrilla consumer resistance:
New Zealand resistance to GM food products is an ongoing example of consumer action. Although this particular issue is international, local resistance, allied to over seas market resistance, has succeeded in keeping GM crops from New Zealand. See “NZ’S GM stance reflects consumer resistance, markets’ needs“.
Consumer resistance can also express itself through the creative practices of everyday life and eventually consolidate in a way of living that is grounded, among other things, in the aesthetics of resistance and vehicles of new meanings.
Discussion
1. Search for any other local examples of consumer resistance in the media.
2. Consider the various points of view in the controversy and how the media portrays those stances. Balance the study across many media sources.
4.05: Identity and Fan Cultures
In other areas of this text, we have considered many different ways of thinking about communication – as exchange of symbols, as flows of information, as part of industries and relations of capital and power, and through the creation and consumption of texts. But communication isn’t purely about transmission. It is also about the ritual of communication, about the ongoing socio-cultural interactions that form a core part of the communicative process. So this section looks at questions of identity performance between users in interactions, and starts to explore more deeply how we make and receive messages as social creatures.
To engage with these questions, there are a useful suite of theories and concepts that are known collectively as symbolic interactionism. Symbolic interactionism is concerned with the construction of identity within a social context – as such, it doesn’t address the psychological or developmental aspects of identity, but rather how an identity is presented and re-presented within a given social or communicative situation. Symbolic interactionism fits in with ideas of identity as something we construct and reconstruct within different social contexts and base on our judgements of the nature and intention of the interaction.
There are a number of theories that fall under the banner of symbolic interactionism, but this section will focus on impressions management, the concept of thelooking-glass-self, and dramaturgy and performance. As you shall see, these theories and concepts historically share a great deal in common, and there is significant overlap between them.
One of the key assumptions of a symbolic interactionist approach to communication is to regard society as something that is constructed and reconstructed through signs generated and agreed upon by interacting individuals. Or, as Mead noted, humans act towards things based on the meaning that those things have for them. This meaning is generated by ‘playing the game’ (Mead) where, by engaging with symbols, they become meaningful and help shape the ‘me,’ the organized, social aspect of the self. The self is constructed out of the I and the Me, or alternatively, the unstructured personality and the structured persona. The I and the Me alternate as we engage with the symbolic landscape we participate in and help create, to help reform not only society but the self.
With that in mind, let’s look at some specific approaches within the symbolic interactionist tradition.
Discussion
1. Before moving on to some specific theoretical perspectives, can you note some symbols, signs, mannerisms etc that identify you, or your subjects, as a communicative member of a group, club, society or wider sub-culture?
2. Are these likely, or not, to be understood by anyone outside the group? | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/Media_Studies_101_(Media_Texthack_Team)/04%3A_Audiences_and_Identity/4.04%3A_Consumerism_and_Subjectivity.txt |
One theoretical tool that is frequently used to explore questions of new media and communication in particular is impressions management. Impressions management is a term used in fields such as communications, sociology, and in public relations theory, and it is used in roughly the same way, just in slightly different contexts.
Impressions management refers to the overt and the unconscious strategies we, as social individuals, deploy to try and influence how others perceive us. Impressions management can explain our clothes, our gestures, the ways we speak, the twitter username we choose, or the Facebook picture we pick for our profile. In deciding on which outwards signs to convey, we try to imagine how others would decode and relate to those signs, and thus choose signs (whether it be hairstyle or a ‘selfie’ on Facebook) which would generate the positive or desired decoding. By successfully managing impressions, an individual not only receives positive reaction from their peers or social group, and thus peer esteem, but it also allows for a consistent presentation of self – that is, an individual creates and maintains a consistent story of who “they” are – the story of “Kate the friend” or “Tama the student”.
When we deploy impression management strategies in our face-to-face social networks, we often do so unconsciously. Your first thought when encountering idea of impressions management might have been ‘that’s very calculated’ or ‘I don’t do that,’ and it was only on second reflection that you realized that you do choose your clothes or make other decisions about yourself based on how others might see you. We are so enculturated to manage our impressions that we stop realizing that we’re even doing it. How many times did you hear when you were younger ‘stand up straight’ or ‘look nice’ or ‘behave, and make a good impression’? We do it automatically as part of the rituals and processes of everyday life within our society.
One of the best places to tease out these processes of encoding impressions management strategies is to look at how you manage your online persona in places such as Facebook. Online, where every communicative act is deliberate and the communication is stripped of non-verbal cues (and quite a few other cues besides), impressions management behaviours become foregrounded. We are quite deliberate and calculating (even if we’re not explicit even to ourselves as to why we are deliberate and calculating) in selecting the impressions we put online. A great example of this is your Facebook photo albums – reflect on when and why you might delete or ‘untag’ photos of yourself that you think don’t make you look “good”? That is impressions management in action.
This idea of understanding identity through trying to imagine how others see ‘you’ is a common one across the symbolic interactionist school of thought. Impressions management is closely linked with another concept known as the looking-glass self.
Discussion
1. We can begin by investigating how we, as individuals, employ impressions management to present ourselves to the world. However, is this equally as applicable in understanding corporate, retail and other institutional presence in all forms of media?
2. More specifically, do such bodies employ similar strategies to individuals in their use of Facebook as an advertising/information tool? If not, identify the techniques they do employ.
4.07: Looking-Glass Self
The looking-glass-self draws more deeply on psychological rather than sociological models of the self in society, but like impressions management, it approaches the dynamic self through that self’s place in a social context, surrounded by other selves, other identities.
Drawing on psychological concepts of the self, the looking-glass-model sees the self as constantly reworking itself through a three-step process of imagining how we appear to others, and how others judge that appearance, and then developing the self in light of that (hypothetical) judgement. It is here you can see the strong ties between looking-glass-self and impressions management. The point of difference (and why this is a psychological rather than a sociological concept), is that this process is entirely in the mind of the individual. Whereas impressions management sees the self modifying itself as based on actual feedback from others (comments, criticisms, rebuffs), the looking-glass-self develops itself entirely on what it thinks the other perceives – it all takes place in the mind of the self. Mead, a leading scholar in symbolic interactionism, refers to this as “taking the role of the other,” something that can begin as the young child passes the mirror stage and understands itself as being an entity or individual separate from other individuals. Charles Cooley, who coined the term ‘looking-glass-self’, spoke of “the thing that moves to pride or shame is not the mere mechanical reflection of ourselves, but an imputed sentiment, the imagined effect of this reflection upon another’s mind” (Cooley, 1964, emphasis added).
The looking-glass-self is particularly interesting to think about in terms of mediated interactions, whether that be a letter, a talk-show, or a Reddit thread. Because mediated communication involves distance, the individual users become more or less isolated depending on the form of mediation, and the social relationship of interaction becomes stripped of some or many of the subconscious and non-verbal cues with which we often rely upon to moderate our reactions. Particularly in two-way, mediated exchanges, such as phone, text or chat, users often have to imagine the ‘reflection’ they are having on another’s mind.
If we focus specifically on forms of two-way communication that place communication as part of social networks and communal ties, we can probably return to look at other forms of symbolic interactionism that focus more on the link between individuals as a site of identity meaning-making. Perhaps one of the most-relevant (and arguably most used) forms of symbolic interactionism are the dramaturgical perpectives of performance.
Discussion
1. Given the prevalence of phone, text, chat and numerous other technological forms of communication do you think such controlled forms of communicating are becoming normalised?
2. If so, is it possible that humanity is moving towards a preference for such controlled communication methods, and that we are becoming our own avatar for our imaginary audience. Try arguing this both ways. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/Media_Studies_101_(Media_Texthack_Team)/04%3A_Audiences_and_Identity/4.06%3A_Impressions_Management.txt |
Dramaturgy is a sociological perspective on identity that employs a theatrical metaphor to explore issues of identity formation and reformation. As such, dramaturgy assumes a place, a moment, and an audience to whom the identity is being presented. This places identity formation both in a social context (such as a classroom, a chatroom, a family, etc) as well as at a particular point in time. This implies that identities can shift with varying contexts and moments.
The key aspect to dramaturgy, however, is the concept of the audience and an individual’s relationship with that audience in that specific time and place. As with impressions management, the individual actor must control their presentation of self so as to evoke from this audience a desired reaction to that presentation. So you can probably start to see elements of both impressions management (reacting to audiences) and looking-glass self (imagining the audience) within dramaturgy.
However, dramaturgy extends the metaphor of the stage even further, and this is where things get particularly interesting. A key element of dramaturgy is the concept of the front- and backstage. In face-to-face interactions, the front- and backstage are two related but separate areas, where the front is the space in which the performance of self takes place, and the back is where that performance is prepared. For example, to borrow Goffman’s own example (1997), for a waiter, the frontstage is the restaurant floor, where the waiter performs their identity as waiter for the diners. The backstage is the kitchen, where that identity is relaxed, until another order is up. As the waiter passes through the kitchen doors, they become the waiter once more, playing their assigned role.
It may be useful to look at one specific communicative arena, online social networking sites, from the perspective of dramaturgy, and ask the question, where is the backstage in an online performance of self? The internet blurs the line between frontstage and backstage, and thus problematizes it. An individual can be simultaneously front- and backstage – their World of Warcraft avatar, for example, can be performing to an audience, but at the same time you, as the extension of that avatar, can be alone in your room in front of the computer (maybe making snide comments about the people your avatar is talking to in a chat window). The backstage and the frontstage co-exist simultaneously instead of concurrently. Another good example of this is when the virtual boundaries between front and backstage break down – like when someone is chatting in two windows, and mistakenly sends a comment meant for one recipient to another, or when someone tries to send a friend a private message via Facebook Messenging, but ends up posting it on a public wall instead.
Whether online or off, the goal of a dramaturgical performance of self is the same – to project to a known audience a desired and desirable perception of self, and to maintain that dramatic portrayal in a consistent manner. Whether you are playing the role solo or in a team, these goals remain the same.
Dramaturgy acknowledges that identities are pluralistic – we have many identities that we put on and off as we move through time and space, and enter and exit different social contexts. As such, to achieve these goals, one has to be able to quickly switch and negotiate roles, or performative masks, as they move between different social contexts.
But as you can see, there is a lot of overlap between different forms of impressions management, and they are by no means mutually exclusive. In fact, they work best when applied as a suite of concepts to address questions of identity in social contexts. For example, in the next section, we’ll apply some of these ideas to the area of fandom.
Discussion
1. In the theater actors routinely perform different roles. Do pubic figures, celebrities, political parties, or corporate bodies, in the media, alter their role playing according to the context or audience?
2. Find an example then describe, and give possible reasons for, each role your subject ‘performs’.
Reference:
Goffman (1997). The presentation of self in everyday life. In Calhoun, C.; Gerteis, J.; Moody, J.; Pfaff, S.; Virk, I. (eds.). Contemporary sociological theory. Malden/Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. pp.46-61. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/Media_Studies_101_(Media_Texthack_Team)/04%3A_Audiences_and_Identity/4.08%3A_Dramaturgy.txt |
Having thought about the different ways we can think of and theorize the performance of identity, this section will now turn to look at how we can apply this to one type of identity – the fan.
Fans are those who identify with the enthusiastic engagement with a text. This text might be a book series, a tv show, a sporting team, or a fashion label. If we think about ways of theorizing identity, we can start to see that “fan” is an identity option that an individual can choose to deploy based on actual or perceived feedback from others. Fandom is often a shared identity performance. This section will take a look at one example of a media fandom, but it might be worth thinking about other fans you know (such as sporting fans) and see how many of these identity and reception roles they also adopt.
Bronies are adult fans of the animated series My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. The term comes from the words ‘bro’ and ‘pony.’ Bronies are generally teens and older, usually male, usually educated. And they are a very active audience of this show.
Bronies as a fandom are interesting to look at for a number of reasons. One is that they conduct their own census, which is very handy for media researchers! Another is that Bronies fit a number of reception categories simultaneously.
Firstly, they are an audience in the sense of a mass audience. They watch the show. They buy DVDs and figurines. The producers of the show may not have set out to attract this particular demographic, but now that they have it, the show’s producers cater to it as they are writing, producing, and even creating merchandise for the show.
Secondly, bronies are users. This status as users is part of their behavior as active fans, in that they exchange information, remix content, have their own websites and clearinghouses of information, and interact with each other. They form social and fan networks within which they share their passion for the ponies.
Thirdly, bronies are prosumers. Prosumer is a portmanteau of producer and consumer, and prosumers drive the remix culture. Remix is where users take existing content and texts, often mass produced texts, and pull them apart to use the pieces to construct new texts.
A favourite form of prosumer text is the fanvid. Texts such as fanvids reconstruct the object of fandom not only through the lense of that fandom (which emerges from the collective experience of the fan network), but also within the wider cultural contexts in which these fans exist. Take for example this My Little Ponyfanvid which remixes or ‘mashes’ My Little Ponies as a fandom object with another favourite media text of this demographic, the film The Watchmen (which is not a text likely to be popular with the original pre-teen target audience of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.)
Prosumers take the idea of the active audience to a whole new level. In the age of the mass audience, the active audience was seen as someone yelling back at the screen, or talking about what they had seen or heard over the watercooler at work or school the next morning. And that still happens. But now, thinking of audiences also as an aggregate of users means that the active audiences not only talk back to the screen – they use screens to construct their own texts in a process of bricolage and re-consumption. In this case – taking pieces of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and marrying them to pieces of a completely different pop culture text that also appeals to this audience demographic to create something that is both the product of and speaks directly to themselves as audiences and users, and as fans.
Discussion
1. Given the broad definition of what a fan is, and the activities they are involved in, is it possible we are ‘fans’ and members of a ‘fandom’ more often than we think, unknown to us, and that this occurs within our everyday lives.
2. Are you a fan of something? Do you recognize the roles of audience, user, and prosumer in your fandom activity?
4.10: Postcolonialism Race and Ethnicity
This section is yet to be hacked – feel free to contribute content.
4.11: Gender
When we talk about gender, we usually refer mistakenly to the biological sex of the person. However, gender refers to socio-cultural constructs that lead us to think of men and women in a particular way. Gender not only defines people by their biological sex, but it consequently influences our behaviour regarding what is expected of us. Judith Butler, in particular, placed emphasis on gender as a social construction of behaviours determined by culture rather than by biological differences between sexes. As a man or woman, a person is often expected to behave in a certain way and is ‘naturally’ attributed certain characteristics. Instead of being ‘natural’, gender is, on the contrary constructed, produced and reproduced within society and culture. When we refer to ‘gender issues’ we usually refer to issues that differ according to the gender of the person. The majority of these characteristics are arbitrarily attributed to people according to their sex . For example, the idea that little girls like pink and want to be princesses and little boys like blue and want to be war heroes. This idea is promulgated across media, such as children’s books, and impacts on people’s later view of themselves.
Under the Window, by Kate Greenaway, p.30.
In the image here, boys are portrayed as active and adventurous while the girl appears as a passive and admiring observer. Women have stereotypically been placed in an inferior hierarchical position than men. Media of all sorts, such as films, magazines, news, advertisements, speeches and books, like the one above, produce and transmit ideas about gender which impact on our own view of men and women and ultimately lead to discrimination and hierarchies.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0RtU...Yk&w=560&h=315
Masculinity and femininity are defined in opposition to each other. This DB ad makes use of ‘cheesy’ music and images to, supposedly, appeal to their idea of a ‘feminine sensibility.’ Not only does it sell the idea that the only interest in women’s lives is men, it also repeatedly confines women into domesticity and emotions. In an intertextual image referring to American Beauty, the beer replaces the woman in the film, in order to indicate that men here are not dreaming about women but about beer. For that matter, it reproduces the traditional association between men and beer and conveys a preconception of masculinity as partying, fun and uninterested in commitment, while women are supposed to aspire to it!
Discussion:
1. What typical attributes of male and female gender roles on TV can you think of? How do the differ in context, i.e. on the job, in the family, at different ages?
2. Compare TV programmes and ads. Do roles and stereotypes differ?
3. Do they differ according to genres?
Reference:
Butler, Judith P. (1990) Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/Media_Studies_101_(Media_Texthack_Team)/04%3A_Audiences_and_Identity/4.09%3A_Fandom.txt |
The history of modern political economy traces back to the works of Adam Smith and Dave Ricardo, who writing in the 18th and 19th Century outlined a model which was broadly supportive of the developments of economic markets and free trade, and was based upon a labour theory of value, which suggested that the value of the goods and commodities produced is directly related to the amount of labour which goes into making that product. Smith and Ricardo’s work was taken up in the mid 19th century by Karl Marx who in 1867 published Capital: Critique of Political Economy, which functioned as a critique of the emergent political economy of capitalism during the industrial revolution. Marx’s major contentions are worth exploring here, as his work remains a foundation for studies of PE, and the basic concepts and categories he proposed are still commonly employed within media studies today, almost 150 years after he devised them.
CC Image from Wikimedia Commons, Author Unknown
Marx begins Capital by identifying the commodity – a material entity which can be bought or sold – as the basic unit on which capitalist economies are built, and then proceeds to distinguish between the use-value and exchange value of a commodity. Whereas use-value relates to the value inherent in the way that a good is used, be it to feed someone, provide primary resources for manufacturing or provide information or entertainment to someone, exchange value refers to the fluctuating value which is attached to those goods. Indeed, during the time of the industrial revolution when Marx was writing, the spatial distribution of goods and markets meant that financial speculators were able to amass vast sums (by the standards of the period) by purchasing goods in one location and moving them to another location before selling them at greatly increased prices. Whilst the use-value of these goods remained constant – they would be used in the same way in both areas – their exchange-value varied considerably, allowing a particular privileged class of people (those with the financial resources to buy large quantities of goods and transport them to another city) to exploit the productive labour of others (those who actually produced the goods in the first place) in order to further entrench their wealth. This is a crucial point, as it reveals that Marx’s approach to political economy reveals ways that capitalism is dependent upon a system whereby the productive labour of one social group is exploited by another, wealthier class who effectively own the means of production and can further entrench their elite financial status through financial speculation which the working class who create the commodities themselves cannot participate in. Pivotal to Marx’s work then, were the social relations between different classes within the emergent capitalist society of which he was a part, and the ways in which privileged classes, which he terms the bourgeoisie, exploit the labour of the working classes, whom Marx calls the proletariat.
Marx builds upon the notion of a labour-theory of value, contending that all exchange value is effectively derived from the amount of time someone had to spend working to create a commodity. This quantifiable temporal unit, however, is itself approached as something which is dynamic and changes depending on social development and structuring. Marx uses examples drawn from the changes to the textile industry within the industrial revolution, in which the introduction of a range of new technologies such as the power-loom – which effectively halved the time that was required to weave a given length of yarn into cloth – transformed the socially accepted amount of time required to produce commodities. Whilst there were still artisans hand weaving after the invention of the power-loom, they only received half the wage they had done previously.
Another important distinction which Marx makes with respect to value, is the introduction of the concept of surplus-value. Whereas the use-value of a commodity relates to the work of the labourer in producing it, under capitalism, Marx posits that the exchange value cannot merely be a direct representation of use-value, as in addition to the work of producing the commodity itself, capitalists (factory owners and merchants) are required to add value to the commodity in order to extract profits from its sale and subsequent circulation within markets. These added costs to the exchange value of commodities are what Marx terms surplus value. This again is used by Marx to suggest that capitalism is an inherently exploitative socio-economic system, as this means that it is predicated upon the capitalist classes from extracting value which is removed from the use-value of goods, and this is what allows them to make a profit.
Furthermore, in a social situation in which advances in science and technology frequently involve the insertion of machines which can reduce the amount of labour required to produce commodities – a process which is still very much relevant to a contemporary situation where digital technologies such as non-linear editing software, digital cameras and cloud-based server systems can allow the production of media with dwindling amounts of labour time – the tendency over time is for the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. This basically states that because technology advances over time, equal quantities of commodities can be produced in diminishing temporal durations, which entails that their exchange value will depreciate if all else is equal. Consequently, Marx argues that in order to maintain and grow profits, capitalists have to enact more and more repressive conditions within the workplace to counteract the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.
Philosophically, Marx inverts G.W. Hegel’s idealist perspective, contending that:
‘The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness’ Marx, 1859 p4 | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/Media_Studies_101_(Media_Texthack_Team)/04%3A_Audiences_and_Identity/4.12%3A_A_History_of_Modern_Political_Economy.txt |
Section 1 – Theorizing the Future
1.1 Where is my jetpack?
Sound familiar? This was supposed to be the time of ubiquitous flight and mars travel, cured cancers and realistic virtual reality. Sure, there were major changes, the cost of communication services dropped dramatically, computer parts became impossibly cheap, and the barriers that once imposed scarcity onto communication have come crashing down. But the future looks a lot more like the past than not. Predictions are hard, especially when they are about the future.
What we understand as the past, to be studied as history, as largely collected through traces that are unreliable. What do we actually know about what voters thought in the 1928 election? For that matter, what do we know about voters in the 2016 election? Contemporary communication technologies allow ubiquitous access to information and widely distributed contact with individuals. New models are trumpeted as offering access to additional information and possibility, ecommerce technologies that would promise to know consumers better than they know themselves. At the same time, these technologies seem incapable of actually resolving the problem of public opinion formation and collective action. The underlying problem of the public sphere is not one of technology, but one of passion. So, you don’t have a jetpack and the forces of hate seem to be gaining strength.
Consider the rise of the everything store, once known as the Sears catalog, now Amazon.com.[1] There is nothing particularly remarkable about the idea that people would like access to a wide array of goods, delivered to their homes, at reasonable prices. Jobbers delivered an assortment of goods with non-fixed prices, department stores developed additional inventory and fixed prices (a great improvement over constant negotiation).[2] Grocery stores and discounters appeared not as a paradigm shift, but as a continuation of the same trend. At times, firms might opt for smaller assortments, but this is merely the play of strategy as the desires of the population are neatly mapped by business operations. The future of retail is also the past.
What continued for all of this time is the desire of the public to be warm, housed, and fed. It is not remarkable that the desires of the public are continuous over time. Deep structures like hunger continue. What varies is the vast array of symbolic expressions of these needs, which come through fashions, cuisines, and other cultural codes. Which is not to say that codes do not become an end in themselves, the rich intertextual life of the public is just as real as the physical life. Manuel Delanda recognized this when he juxtaposed two distinct gradients for the legitimation of a state: symbolic and material.[3] A system that provides sustenance with no meaning or intersubjective investment is objectionable, just as a system that has a vast symbolic life with little effect would be an utter failure. Failed symbolic legitimacy can overwhelm physical plenty.
This textbook is not an account of the reasons why jetpack development has been so slow. For the most part these would be effectively explained by elementary physics and engineering. In an article on the topic of jetpacks in The Guardian, Cardiff University Lecturer and science columnist Dean Burnett laid out the key issues with jetpack technology: gravity is a substantial force and most flying machines use properties like aerodynamic lift (wings) to generate enough lift, managing the size and deployment of the engine itself.[4] After all, it is not enough to build an engine that might lift a human successfully, but you need to attach it to a human being. The Evergreen Aviation museum, a world leader in obscure craft which includes the Spruce Goose, features a number of single user escape helicopters. James Bond, eat your heart out. Attaching a thruster to a human body is tricky and we haven’t even gotten into special issues in buckle development. Burnett’s argument did not hinge on the difficulty in building the machine, but in the fact that it is not desirable. Jetpacks are far more dangerous than bicycles, people would make terrible choices with them, and they would produce vast emissions of greenhouse gasses. You don’t want a jetpack – notice that word: want.
This is the inflection point for our studies of the future. In communication, the question is rarely if something is possible, but if it is probable or desirable. The title is New Media Futures, our subject matter: what are the possible and probable future technologies for the creation of meaning.
1.2 Disciplinary Context
This book was written for use in a broad New Media program based in the Communication Studies tradition. There are a number of disciplinary threads that tie our traditions into their current administrative alignments. The rhetorical wing of communication traces their origins to a walkout from a writing conference. Mass communication research on the other hand would emphasize the role of social research and media studies from the outset of communication.[5] Others would choose moments that resonate with their particular moment of transdisciplinary contact, from art history to sociology. Communication is not an unusual academic field in this sense.
All academic fields depend on a largely arbitrary disciplinary moment, a point where some critical ontological or epistemological choice was made that determines the answers to many subsequent questions. What does that mean? Economists often begin from a disciplinary fable about the rationalization of barter. Sociologists may reduce interactions to the result of a social force. Artists explore the moment of genius where creative energy seemingly appears from nowhere. Psychologists find the core of all behavior in the cognitive structure of the individual with a lurking basis in the brain.
The tighter the story, the more likely your discipline is to have prestige. It is not that these stories are entirely wrong, but that they always necessarily tell part of the story.
Communication is a great field because it is organized around a number of weak stories. At the same time, this is a curse when dealing with organization of the university system. Is communication a point to organize around or a virus that is withering the marrow of disciplinary rigor?
The critical moments for the study of communication would be decisions about people and context (meaning networks and objects), proximal and distant.
People Context
Proximal Interpersonal and small group Biological and Technological determinism
Distant Rhetoric and public culture Infrastructures
This is not to say that scholars may not connect multiple areas of research, but that most research tends to fall into these slots. The truth is likely between all: it is not that the infrastructure is enough to cause the movement, but that the movement surely would not have formed without it. Academics select an angle because it provides explanatory leverage, that when placed in conversation with other perspectives, can provide rich understanding of the world.
Beyond communication, this book is situated with regards to Futures studies. This is only one of many possible names for this academic trajectory, along with foresight and many others. In his 1932 call for aid, “Wanted – Professors of Foresight!” H.G. Wells called for the development of a field of foresight, this new field would deal with unanticipated consequences that accompanied the development of new technology. The question for Wells: why are publics so reckless when confronting technologies that vastly increase the speed or range of processes? What additional skills could be brought to bear to more effectively engage with these problems:
There are no Professors of Foresight as yet, but I am by way of being an amateur. Let me draw a plain conclusion from tonight’s audition. Either we must make peace throughout the world, make one worldstate, one world-pax, with one money, one police, one speech and one brotherhood, however hard that task may seem, or we must prepare to live with the voice of the stranger in our ears, with the eyes of the stranger in our homes, with the knife of the stranger always at our throats, in fear and in danger of death, enemy-neighbours with the rest of our species. Distance was protection, was safety, though it meant also ignorance and indifference and a narrow, unstimulated life. For good or evil, distance has been done away with. This problem of communications rushes upon us today – it rushes upon us like Jehu the son of Nimshi. It drives furiously. And it evokes the same question: is it peace?
Because if it is not to be peace foreseen and planned and established, then it will be disaster and death. Will there be no Foresight until those bombs begin to rain upon us?[6]
This is a conservative idea, Wells calls for a futurism that could imagine a peace that could be created with existing technology. Distance is gone, the question becomes how to deal with closeness in the name of peace. The default condition lacked contact, now that contact has been established, how do we deal with it?
In this same time period, the Futurist movement in Italy took the opposite approach: instead of preserving or creating piece, conflict was desirable. For the futurist, nostalgia is the problem, an oppressive force that prevents the technologies of acceleration from transforming society in new profound ways. Consider this excerpt from a futurist work by Martinetti:
This is how we deny the obsessing splendor of the dead centuries and collaborate with victorious Mechanics, the force that grips the earth in its network of speed.
We are collaborating with mechanics in destroying the old poetry of distance and wild solitudes, the exquisite nostalgia of departure, and in its place we urge the tragic lyricism of ubiquity and omnipresent speed.
Our Futurist sensibility, in fact, is no longer moved by the dark mystery of an unexplored valley, of a mountain pass that we, in spite of ourselves, picture as crossed by the elegant (and almost Parisian) ribbon of a white road, where an automobile gleaming with progress and full of cultured voices abruptly pulls up, sputtering; a boulevard corner camped in the middle of solitude.
Every pine woods madly in love with the moon has a Futurist road that crosses it from end to end. The simple, doleful reign of endlessly soliloquizing vegetation is over.
With us begins the reign of the man whose roots are cut, the multiplied man who merges himself with iron, is fed by electricity, and no longer understands anything except the sensual delight of danger and quotidian heroism.[7]
The sensibility here should remind you of the ideology of contemporary technology conglomerates. It isn’t that technology makes things better, but that technology transforms all of life, and those ways that came before are not simply obsolete but regressive. We should consider this not to celebrate futurism, but to see how this set of ideas about speed and destruction recur. Schumpeter did not invent creative destruction – it was baked into the aesthetics of this movement.[8] Martinetti pushes us toward an anti-romantic view of the world. At the same time the masculine ideal of this movement is exclusionary, the celebration of rootlessness costs the stability of the tree. When Mark Zuckerberg promoted the slogan “move fast and break things,” it was intended to exemplify the challenge to the status quo.[9] This was a new kind of organization that wouldn’t follow rules. Now, a decade later, we can see that rules of political communication and media ethics were hard won and necessary. Zuckerberg wasn’t new, the Futurists understood the appeal of destruction and the power of novelty.
In 1967, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences published “Toward the year 2000: Work in Progress.”[10] Unlike the romantic appeal for peace of Wells or the anti-romantic zeal of Martinetti, Daniel Bell’s position comes closest to ours in this book (and likely your course):
Time, said St. Augustine, is a three-fold present: the present as we experience it, the past as a present memory, and the future as a present expectation. By that criterion, the world of the year 2000 has already arrived, for the decisions we make now, in the way we design our environment and thus sketch the lines of constraints, the future is committed. Just as the gridiron pattern of city streets in the nineteenth century shaped the linear growth of cities in the twentieth, so the new networks of highways, the location of new towns, the reordering of graduate-school curricula, the decision to create or not create a computer utility as a single system, and the like will frame the tectonics of the twenty-first century. The future is not an overarching leap into the distance; it begins in the present.[11]
Bell sees change as occurring in systems. The contributors to the project span the social sciences with a range of prescient insights about the power of computer systems to transform decision making and emerging technologies. This model of future study depends on systems theory and a clinical detachment from what a future would be like. The account in this book differs in that we are not concerned with abstract visions, such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s thoughts on the near future of non-educational transfers in cooperative versus wedding cake federalism, but in the creation of things and experiences.[12]
This is not an exhaustive list of works on the future, there are many more that could easily fall within the purview of a course on the History of the Future and that in a course on the future of futures would be relevant. It is entirely possible that your instructor will include a great many more futurists for your consideration during lecture or in other readings. What I want to pull out of these three works in particular are three themes:
• Wells sees the risk of collapsed distances and accelerating systems. He calls to the fore assumptions about the conditions that stabilize systems that could be eroding. Future thinking can lead to peace.
• Martinetti sees the future as a chance for a new aesthetic, a chance to throw off the restrains of the old order. Future thinking can lead to more productive conflict.
• Bell sees the future as a logistical reality. Future thinking emphasizes the conditions of possibility of the present and probabilistic models of what is to come.
1.3 Key Concepts
In this section, I will be describing a number of key concepts in the study of future media. These theoretical interventions will be helpful as they allow you to effectively sort a large number of ideas and see the development of arguments over time. At first this might appear to be jargon — overly technical and specific. Experts use specialized vocabulary for the sake of efficiency. There is no reason why we should say a paragraph when a well-established word would do. By reaching agreement about key discourses and ideas, further ideas can be developed more quickly and with greater depth. Spending time considering the theoretical structure is important in this sense as it allows us to have a discussion about key concepts and classes of ideas without laboriously naming every concept. Intentionally obfuscating ideas is a problem, but we should also be reticent of the idea that all non-technical ideas should be reduced to sound bites or simple binary oppositions. These concepts need to be interesting enough to get at the debates of this time, but not confusing.
1.3.1 Continuity and Rupture
One of the most important tropes in this culture involves the term “modern.” What it is to be modern is to be current and enlightened, modern is new and smart. That which came before is backward. Bruno Latour developed this idea in his book We Have Never Been Modern, where the assumption that the rift between prior practices and new practices is called starkly into question.[13] By pushing off the old to the pre-modern false novelty provides an illusion of knowledge, a distinction without a difference. This discourse appears in many forms.
James Carey and John Quick described the idea of the electrical overturning of social structure as the “electrical sublime.”[14] The utopian hope that electrification would transform social relations has been an ongoing theme. Carey and Quick describe the Innis-McLuhan exchange, where Canadian theorist Harold Innis argued that electrification would only continue existing power relations, and McLuhan took the position that electrification would enable new modes of life that would restore our everyday space.[15] Innis was not opposed to technology, you likely hear the oppositional voice on a nearly daily basis. The point is that ubiquitous technology is neither the key to utopia or the gateway to despair. Questions of value and structure exist independently of the technical details of society. The ubiquity of electricity transformed society, but not in the mythic dimension of producing an entirely new human.
Vincent Mosco made a similar case in his critique of the digital sublime: the ostensibly new digital world had entirely different rules and marked a transformation in the ways that things are done.[16] It is not the single online video that transforms televisuality, but the Netflix platform delivered through multiple devices. Cultural theorizing that relied on observations of first adopters would miss the actual interactions of the multitudes of users who had not yet arrived online. Instead of online interaction leading to a destabilization of identity, the identifiers of the users were amplified and the editorial function of prior bottlenecks decreased.
The meta-analysis of prediction offers further warnings. Philip Tetlock argues in his classic, Expert Political Judgement, that predictions by experts can be scored for relative accuracy.[17] The general outcome of the study suggests that well-designed formal models do an excellent job predicting the future.[18] People with open minds and the liberal arts sensibility, my way of describing “foxes,” do reasonably well. The more deeply entrenched in a particular world-view, the worst the predictive accuracy, with undergraduates coming in last. Perhaps this is why we have curriculum committees and professional advisors. The best predictions would seem to come from people who have a fox-like cognitive style, with reduced hindsight bias, a higher propensity for integrative thinking and cautious probability judgements, with few attempts to invoke belief defense mechanisms.[19] Tetlock’s advice was in my mind throughout the planning and execution of this textbook:
We often learn we have gone too far in one direction only after it is too late to pull back. Executing this balancing act requires cognitive skills of a high order: the capacity to monitor our own though processes for telltale signs of excessive closed or open-mindedness and to strike a reflective equilibrium to cultivate the art of self-overhearing, to learn how to eavesdrop on the mental conversations we have with ourselves as we struggle to strike the right balance between preserving our existing worldview and rethinking our core assumptions. This is no easy art of master. If we listen to ourselves carefully, we will often not like what we hear.[20]
You should also keep this in mind through your life, especially the part about not changing your world-view too quickly. This is not a call to change your mind quickly, but to really think about how you think.
For the most part there is a great deal of continuity – people and their desires remain fairly similar over time. There are also moments of rupture. Theorizing these moments is far more interesting, often taking far more energy and attention that theorizing the continuation of the present. It is critical to balance our theorizing of that which changes and does not change.
At the same time, Nassim Taleb has argued that the approach to theorizing from continuity is backward. The optimal theory for the future in this view would depend on the analysis of structures from the perspective of “black swan” events and more complex dynamics that come with non-linear systems.[21] Antifragility is a critical contribution by Taleb for our theoretical approach – instead of assuming that systems evolve toward some harmonious order, he proposes a rigorous accounting of structures, forces, or ideas that thrive on disorder.[22]
Changes are real and theorizing the big ones is important. In the context of a future oriented media studies be careful not to confuse the possibility of rupture with the likely continuation of the status quo. At the same time, beware of the convenient continuation of the status quo – it can change.
1.3.2 Convergence and Emergence
Among the most interesting and important features of any theory are those that explain the relationships between micro and macro factors. Process development often hinges on factors that are difficult to observe, exist between levels of explanation, or are paradoxically hidden by the very constructs that would make them meaningful in the first place.
When we describe emergence, it is not that some media are “emerging” but that some ideas appear as constellations that then are recognized only once they are in effect in the world. Emergence and convergence are not opposites. It is important to note that this book is written from the perspective that emergence is not unobservable or unknown, but along the lines proposed by Mario Bunge where emergence is a combination that produces novelty:
In other words, we explain the emergence, behavior, and dismantling of systems in terms not only of their composition and environment, but also of their total (internal and external) structure. Nor is this enough: we should also know something about the system’s mechanism or modus operandi: that is what process makes it behave – or cease to behave – the way it does.[23]
A certain structural functional logic can guide our analysis of emergence in media systems. Our emergent combinations are not the mystical combination of parts which make more than their sum, but are embedded in complex assemblages that are already designed to incorporate the possibility of desire. These models also have assumptions and rhetorical frames, generally the social designs that are supposed are biological or mechanical. Despite this oversight, there are important lessons to draw from systems theory, one that is particularly pithy and for Bunge useful: don’t skip levels. A theoretical explanation needs to account for the micro, mezzo, and macro, even if just in a cursory way.
Convergence on the other hand implies that two things are merged together. This can be more or less intentional. Sociology and anthropology converge at the cultural dimension of meaning and the model of structures. These modes of convergence do not produce novelty, instead they are ways of arriving at particular structural functions or changes through combination. Convergence tends then to describe the ways that we discuss financial structures that allow a large conglomerate to function or the sort of devices that will provide us with an infinite supply of reruns.
Scalable, planned interventions collide with the everyday knowledge of the field. Michael deCerteau famously framed this as the distinction between the strategic and the tactical.[24] James C. Scott used an analog of this insight in his critique of high modern social planning. Plans fail because the way that planners see for scale makes it almost impossible to comprehend the situation in the same way that people on the ground do. When we think about successful convergence, as expressed as a transmedia property, the result is the opposite of novelty. Exposition of an already existent novel story system is the most effective way to generate a return.
This is not to say that convergence cannot produce novel results, but that if the overt design of a system is to produce more of the same it seems unlikely that the conditions for novelty will be truly present.
What do you notice in this picture? A poorly placed sidewalk. The users of this environment have a clear preference to walk directly ahead, down the sidewalk that was once placed in this location. Now the sidewalk has been moved slightly people continue to walk where they want.
Desire lines exist in many places, you likely know of locations where the sidewalks were laid out as a grid where people would clearly prefer curves or angles. Robert Moor, reviewing the problem of desire lines, noted that the policy of Central Park in New York City had been to pave the desire lines: to use them as a guide to where sidewalks should go.[25] If they had followed this approach the park would have been filled with sidewalks. Purely emergent sidewalk design also fails. The question for designers: how can we balance the factors, honoring the desire of the users of a space without destroying the experience of it?
1.3.3 The Conditions of Possibility
A. The Simple Conditions
There is an important distinction to begin with between necessary and sufficient. Consider the development of a fire, it is necessary for fuel, a source of oxygen, and heat to be present for a fire to ignite. Remove any one of these three necessary elements and there are no longer are sufficient conditions for fire. Warmth and air are a summer day.
Developed by Immanuel Kant in book The Critique of Pure Reason, the conditions of possibility argument provide important resources for media research as it avoids the search for pure forms.[26] Instead of a metaphysical position that treats human sensory experience as secondary, Kant produced a system that allows sensation to be the primary focus of philosophy. Within the world of experience, Kant considers some experiences to be special, those that lift us up out of our normal perception – Slavoj Zizek proposes that these experiences are double, they are both sublime and disappointing as they remind us that we exist in a world of perception. Excavation of the conditions of possibility for the media present is an essential task for future studies. The following are two examples of this sort of analysis:
First, in his 2005 classic, Convergence Culture, Professor Henry Jenkins argues that new participatory cultures will be enabled by the convergence of media technologies.[27] When students encounter the book they are often quizzical: they live in a nearly completely converged world, the idea of medium specificity or a rigid break between the internet and the television is alien. Convergence is a fact of their lives, it did not have the positive and progressive implications described in the book.
What readers miss in the account of convergence culture is that the underlying drive would be that of a robust culture encountering lower barriers for interaction online. It was not the convergence of the devices that would have transformed social life, but the changing culture. Accounting for the forces within the convergence story is the reason why we assign this book to this day.
Second, it would be folly to say that all of the implications of convergence culture would have been possible if the culture had simply tried harder. Digital Non-Linear Editing software transformed the workflows of the contemporary media producer. Rapid, ubiquitous time-axis manipulation of video is remarkable and definitely necessary for the development of our current media culture. DNLE did not cause social change alone – it was merely a critical part.
In more concrete terms, the conditions of possibility for a thing are all the things that must be true for it to exist. A house with wooden studs requires a timber industry to produce materials, the entire chain of material operations necessary to make the house are required, but are not necessarily apparent in the consideration of the style of the windows. The conditions of possibility are often invisible and taken for granted.
Distinguishing between necessary and sufficient in this case assumes causation. Although metaphysical speculation is interesting and occasionally useful, for our purposes we can assume that there are causes and effects in this world. Causation is special, and mere correlation is blocked from taking on the power of a cause.
B. Episteme
This analysis of the procession of ostensibly invisible forms is apparent in discourse as well. In his remarkable book, The Order of Things, Michael Foucault describes an episteme, which investigates the discursive conditions of possibility for the present.[28] The layering of ideas and the progress of those ideas can also be excavated for analysis, this task is called genealogy. Foucauldian analysis asks the reader to consider the history of an idea and to take seriously the idea that one system of ideas can inflect another.
A powerful effect of this shift is the “death of the author.”[29] Roland Barthes criticized the romantic genius and the way that the idea of the author allows a search for a “secret, an ultimate meaning, to the text.”[30] This insight has been found in other communication fields as well, Ed Black in the critique of neoaristoelianism: we should judge speeches on the basis of their effect in circulation, not in the intention of the speaker.[31] The horizon of meaning must exceed individual intent.
Michael Foucault goes further to attack the institution of authorship and the privilege of the subject in producing text. This post-structural provocation is powerful, as many of the technologies considered in this book, and in communication research today, involve autopoesis – texts produced by automation. Think of the authorship of a Facebook feed – the means by which the feed you view was produced is the selective production filtered by relevance and recency of content created by a number of other people. The website/app load you experience is untouched by human hands: there was no author as such. This does not mean that the assumptions that were used to produce the program building are somehow non-human. At this point we tend to infuse the creators of systems like this with the romantic genius quality of the author. Characters like Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates replace Shakespeare.
Staging the larger debate about the role of structure and human agency is critical. Some scholars emphasize the profoundly human dimension of communication, framing research through the stories of people. This anthropological strand of communication research is important and stands in juxtaposition to the sociological strands that would focus on the mathematics of diffusion, or the critical/cultural which would decenter the story of the actor and the network for a genealogy of the discourses which made sense of both the network and the actors. The disciplinary matrix of Communication will be explored at length in another section of this book.
How we understand human agency is a profoundly important episteme.
C. Modal Logic
Necessity requires that something be not possibly false. Contingency would allow a conjecture that would be possibly true and false. Those claims which are truly necessary would be limited in the sense that that they would not include the conjectural information. Necessity is boring. Analytic results in general are powerful as they are restricted to simple qualities. The associated theory of positivism depends on the elimination of ambiguous or multiple signs. This presents an important limit on the use of analytic propositions for the study of communication.
If a connection to formal logic is desirable for you as a learner (or instructor) the theory proposed in this introduction would require a rigorous modal logic. Keep in mind, that we are not looking at single qualifiers, but hundreds of nested and reflexive logical structures. At some point, it will be necessary to suspend the expansion of the formation, this choice points toward the concern with infinite regression.
D. Modes of Proof
Mode of Reason Description
Deduction Working down from principles
Induction Working up from examples
Reduction to the absurd Working until the results are obviously wrong
Abduction Working with the probability that a claim is true
It is important to consider the kind of proof you are employing. For the most part, you use reduction and abduction in everyday life. Deduction and induction are useful for mathematical processes but are difficult to find in the real world. Much of contemporary argumentation theory offers ways of theorizing the various logical leaps that are made with abductive reason (more on this later).
1.3.4 Time and Temporality
When are we? I ask this question often of students, there are many satisfying answers. Some answers conceive of time as an objective thing. As the agents of the Federation Bureau of Temporal Investigations explain to a befuddled Captain Sisko, “time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.”[32] There is a powerful truth here: time as we perceive it is real (Time is a condition of possibility – it surely exists, and to consider what it is would be fully speculative) and some events are path dependent. You cannot have microcomputers without transistors. This is the time of chronos: when we are and how events process. At the same time, without the performative dimension of the initial public offering, the moment of the microcomputer revolution would be unmarked.
Kairos positions time as a point, this is the moment of now.[33] The means by which the moment is produced are central to communication theory as a whole. Time as a moment is inherently synthetic. Chronos continues to proceed even if we ignore it. Time telescopes as you get older, facts that you once knew that seemed fresh and important can become painfully dated. Consider the way that people talk about electricity generation. In the early nineties, it was a meaningful thing to say that the “technology isn’t ready yet.” If this is baked into your conception of the current moment you have missed decades of innovation. Underlying truisms about how electricity moves. Gone are the days of Enron engineered blackouts, which made sense as California would be an energy importer.[34] California now has been known to send solar energy out to avoid over-supply.[35] Publics often remain in moments long after the clock has moved on.
24/7, 365. A cliché intended to express that someone is continuously engaged or about an idea. The problem: there are more than twenty-four hours demarcated at any given moment on earth. Assuming that it is 1500 pacific daylight time on a Thursday, it is 1200 Friday on Teraina Island, and 1000 Thursday on Baker Island.[36] These times are GMT -12 and +14 respectively.
The standardization of time is a political process featuring precise engineering, not a scientific truism.
1.3.5 Probability
For the most part, students encountering this book will have been educated in a fairly standard model of frequentist probability. The basic dynamic presented is that of a random generator, usually presented as a fair coin, which then produces a string of results that are totally independent. Does a string of wins or losses mean anything in this context? No.
Instead of theorizing the probable in terms of a random device, increasingly the public is presented with dynamic scores that consider the probability of an event, given information, anterior and posterior to a new event that provides information. In an election, there is a likely winner and a likely loser. Adding new information like scandals or policy proposals can change the current probability of a win or loss.
The model for understanding the event of the upcoming election depends on an understanding of the relative durability of our assumptions. Adding new information, like a new poll, to the model would not change how we think of the race from a default position of 50/50, instead based on chronological time and the impending kairotic event, a score could be derived.
Simple probability of course remains, but is not particularly helpful in resolving the implications of multiple factors on a single relationship. If you are expecting probability to be handled in this book as the consideration of a pair of discrete outcomes, you will be lost. More on the mathematics and the Bayesian shift in Section four.
1.3.6 Speculative
A common adjunct term used in the discussion of the future is speculative. Dunne and Raby, in their book Speculative Everything, pose that speculative methods for design are intended to provide a grounded opportunity for the evaluation of potential worlds. Existing within the clear boundaries of the possible, speculation is intended to break the linkage between the probable and the plausible, allowing the consideration of the preferable.[37] Fantasy (and metaphysical speculation) are not particularly useful for speculative research.
Dunne and Raby take direction from Ricard Barbrook’s (known for his development of the Californian Ideology) position on future imagination, which begins with a consideration of the way that the image of the future has often been forgotten.[38] A limitless future had been promised repeatedly, none of the promises of current boosters are particularly unique.[39] In rhetorical studies, this appears in the use of the phrase “future anterior,” invoked as a device where a utopian future potential is leveraged against the present. This is in an important sense the inverse of “tarrying with the negative” where the scales of evaluation are shifted by the application of a nebulous negative value. Although Barbrook does not use this phrase in his writing, the critique comes through clearly in his descriptions of Bell Labs and the wildly optimistic presentations of participatory culture. The utopian promise of technology is always just around the corner, whether that is Walter Cronkite promising a world without hunger or swarms of robots making labor obsolete.
Among the central problems in the existing regime of design thought is the sort of vision employed by these organizations. Design has become a quick gloss for looking to aestheticize their products or plans. Those organizations have a high-modern sensibility which is intrinsically strategic – this idea already appears in the discussion of desire and communication. What speculative storytelling often does is emphasize the everyday dimension, the sort of experience that high modern imagination loses.
Speculative design is intended as a political program that can unmoor the tools of design as an academic pursuit from the rough docks of problem solving methods. Instead of a design theory that finds answers to questions posed by powerful institutions, speculation allows designers to find their own questions and to design for society, rather than a particular client. Problem solving is only one of a number of epistemic possibilities, speculation as much as it enables argumentation and debate, is an academic technology that can produce new knowledge in fruitful ways. It is not a new insight that design and argument are deeply linked, what is fascinating are the manifold of discourses presented to justify the lack of creativity in the design process itself.
Where the perspective by communication researchers differs from designers is that we generally are very interested in the ways that discourses would need to change to arrive at a possible future. It would be reasonable to conclude that communication is slightly more conservative in disciplinary outlook then design or architecture. It would also be reasonable to see this as a reflection of larger disciplinary coordinates, as communication is not locked into a problem-solving epistemology.
We should consider some of the methods for speculation proposed by Dunne and Raby:[40]
• Fictional worlds – literary and artistic contributions can challenge the stability of signs and promote new combinations
• Utopia/Dystopia – work through the ideas to either of the two extreme conclusions: the juxtapositions are productive
• Extrapolation – follow the dreams that lead to existing designs, let the dreams play out all the way to their conclusions
• Idea Stories – writing concepts as narratives; they use the example of red plenty (a new technological planned Soviet economy); use the narrative and look for resonances
• Thought Experiments – collide ideas in a non-narrative form, work with the abstraction of the formula
• Reduction to the Absurd – take the idea to the point that it fails and literalize it
• Counterfactuals – flip one of the actually flippable switches at a moment in history and suppose how that specific change would have affected the present
• What-ifs – flip one of the switches for the conditions of the present and work forward
The most important point: this is already how people work and think in design, the real reality is bracketed behind a discourse of problem-solving and reality that is itself a discourse. Speculation is powerful because it allows us to retake the imaginative language of design without being loaded into a static concept of reality. Within these categories play with the dimensions of narrative (concrete)/non-narrative (abstract), present experience/past memory/future expectation.
1.3.7 Virtual
Virtual does not refer to a device, be that goggles or a suit, but to the prospect of a synthetic perception. Brian Massumi, Canadian Communication professor and specialist in sensation and communication research, has argued that the virtual only exists in the combination of position and moment, as an effect of an endless loop of sensation, “When its effects are multiple, the virtual fleetingly appears. Its fleeting is in the cracks between and the surfaces around the images.”[41] Contemporary affect theory in communication has linked the physical, textual, and relational, “Affects are virtual synthetic perspectives anchored in (functionally limited by) the actually existing particular things that embody them.”[42] What does this mean? How you actually feel when you experience something matters. Your body and perspective are not barriers to understanding the world, they are the world. Andrew Murphie describes this as an enfolding, the multiple faces of what is ultimately a single surface.[43]
The virtual as a form of synthetic perception is deeply connected to the imagination. Once we establish a theory of virtuality that exceeds the sum of parts and perception, the analysis of the virtual comes to include physical and discursive considerations. Virtual worlds are then the worlds we inhabit as well as the imaginary worlds that we feel into possible existence. This book has an expansive orientation toward text, sensation, and technology because it is necessary.
1.3.8 Ideology
Ideology is a commonly used word, generally referring to a system of ideas that provide a coherence to thinking that exceeds the basic descriptive facts of the world. In this sense, everyone is ideological. If you were to remind someone that their world view was in a sense ideological they would likely be offended, there is a connotation in the term which supposes that an ideology is artificial. To consider what ideology is and why it is important, we should consider a few practical ideas.
How do we deal with people who have wrong perspectives? A straight-forward case here would be the consideration of individuals opposed to the vaccination of children. Vaccines are a safe and effective way to decrease the prevalence of infectious disease. The solution to non-vaccination would seem to be to challenge the ideology of the individuals, telling them that experts have determined that vaccination is safe. It must be that some bad piece of information is blocking their mind from arriving at the truth. Remove the bad block and they will think correctly. This doesn’t work. Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler’s research has been exemplary in demonstrating boomerang effects where seemingly ideology solving messages actually backfire, increasing the underlying belief.[44] What the seemingly crude theory of ideology misses is the idea that expertise, a form of backing that would be taken very seriously in some ideological frames, is negative in the conspiratorial frame of the anti-vaccine movement. Rather than operating as a bad idea that somehow clouds the mind, conspiracy discourse has a much richer symbolic life.
Conspiracy theories are a popular topic for research as they are a wicked problem for moving society forward. Jodi Dean, a leading political theorist, went as far as to ground the conspiracy as one of the foundational units for political analysis today.[45] The underlying structure of conspiracy includes the dominant duped view, which is maintained by a nefarious actor who knows secret information, that secret information would lead to a complete overturning of the dominant discourse. A participant in a conspiracy theory is not passive, they are actively working to reveal to you, the revealer the degree to which you are duped by ideology. Elizabeth Anker has argued that the dominant affective position of American politics is melodrama, of which conspiracy is a key form.[46] Conspiracy theories are both satisfying and practical. Qanon conspiracy discourses allow supporters of the Trump administration to incorporate bad news into their framework by inverting the roles of other characters in the drama.
If one wears a Q shirt to a rally and demands the release of the OIG report, they likely are aware of the controversy that is the Qanon conspiracy theory and have considered it as such. This is where Dean, citing Zizek and Sloterdjik, have formulated ideology as “enlightened false consciousness.”[47] People know that there are inconsistencies in their beliefs but they choose to continue. Ideology is not something that happens to people like a nightmare where they should be woken up, instead ideology is something people do for themselves to make their worlds. Ideological critique has languished in recent years as the mere identification of an ideology means very little and the application of new information likely doesn’t lead to attitude change.
This is not to say that attitude change is impossible, we have decreased tobacco and increased condom use, but that the underlying relationships around belief are not linear or based on simple delusion. Joshua Kalla and David Brockman have found that persuasion related to social issues, such as gay marriage, is possible but most effective when not tied to an impending political measure.[48] People are willing to have interesting conversations, as long as they are not motivated as such.
It also becomes clear why marketplace of ideas models fail – ideas are often mislabeled, mishandled, and the buyers are often also sellers already coming to market with strict shopping lists. Changing attitudes depends on affective change, a virtual dimension, that is much more interesting for our consideration of potential futures.
In the May 2012, New York Mayor Bloomberg proposed a ban on giant cups of soda. The reasoning: the consumption of sweetened beverages is a public health problem, if people were made to “double-fist” their nectar they might drink less. You could still buy a ton of soda, it would just be less convenient. The push back was intense: limiting people to 16 ounce cups was a major loss of freedom. Eventually, the regulation was struck down as exceeding the authority of the department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
Behavior change is important, especially in the context of population health. If a substance is truly dangerous it is highly regulated. Tobacco and alcohol are good examples here. What do we do with times when the case for regulation isn’t so clear or when an overt ban would be heavy handed? Cass Sunstein (a law professor) and Richard Thaler (a behavioral economist) proposed a theory called libertarian paternalism where instead of overt strong prohibitions on conduct a series of small changes in design called nudges could be employed to subtly change behavior.[49] Changes in “choice architecture” could lead to different results by manipulating: defaults, expected error, action mapping, feedback mechanisms, layouts, and incentives.[50] If one were to simply change the context around the individual, they would make the “right” choice. What is striking here is the resonance between this position and the crude theory of ideology. There are many times when better designed systems can produce better results, but those situations will rarely align with practical politics or the leverage of the state.
1.3.9 Accelerationism
Just as the futurist aesthetic challenges the provincialism of slowness, vegetation, and romanticism, the accelerationists now challenge the axiological assumptions about slowness, stillness, embodiment, mindfulness (and many others) of contemporary theory. The accelerationist turn calls for the assessment of the choice to decelerate and the theoretical constructions associated with traditional humanistic critique. A key reference point in the literature on accelerationism is the Marxian claim that capitalism collapses because of its own internal contradictions, the dependence of accelerationism on this foundation is also contested.[51] Why would this point matter? If we have some predictable end point to social process, it would seem reasonable that if we could engineer that process to accelerate could be beneficial. The inevitable collapse narrative is convenient, but misses the key point made by Friedrich Pollock that as market systems strain under their own contradictions they tend to become authoritarian fusions that he calls “state capitalism.”[52] Depending on which core classes you have taken, you can see a lurking debate about the nature of social theory developing here.
Without the broader consideration of social theory, we could also see accelerationism as the choice to embrace contemporary technology. Once the choice is made to embrace technology, the study of the internal structure of capitalism as it is, abstraction, and acceleration, the range of possibilities for both research and politics dramatically increase. Williams and Strnick’s “#Accelerate – Manifesto for an accelerationist politics,” poses a different accelerationist future. The traditional points for the critique of the human sciences as romantic returns to what is increasingly a fantasy world. The future is taken by those who actively deploy the tools of modernity toward their own ends:
To do so, the Left must take advantage of every technological and scientific advance made possible by capitalist society. We declare that quantification is not an evil to be eliminated, but a tool to be used in the most effective manner possible.
The tools found in social network analysis, agent-based modeling, big data analytics, and non-equilibrium economic models, are necessary cognitive mediators for understanding complex systems like the modern economy. The accelerationist Left must become literate in these technical fields.[53]
The left in the context of this extended block quote can just as easily mean humanists or social scientists or artists. For many years, it was fashionable to critique computational means of thought production and then a necessary defense for meaningful theoretical structures. Today, these moves keep academic debates frozen in time. Among the most important ideas to move beyond is the critique of mastery, the idea that the claim to use technology in a quantitative project was something of a claim to fully represent the world and control that representation.[54] Researchers need to be good with technology. Future media students need to deploy a combination of theoretical, cultural, and technical methods, they don’t need a sophisticated list of excuses for why they don’t know how to do things.
More metaphysically, Nick Land, a key accelerationist theorist, argues that the accelerationist moment is a feedback loop.[55] By unleashing cybernetic power the accelerationist turn could potentially enable the singularity, which is the concept that a powerful enough computer could allow the uploading of all intelligence into a single artificial meta-structure.[56] The question of the desirability of assimilation into a collective is another question entirely. For advocates of singularity, the prospect of brain-computer interfacing is exciting as it transforms the condition of possibility of embodiment. For those opposed, it is embodiment itself that is the heart of the human condition. At the same time, only the artificial intelligence of capable of producing the singularity can truly be said to be sufficient to cause such an event. It is entirely possible that brain-computer interfacing will never reach this level – more on this in section three.
Accelerationism can provide three important insights:
• If we assume that social processes are knowable and predictable, their engineered outcomes, if positive should be hastened. Fatalism is a choice made by humanists and social scientists, not a necessity.
• Humanistic critique often relies on implicit value assumptions that intrinsically conservative, and should be challenged or inverted.
• The possibility of a wildly divergent future with an alternative cosmology.
1.3.10 Simulation
The prospect that reality is an illusion has a long history across many human cultures. Sensation is not satisfying, there must be some other reality out there. Make no mistake, this is not a claim that the physical world does not exist, but that there is no higher essence that could somehow be beyond the world as we understand it.
Jean Baudrillard provocatively claimed that “the Iraq War did not take place.”[57] What he meant by this was not that there was no military conflict in Iraq, but that role of media performance in the war was such that it produced a new reality of war, a virtual world where one experiences the war through the vision of a military system attacking a building. The kinds of wars, and seemingly spectacular yet invisible costs, could dramatically recalibrate the choice to engage in armed conflict. At the highest level, this forms a simulacrum, a symbolic world more real than reality.[58] Escape is not an option, there is no way out of language, the alternative is to critique the most pernicious forms within our simulation. In opposition to the central thesis of accelerationism, that there is an end point that can be approached to history or a system of symbols, Baudrillard reminds us that there is no end point. History is always already in the dustbin as we are continuously remaking it, there is no end point that we are moving toward: just more discourse.
The most popular simulation topic today comes in the form of the simulation argument. Presented in this form by Nick Bostrom, we are asked to consider the possibility that we are currently living in a simulation. The essential premise of this argument is that it is likely that a highly technically advanced civilization would have seemingly infinite computing power.[59] From this point, the prospect that a civilization could run an ancestor simulation (a realistic virtual world that we are a part of) is possible, assuming that the processes by which such a civilization would come to pass would not be entirely self-destructive. Bostrom is thus not arguing directly that we live in a simulation, but that we should consider the conditions of possibility for arriving at the state of post-humanity where we might have seemingly infinite computing power.
Existential risk, the prospect that humanity or any human like civilization could be destroyed, becomes a central concern for the evaluation of possible futures.[60] HG Wells consideration in Professors or Foresight wanted, was the new technologies obliterated distance, it was not that a utopia of infinite communication was coming, but that the new technologies heralded new destructive possibilities. Simulation provides us a framework for considering what the world could and should be.
In a more concrete sense, deepfakes are a profound immanent problem. Deepfakes use neural nets to map images and sounds together.[61] Primarily used for the production of pornography, deep fakes allow the simulation of what would be real material. The status of photographic evidence has already been in decline for many years, the deep fake transitions from the world of the singular fake to the entire moving vivacious simulated fake. The reason why deep fakes are so vexing for the public sphere is their ability to fully break the chain of the indexical trace. Phillip Rosen argued that the fundamental quality of images in the public sphere is their capacity to providing evidence of having been there – that there was something real and evidence of action that could exist.[62] Metaphysical games are fun, pragmatic questions about the status of evidence in court point toward the danger of simulation.
Simulation is important in three ways:
• Philosophy has been concerned with the feeling that this is all an illusion or simulation for thousands of years: this is a foundational idea. These are tightly bound up with questions of the meaning of life, hope/despair, genesis/apocalypse.
• People are often searching for some trace of perception that is a life-line to the “real” world. No such connections exist.
• Simulations can appear to be more real than reality, are quite useful; dangerous.
1. Derek Thompson, “The History of Sears Predicts Nearly Everything Amazon Is Doing,” The Atlantic, September 25, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/business...amazon/540888/. ↵
2. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization and Perception of Time and Space (University of California Press, 1986). ↵
3. Manuel De Landa, Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason (London; New York, NY: Continuum, 2011). ↵
4. Dean Burnett, “Jetpacks: Here’s Why You Don’t Have One | Dean Burnett,” The Guardian, September 23, 2014, sec. Science, https://www.theguardian.com/science/...nce-scientists. ↵
5. John Peters, “Democracy and Mass Communication Theory: Dewey, Lippmann, Lazarsfeld,” Communication 11, no. 3 (1989): 199–220. ↵
6. H G Wells, “Wanted – Professors of Foresight!,” October 1, 2018. ↵
7. F.T. Martinetti, “We Abjure Our Symbolist Masters, The Last Lovers of the Moon,” in Futurism: An Anthology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 94. ↵
8. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Reprint. edition (Harper, 1975). ↵
9. Nick Statt, “Zuckerberg: ‘Move Fast and Break Things’ Isn’t How Facebook Operates Anymore,” CNET, accessed October 2, 2018, https://www.cnet.com/news/zuckerberg...erate-anymore/. ↵
10. This book is a fascinating achievement that covers much of the same potential ground as this book. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “The Relationship of Federal to Local Authorities,” in Toward the Year 2000: Work in Progress (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). ↵
11. Moynihan, 1. ↵
12. Moynihan, “The Relationship of Federal to Local Authorities.” ↵
13. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Harvard University Press, 2012). ↵
14. James W. Carey and John J. Quirk, “The Mythos of the Electronic Revolution,” The American Scholar 39, no. 3 (1970): 395–424 ↵
15. The critique of McLuhan’s utopianism appears in Bell’s work as well. ↵
16. Mosco, Vincent, The Digital Sublime (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006). ↵
17. Phillip Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2006). ↵
18. Ibid, 76. ↵
19. Ibid, 143. ↵
20. Ibid, 215. ↵
21. Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable Fragility", 2nd ed. (New York: Random House, 2010). ↵
22. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2014). The assumptions of order and natality are among the most important reasons for the continuation of psychoanalysis as a field. ↵
23. Mario Bunge, Emergence and Convergence: Qualitative Novelty and the Unity of Knowledge (University of Toronto Press, 2015). ↵
24. De Certeau, Micheal, The Practice of Everyday Life, 2nd ed. (Berkley: University of California Press, 2002). ↵
25. “Tracing (and Erasing) New York’s Lines of Desire | The New Yorker,” accessed October 2, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annal...ines-of-desire. ↵
26. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (Verso, 1989), 203. ↵
27. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, n.d. ↵
28. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (Routledge, 2005). ↵
29. Michael Foucault, “What Is an Author?” (Lecture, 1969). ↵
30. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Jonathan Cape (Paris: Noonday Press, 1991). ↵
31. Edwin Black, Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method (Univ of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 75. ↵
32. “‘Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’ Trials and Tribble-Ations (TV Episode 1996) - IMDb,” accessed October 2, 2018, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708655/. ↵
33. John Durham Peters, “Calendar, Clock, Tower” (Media in Transition 6, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2009), web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit6/papers/peters.pdf. ↵
34. Julian Borger, “Tapes Reveal Enron’s Secret Role in California’s Power Blackouts,” The Guardian, February 5, 2005, sec. Business, https://www.theguardian.com/business...5/enron.usnews. ↵
35. Ivan Penn, “California Invested Heavily in Solar Power. Now There’s so Much That Other States Are Sometimes Paid to Take It,” www.latimes.com, accessed October 2, 2018, http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-f...tricity-solar/. ↵
36. Spend some time looking at this time zone map and it will become clear that time zones are political. https://www.timeanddate.com/time/map/
37. Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming (MIT Press, 2013), 5.p 5 ↵
38. Richard Barbrook, Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village (Pluto, 2007), 8; Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, “The Californian Ideology,” Science as Culture 6, no. 1 (1995): 44–72. imaginary futures, 8 ↵
39. Barbrook, Imaginary Futures, 243. ↵
40. Dunne and Raby, Speculative Everything, 67–88. ↵
41. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 133. 133 ↵
42. Massumi, 35. ↵
43. Andrew Murphie, “Putting the Virtual Back into VR,” in A Shock to Thought: Expression After Deleuze (New York: Routledge, 2002), 188–215. ↵
44. Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler, “When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions,” Political Behavior 32, no. 2 (June 1, 2010): 303–30, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-010-9112-2. ↵
45. Dean, Jodi, Publicity’s Secret (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002). ↵
46. Elisabeth R. Anker, Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom (Duke University Press, 2014). ↵
47. The key idea in the psychoanalytic critique of ideology is to acknowledge that people are often actively participating in the reproduction of a discourse, they are not duped by ideology, they are manufacturers of it. As a theoretical construct, this compliments the social science research and provides a forward looking sense of the narrative structure around ideology today. Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology; Dean, Jodi, Publicity’s Secret. ↵
48. Joshua Kalla and David E. Broockman, “The Minimal Persuasive Effects of Campaign Contact in General Elections: Evidence from 49 Field Experiments,” SSRN Scholarly Paper (Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, September 25, 2017), https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3042867. ↵
49. Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Penguin, 2009). ↵
50. Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein, and John P. Balz, “Choice Architecture,” SSRN Scholarly Paper (Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, April 2, 2010), http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1583509. ↵
51. This introduction is an essential resource for understanding accelerationism. Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian, “Introduction,” in #Accellerate: An Accellerationist Reader (Fairmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2014). ↵
52. Friedrich Pollock, “State Capitalism: It’s Possibilities and Limitations,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Arato and Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 1985). ↵
53. Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, “#Accellerate,” in #Accellerate: The Accellerationist Reader (Fairmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2014). ↵
54. Williams and Srnicek, 360. ↵
55. Nick Land, “Teloplexy,” in #Accellerate: The Accellerationist Reader (Fairmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2014). ↵
56. “The Singularity Is Near » Homepage,” accessed October 2, 2018, http://singularity.com/. ↵
57. Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (Indiana University Press, 1995). ↵
58. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (University of Michigan Press, 1994). ↵
59. Nick Bostrom, “Are You Living in a Simulation?,” Philosophical Quarterly 53, no. 211 (2003): 243–55. ↵
60. Nick Bostrom, “Existential Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios,” Journal of Evolution and Technology 9, no. 1 (2002), https://nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html. ↵
61. “How ‘Deep Fakes’ Became Easy — And Why That’s So Scary,” Fortune, September 11, 2018, http://fortune.com/2018/09/11/deep-fakes-obama-video/. ↵
62. Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). ↵ | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/New_Media_Futures_(Faltesek_and_Adams)/1.01%3A_Theorizing_the_Future.txt |
Section 2 – Where change is unlikely
Somethings do not change. Consider the humble triangle. For all triangles including a right angle, formula a^2 + b^2 = c^2. For Euclidian geometries, this formula describes the length of the sides of that triangle. Unless there are dramatic changes in the Universe, triangles will continue to have three sides, three angles, and operate according to some very simple rules.
The items in this section are intended to provide a foundation that allows us to understand the conditions of possibility for the discussion of things that can change, or will change. Some of these items may seem bizarre – they are included because of the extensive virtual horizon of media moving forward, this book is intended for classes that consider headsets, bodysuits, and brain-computer interfaces just as seriously, or likely more seriously, than they consider the design of a front page of the paper for the Dodgers winning the World Series.
Each sub-point in this section will identify something that is unlikely to change, some important basic information about it, and the practical consideration of how that unchanging property impacts your world.
2.1 The Electro-Magnetic Spectrum
NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) provides this handy chart:
The spectrum extends all the way from the long waves of radio through the short waves of positron imaging and background radiation in the universe. When you screw the coaxial cable into your cable port for your television or modem you are attaching a metal conductor for a radio signal.
All electromagnetic radiation is similar, taking this block quote from NASA:
Electromagnetic radiation can be described in terms of a stream of mass-less particles, called photons, each traveling in a wave-like pattern at the speed of light. Each photon contains a certain amount of energy. The different types of radiation are defined by the amount of energy found in the photons. Radio waves have photons with low energies, microwave photons have a little more energy than radio waves, infrared photons have still more, then visible, ultraviolet, X-rays, and, the most energetic of all, gamma-rays.“[1]
Why do we care about this then? Almost all of our contemporary image media and network driven technologies depend on the spectrum. All optical media are spectrum dependent: light interacting with paint and screens both rely on the same underlying spectrum dynamics of color.
Does that mean that your microwave is dangerous?
No. Your microwave uses a faraday cage to contain its electromagnetic energy. The same cages are useful for computer security – a faraday bag is important for containing suspicious electronic devices, and faraday cages protect electrical equipment.[2] What is the magic here? A web of metallic bars or strands.
This will not change in your lifetime. The fundamental units of all systems will be somewhere on the spectrum.
2.1.1 Scarcity
Consider a car radio, as you drive away from a city the signal from your favorite vaporwave station becomes weaker and weaker as you move away until you can no longer hear it at all. Of course, such a hip station would use the FM method of encoding as it allows greater fidelity to the original (it sounds better). At that point, you might switch to an AM station from that same city which carries broadcasts of stand-up comedy. As you approach the next city you may find the same frequencies on which you enjoyed vaporwave and jokes carry jazz and sports. In any given place, there cannot be two transmissions on the same frequency. The waves cancel each other out: this is a key property of waves.
The principle of scarcity is so important that it is the basis of broadcasting law. In RTNDA v. Red Lion, the Supreme Court made clear that the scarcity of broadcast spectrum allowed the restraint of speech using radio.[3] Deciding what would be carried on a rivalrous channel over the air would be a matter of public concern. In the Tornillo decision, the Supreme Court found the opposite in the case of newspaper: unlike a radio station they are not rivalrous.[4] Economic, rather than electromagnetic, justifications for restriction run afoul of the first amendment.
This is also the basis of policy discussion in the context of net neutrality. Although at the upper end of utilization bandwidth through the internet may have a physical limit, for most intents and purposes it is a non-rivalrous resource. Advocates of net neutrality contend that such an important electromagnetic service should be considered under the same legal regime as telephone service: as a common carrier. Opponents contend that operators of internet systems should be allowed to recoup additional funds from heavy users of the infrastructure and that they may have a first amendment interest in editing the flow of information. More on this will appear in a later section as policy and network shaping technology are highly likely to change, what is unlikely to change is the rivalrous scarcity of bandwidth.
At this university, this course comes after a course on political economy and legal theory of new media, for those of you reading this without such a course this 2×2 matrix can be very helpful.
Rivalrous Non-Rivalrous
Excludable Private Goods: single use experiences or things. Food. Club Goods: traditional cable television, concerts.
Non-Excludable Common Goods: Goods that can be exhausted but are not easily controlled, open pasture land, oceans. Public Goods: Ideas and other things that are not used up and are for everyone: ideas, air.
2.1.2 Optics
Light sources emit many photons on many wavelengths in many directions. A bright light source could be more clearly organized by the use of a lens that would organize the light created by the source. The Fresnel Lens is a great example of this. The ridges of the lens allow the light passing through to be organized to flow in a coherent direction.[5] Light can also be focused with a conventional concave lens. The lens on your camera is condenses the light that reaches it into a coherent beam that lands on some kind of sensor or film. When you consider this in the context of the light being electro-magnetic energy, it makes sense why you should not take a picture of the sun. All of the energy that the sun emits is scattered, the camera (or your eye for that matter) uses a lens to focus energy. All sensors in cameras, to be addressed later in this section, are energy collectors.
Polarizing filters use very fine lines to block the flow of unorganized light to a source, this is useful as it can dramatically reduce glare. This is why polarizing sunglasses may not allow you to see your phone, and is how transparent glass 3D systems are able to separate channels for the viewer.
Light can also be split apart into discrete wavelengths. A prism reveals the colors within white light, while mass spectrometer allows you to see which colors are absorbed or reflected by a particular object. This has a number of implications for how we understand the design of cameras, displays, and paints.
There are two ways that we can understand primary colors: additive and subtractive. Most students in this course will be familiar with subtractive theories of color. These theories contend that with a certain number of basic colors (primaries) all other colors can be produced. Typically, these are presented as red, yellow, and blue or more technically as cyan, magenta, and yellow. The base off-set printing process uses CMYK (where K is black).[6] Tiny dots of these colors could then be made and printed in proximity, which is perceived as a field of color. These different inks would absorb some frequencies of light while reflecting others. This is the subtractive primary base, as more colors are added the reflection profile of the material will move toward black.
Additive primaries exist in light itself. These primaries are red, blue, and green. The absence of light is black, while the presence of all lights is white. Each of these theories is meaningful and correct, they simply describe different optical properties of different media as they interact with light.
2.2 World Systems
World systems theory sees the collection of countries, geographies, and cultures as an evolving system over time. This approach is helpful for our analysis because it views these large institutions as a continuously evolving system, rather than historically specific units.[7] Studies of the future of media in this state system would call for the evaluation of core-periphery distinction, the flow of materials between countries, shifting frameworks for the interpretation of events and flows.
The inclusion of world systems here is not intended as a conservative note, but one that calls for rigor. Some of the weakest predictions that have come through popular media studies in recent years are those that underestimate the staying power of the state as a form of human organization. We make states because they are useful for doing things that we want with people who may have common cause with us. Some of the hardest won lessons of the last few years have been that new media technologies do not “laugh” at powerful institutions as some authors supposed in the 1990s that they would, but that they are often twisted to support the status quo.[8]
It is also important not to limit our consideration here to the state: large corporations, transnational activist groups, publics/counter-publics, trans-state organizations, militaries, and terrorist groups just to name a few are actors in this system. They are not going away. Facebook will not replace the government. Trade wars, a rising threat at the time of this writing, prove the power of the state over the economy and technology and the power of technology and economy to shape the state. Government should always be in your consideration of the future.
2.2.1 Geography
There will continue to be scarce resources and geographic barriers to the movement of people and things.
As of the time of this writing, one element that may appear to be unlikely to change is the distribution of rare earths, such as neodymium, which is critical for building magnets. It is important to note that rare earths are not actually rare, they are only seen as rare because of the negative externalities of mining and the sure cost of sorting through huge amounts of soil.[9] The rare earths are the lanthanides, which are just above the exciting radioactive actinides section of your handy periodic table. The things we use these technologies for, like MOSFET transistors are highly unlikely to change. How will we find the political will to secure our necessary supplies of these materials in a responsible way?
The ways that the configuration of space on earth shapes possibility should not be understated, many discourses organize the understanding of space and time on the basis of the physical layout of mountains, lakes, oceans, and many other physical forms. Geographic forms are interposed into other political discourses which then become co-productive.[10] What does that mean? Mountains may not change, the ways that we talk about manipulating mountains will.
2.2.1.1 Undersea Cables
Former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens is frequently lambasted for his remark that:
And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes.[11]
This was initially intended as an argument that the internet was rivalrous, but the deeper point is worth thinking about: the internet is a physical thing. Among the most important reminders of this is the undersea network of cables that make up the backbone of the internet.
Edward Snowden revealed in his 2013 document dump with wikileaks that the National Security agency had tapped into the cable landings of other countries. Consider this map:
Figure 2.3:TeleGeography Submarine Cable Map: https://www.submarinecablemap.com
There are a finite number of good points where cables would be connected between countries, sniffing at these key points would allow a state actor to see a great number of messages. With that information, they could see to their national defense or provide their industries an advantage over those in other countries. From the other side, such points present key weaknesses. Cable cutting subs would sever these links in the first moments of a war. In other conflicts, military use of public telecommunications infrastructure has been a critical vulnerability.
2.2.1.2 Satellites
If physical linkages are not possible one important way of linking distant areas involves routing the signal up and away from the surface of the planet. Satellites are already a key form of logistical media, they allow your navigation system to know where it is, and process television signals.
Compared with links to fiber optic or coaxial cables, satellite transmissions require more power, are slower, and more expensive.[12] At one point Facebook commissioned blimps that would fly and produce conductivity across the surface.[13] Access to a nation’s sovereign airspace is no small matter, and the risk the distant service might displace the development of local infrastructures is quite real. At the end of the day, the local spatial fix that could be created through control of the telecommunication infrastructure outweighed the idea of the quick, cheap, foreign access point.
Beyond cable cutting, among the first major acts of the next World War will include the use of anti-satellite weapons, either with ground based systems, other satellites as weapons. The world of ubiquitous satellite access is a result of a lack of major interstate conflict, not technical necessity or inevitability.
2.2.1.3 Other Transmitters
All linkages depend on some interaction with a transmitter. The spectrum is limited, with different bands assigned for different uses.
Radio transmitters and receivers, like those in your cell phone, allow you a great deal of access to information. Transmitters will continue to be critical infrastructure. Any method that does not involve transmitters, would involve shifts in the laws of physics or biology that are well beyond this book, or the society where people would read it.
2.3 Transistors
The digital revolution depends on the transistor – a semi-conductive device that allows the solid state encoding of logic gates (they can also be used as amplifiers). For the most part, the transistors we are interested use a field effect. Before we get into the discussion of operators, it is useful to think about the two kinds of transistors: P and N. In order to augment the electrical properties of the semiconductors already used in transistor, specific materials can be added that change those electrical responses.[14] In the case of P doping, the region in the middle of the potentially conductive zone is treated with a material that will further react when exposed to a proximal electrical field. The P transistor will then turn off an underlying flow. An N doped semiconductor will turn it on.
At first you might think that this is a fairly low level innovation, these seem to be simple switches that express binary logic. What is powerful about these systems is that they can be produced in massive volumes at incredibly low prices. Replacing expensive vacuum tubes, transistors made it possible to build many more processing systems than were possible before. Even better, transistor based processors were so affordable that general purpose processors could replace specially built electronics in many cases. Transistors make software possible.
The design of logical operators is highly unlikely to change. All computationally legible information can be represented using transistor states of A/B. These are described through truth tables.
The following are descriptions of key logic gates:
AND
A B Output
0 0 0
0 1 1
1 0 1
1 1 1
In terms of practical transistor design, an AND gate requires two switches aligned in a series. Only if both switches are on will the current flow.
*To read these circuit diagrams, you can see inbound voltages from v, A or B. In these diagrams I see the world as nMOS, meaning that switches are flipped on by A or B, the voltage is aways present with v.
OR
A B Output
0 0 0
0 1 1
1 0 1
1 1 1
In terms of practical transistor design, the switches are parallel. If either switch is on the current will flow. The problem, is that we cannot easily distinguish between the values A and B. Either could be on.
As you can see, the operator OR is not particularly revealing, which leads to the gate XOR
A B Output
0 0 0
0 1 1
1 0 1
1 1 0
The principle of functional completeness, supposes that there are two gates that are functionally complete: NAND and NOR: all other gates can be constructed using either of these. NAND supposes that two inputs result in one…
A B Output
0 0 1
0 1 1
1 0 1
1 1 0
The transistor setup for the NAND gate is quite straight forward as the current would always be flowing across the active region of a P doped transistor. One of the trickier ideas here – how would a NAND gate produce a NOT gate? If both leads of a transistor were lead into a single input, the presence of that input would produce a 0 outbound signal. The leads of the transistor do not necessarily need to run to the same place.
The complement would be a NOR gate…
A B Output
0 0 1
0 1 0
1 0 0
1 1 0
Notice the critical idea here: there are four transistors combined into a single circuit which includes both a NAND and a NOR, instead of the binary logic here being on/off the circuit encodes high/low. When both P type transistors block, the flow creating the NAND, the path for the NOR is opened.
Why is this such a powerful technology?
At first it might appear that the reduction of all information to binary might appear difficult and confusing. What is important to understand is that binary states rely on the same processing algorithms that you rely on every day. Consider binary addition, it relies on the same process that you use for adding any other numbers, the difference is that you carry the 1 whenever the sum is more than 1.
Notice that I am not required to carry until bit 3, where 1+1=0; carry the 1. In Bit 6 we see the next step where 1+1=0 carry the 1, but we have already carried a one, thus the result is one. Subtraction follows a similar process. On the level of the transistor, mathematical tasks become simple combinations of on and off.
Transistors and logic gates offer the brute force necessary for the simulation of any specific operation.
The underlying principle of semiconductivity is highly unlikely to change, the alternatives to existing semiconducting technologies in terms of semiconduction still rely on the Boolean logic of transistors, meaning that the core of the idea is likely here for the long haul. Beyond that, it is unlikely that quantum computers, spintronics or other such technologies can replace the signal amplification role of the transistor, after all, the transistor did not replace the vacuum tube.[15] Quantum computing is interesting, and could begin to supplant the transistor binary paradigm, but the technology is far further away than is generally acknowledged.[16] The period of time between the transistor and Facebook was over fifty years.
This should remind you of Gitelman and Pingree’s axiom: new media do not completely replace the old, they resituate and define the use of the others.[17] Moving forward we can use these ideas to understand other technologies and the possible limits of computation in understanding – the magical innovation of the digital is the possibility that all information could be quantized and processed through logic gates.
Summary:
• Transistors are durable, they have no moving parts.
• Moore’s Law: we are always finding ways to put transistors into a smaller space, at affordable prices.
• Uniform fields of transistors enable high-level abstractions. These abstractions are what we call software.
2.3.1 Heat
All circuits produce heat. Electricity is the movement of electrons and that physical motion really exists. Bitcoin miners struggle with adequate supplies of electricity, both for their systems and for their cooling. Integrated circuits include resistors, which intentionally deal with excess voltages as heat. Heat further increases resistance, which can cause other problems as well. Quantum computers, and high precision imaging transistors, must be kept cold. Dissipating heat is the essential task for design of new systems.
2.3.2 Abstractions
Many of our emerging technologies depend on augmenting layers of transistors. Understanding how those systems work and how they translate information into a meaningful form is absolutely essential for understanding the future. The transistor and the qubit mean little if there is no language to implement instructions on them. Even then, there is already vast computing power available. Aside from the calculation of np-hard problems, it is hard to see what new classes of operations will appear in this era. The most likely answer is that the kinds of abstractions that could be processed will go far further. This term will appear in another section, but it is useful to think of it now: the digital refers to the production of fast, useful abstractions.
2.4 Humans and Sensations
This section is not intended to defend the idea of humanism, but to say that the critical subject of this book is people. Those people have sensations. The questions of how those sensations can be produced and reproduced. In this section, we are concerned with understanding basic human physiological structures and the basic physics, chemistry, and biology of perception. Special attention will be paid to the idea of standardization, meaning the question of how we map different physical inputs into a sensation and what result may or may not be registered. This is a particularly powerful element of the analysis of the virtual as we must account for the ways that meaning can be actually produced.
Note that this is limited to a fairly banal conception of five senses. This section of this book is intended to concern that which is highly unlikely to change, so ideas like expanded senses and ambient awareness are in section three of this book.
2.4.1 Hearing
The sense of hearing is the result of the complex processing of vibrations, primarily, in the cochlea of the human ear. This typically responds to a frequency range 20-20,000 hertz.[18] Younger people may hear higher pitches than older people.
Sound as we know it is a longitudinal wave. The mechanics of a wave like this are slightly different than light waves, but can be described in similar terms. An energy source, like a speaker or a voice produces an energy wave that then travels through a medium to reach a reception point. Energy can move around this space and be reflected back at the source.
This is the acoustic envelope. Any sound has an attack, the initial moment when the sound is produced, a time where it is sustained, and the end where it decays and is released. This is an important idea for understanding both sound and sound processing. The envelope represents a sound as an energetic moment, within that moment the elements of the wave can be further manipulated. If an entire envelope is heard in a reflection with a complete attack, it is called an echo. When the wave interacts with the sustain of a prior envelope it is called reverb.
When different waves interact, they can form what is called a standing wave where the energy of the two is merged. It is also possible that a wave could cancel out the other if it is out of phase with the original.
There are two dimensions we should consider: the frequency of a sound and the energy level. The core note of the piano is Middle C with the A of a Viola at 440. Your instructor will likely use a frequency generator to produce some of these tones and harmonics. If they do not, you should be using a program like garage band or just playing around with the random pianos that seem to be around college dorms to think about these concepts.
The energy of sound is expressed in decibels. This is a logarithmic scale meaning that an increase of ten decibels is one hundred times the energy level. Thus, if an employer were to break the 84 dB threshold for hearing protection in an environment by a few dB it is a massive increase in energy level.
Reflections may be adjusted. Sounds can be absorbed. An anechoic chamber uses large absorptive wedges to eliminate sound. Sound can also be diffused by these wedges. Contact with a surface with a great number of cleavages allows the wave to impact over time. This is critical. Once the wave is broken into many smaller reflections in different time frames the total sound is dramatically reduced.
Reflection can be used strategically in designing spaces that would be advantageous for superior reflection, like a lecture hall. Among the reasons why people enjoy singing in the shower is the propensity for the small space with parallel walls to form standing waves, further the humid air of shower has greater impulse than dry air in the world. This is an important point: sound waves propagate differently depending on the medium.
Objects producing sounds are also limited by their resonance frequencies. If one plucks a string, the wave length is constrained by the total length of the string. Of course, harmonics may operate on different intervals, but the fundamental frequency of the sound will remain the same.
A barbershop quartet is a fascinating study in harmonics. If you listen to a group with a few singers you can hear more tones than should be present. Why? Because harmonics form between the frequencies where the singers are.
How is this translated into the brain? The human takes in sound through the cochlea, either received as vibration of the creature directly, or through a system of bones in the ear which is then processed in the inner ear by the cochlea. Shera, Guinan, Oxenham describe the role of the inner ear:
The mammalian cochlea acts as an acoustic prism, mechanically separating the frequency components of sound so that they stimulate different populations of sensory cells. As a consequence of this frequency separation, or filtering, each sensory cell within the cochlea responds preferentially to sound energy within a limited frequency range. In its role as a frequency analyzer, the cochlea has been likened to a bank of overlapping bandpass filters, often referred to as “cochlear filters.” The frequency tuning of these filters plays a critical role in our ability to distinguish and perceptually segregate different sounds. For instance, hearing loss is often accompanied by a degradation in cochlear tuning, or a broadening of the cochlear filters. Although quiet sounds can be restored to audibility with appropriate hearing-aid amplification, the loss of cochlear tuning leads to pronounced, and as yet largely uncorrectable, deficits in the ability of hearing-impaired listeners to extract meaningful sounds from background noise.[19]
The research from which this quote was extracted concerns the understanding of the critical band of the cochlea, where the ear may actually interpret signal. This would play a critical role in understanding what kinds of filters and sound modifications could be conducted. It would make little sense to increase the volume of what could not be heard in the first place.
Much of what we would understand to be semantically meaningful activity takes place in the relatively low end of this band. Voices can be understood by slicing out 250-1000 hertz. Once activated a relatively small number of neurons interact with the hair cells, indicating a tone at a particular point. Sound perception is limited to the particular bands where the hairs are capable of processing a vibration.
Sound is standardized through the frequency, envelope, and energy level. Special forms of sound organization that take place over time and through the organization of tones is called music. The schemes by which we organize tones are highly likely to change.
2.4.2 Vision
Vision, in humans, relies on the retina to interpret light focused by the lens. This information is then relayed through optic nerve to the brain, it is processed by a number of regions. Although the exact process by which recognition of particular forms is still unknown, the brain appears to first process edges and then to work among multiple sets of edges to form an image.[20]
On the level of the retina, there are two distinct receptors: rods and cones. Rods are distributed outside the central fovea and have little role in color, they are highly sensitive.[21] Cones are found in the foveal region.
Cones are far more responsive, detecting color. There are three kinds of cones: S, M, and L which appear to be associated with different perceptions.
Rod sensitivity peaks between S and M. Each cone cell has a single line to the optic nerve, rods[22] It is important to note that there are far more L and M cones than S.[23] The receptors of the retina are thus all receiving some particular color, it is not that the cones see color while the rods do not. The resolution of the retina is roughly 150,000 cones per square millimeter.[24] By contrast, the most sensitive commercially available film cameras have a pixel density of roughly 42,000 per square millimeter. Most display systems operate at much lower resolutions.
Beyond resolution, the eye and the sensor have different refresh rates. Historically the normal flicker detection threshold for the eye was understood to be around 70 Hz (just above the refresh rates of an analog television), although research has indicated that detection of flicker for light with a spatial edge can be perceived at much higher frequencies [25]
The underlying structures of artistic composition make sense in the context of the eye relying on a combination of edge and color detection, from line through variety the basic features of art work with these perception mechanisms. At the same time, there are surely codes that interplay with the nature of perception itself. More on this in the next section.
Depth Perception
Most depth cues are mono-optical.[26]
Cue Description
Occlusion One thing is in front of another
Parallax Moving your head allows you to see a new image
Size Things in the distance look small
Linear Perspective Lines appear to converge toward the horizon
Texture At a distance textures are not visible
Atmosphere Things in the distance are hazy
Shadows Light sources produce indications of depth
Convergence The eyes tend to converge on an image at a moderate distance
Stereopsis (Binocular Convergence) Each eye sees a different image
As you may have noticed, parallax (mono-optical) depends on the motion of the head. This demonstrates a level of sensory integration, with touch, as the proprioception of the head is involved.[27] Modally, the senses are more integrated than disintegrated.
2.4.2.1 Color
Color is not changing in as much as it will not have a dispositive resolution. What does this mean? Color is ultimately a combination of an object, light, and a perceiver. Where color resides between these sites is an old philosophical debate. What is especially important to understand about color is that it is not separate from vision itself. Commonly in communication and art programs color is taught as something secondary and less than line or form. As you have already read the idea of color and non-color receptors is dubious – rods perceive a sort of blue. This lack of color is known as the coloring book hypothesis: the brain produces a world of outlines which are then colored in. As Chiriuta describes, the research on vision does not bear out this theory: colors are processed simultaneously in edge detection.[28]
At the same time, color dysfunction is extremely common among males. It is best practice to NOT use color as the primary means for encoding information, as many people are unable to detect certain hue differences. Changes on an evolutionary scale are clearly among those in the less likely category for this book.
Attempts at standardizing color hinge on reproduction. Although Pantone is generally known for fun research on color trends, the real products are specialty inks that can be used across product classes. Pantone produces educational materials that can help understand what a particular color is, at least in as much as it can be recreated:
2.4.3 Touch
To begin with there are a few major categories of touch perception: mechanical (pressures and vibrations), temperature, pain, and proprioception (dimensions of the body at present).
In terms of processing, much of the work of touch sensation is accomplished by ganglia, with the majority of touch neural structure devoted to the perceptions of pain and heat.[29] This paragraph is directly informed by Abraira and Ginty’s review for the Journal Neuron. Of the neurons that respond to touch sensations, there are low and high threshold variants. These perceptions are thought to be mapped to the different conduction potentials of the neurons, such as their myelination (being covered with a protective insulator). Hair also plays an important role – hairs are physical mechanisms that produce sensation and depending on hair type. Receptors also display different adaptation rates, meaning that they might continue firing if repeatedly stimulated, these are likely the key to textures. Fast adapting fibers have far more intense reactions. The uses of such fibers would be clear: sometimes you need a really strong touch to tell you to move your arm, but you don’t want that signal repeated too often. Yet another type of receptors, including Pacinian Corpuscles: these are important as they are receptors that can meaningfully transmit vibration frequency. The highest density of these receptors is found in the finger tips. As Abraria and Ginty note in their consideration of the integrative theory of touch:
Our skin, the largest sensory organ that we possess, is well adapted for size, shape, weight, movement, and texture discrimination, and with an estimated 17,000 mechanoreceptors, the human hand, for example, rivals the eye in terms of sensitivity.
They theorize that the Dorsal Horn of the spinal cord is akin to the retina in the perception of touch, serving as an intermediate rendering point for incoming touch information, although some touch information may pass through by another channel.
The processing of touch perception is complex. Berger and Gonzalez-Franco hinge their research on the idea of the “cutaneous rabbit,” an illusion in touch where taps at two points produce a feeling that the touch moved between those points.[30] They use this argument to lead to an important debate: is touch perceived as a connection between particular points on the skin and parts of the brain; or is touch something far more tied into cognitive processes beyond the mapping of the skin? In their experiments, virtual reality equipment (oculus rift) was used to produce an “out-of-body” touch illusion. What is important about their work, is that they were able to produce out-of-body touch illusions without corresponding visual stimuli although enhanced by that additional information. Sensation of touch is deeply tied to other cognitive features, it is not simply a push-button effect on the skin. This line of research can also be explored through the work on affect and touch: in the absence of conscious-reflection touching can produce pro-social outcomes.[31]
As much as experiments like the cutaneous rabbit prove, the problem of haptic translation is difficult. The limits of the interpretation of touch as haptics will be discussed at greater length in the next section, but the question becomes, can we actually deal with the sure number of sensations that would be needed to replicate the world as we know it? Does a vibrating glove match the grain of velvet?
A further consideration is the role of the mapping of the body as it relates to the position of limbs, organs, and the space around the self. Terekov and O’Regan have proposed a model of the perception of space where an agent secures an awareness of space as an unchanging medium, rigid displacements, and relative position.[32] This offers an important insight about the production of spatial awareness both for creatures and AI systems: the foundation of the world can take place without a concept of space itself. In the context of human perception this becomes something of a sixth sense of body position, movement, and force.[33] Tuthill and Azim argue the perception of the body in space then is critical for stability, protection, and locomotion.[34] Most animal motor functions depend on the feedback loop of the perceptual system, with a few notable deceptions. Generally, the feedback information provided by various species proprioception systems are similar, suggesting a common origin.
Heat and pain are less relevant. There are clear media applications for the use of hot and cold, the cases where pain responses would make sense are limited. An example would be the Star Wars experience at Disney World which makes use of haptic feedback vests to help guests perceive the impact of laser hits.[35] Of course this is not true pain, just a gentle tap.
2.4.4 Taste
Taste is a combination of sensations. Some of what we understand as taste is smell, blended with texture, sight, and sound. In terms of the specific sensory differentiation point, the key to taste is the taste bud, which contains specific chemical receptors.
Roper and Chaudhari report in their review of the literature for Nature Reviews: Neuroscience that each taste bud contains three distinct types of receptor cells: Type 1 unknown function with a highly heterogeneous makeup (50%), Type 2 larger and spherical detecting sugars, amino acids, and bitter compounds (33%), Type 3 with the mechanism for the detection of sour distributed in patches around the mouth (2-20%).[36] The taste buds are distributed, along with touch and temperature receptors, in various structures around the mouth called papillae.[37] The review contains more specific information about the synaptic linkages for each type of cell, this is beyond the scope of our analysis for this book.
First, the simplistic four flavor model is not supported by the research. The receptors of the taste buds can recognize many different compounds. Consider the amino acid lysine: it is nearly 70% as sweet as sugar, and one of the primary flavor elements of pork. Second, the idea of regions of the tongue being associated with particular flavors does not hold. Taste receptors are found in many places in the body, which makes sense as they are sophisticated chemical detectors and there are many chemical detection tasks that would seem to be key to human life.
The total number of potential flavors ranges between five: salty, sweet, sour, bitter, umami (glutamates) and twelve. Any number of chemicals can be detected by the taste buds described in the research. Some receptors detect carbon dioxide.[38] Spicy flavors are detected by the VR1 heat receptor (which helps keep you from burning yourself).[39] Thus the common-sense retort that there is no taste of spicy, it is just hot. But hold on – not only are the receptors for hot in your mouth (and not on your forearms or lower back), a specific receptor for heat, and another receptor for the perception of coolness that runs along same set of nerves.[40] Why would flavor be limited to one of the sets of chemical receptors tied to nerves that are enfolded into perception? There also seem to be receptors for calcium, zinc, maltodextrin, histidine (linked to heartiness or kokumi), glycerol sensation may hinge on chain length.[41] It is still unclear how the sense of salty works, yet we know from practical experience that salt can decrease the perception of bitter, and almost everyone enjoys a salty snack.
The hinge of this question is not biochemical, but phenomenological, how do we know when a combination of chemical interactions in the taste bud become an independent flavor? Andrew Smith writing for a New York Times blog noted that flavor scientist questioned how many different flavors should be recognized due to the lack of a firm basis for the idea of flavor.[42] More importantly, the body responds in many ways to taste alone, without actually swallowing the food. This is the challenge then for the role of flavor itself – how do we create a meaningful set of classifiers for such a robust and multidimensional experience? Is it enough to say sour when there are so many other sensations and descriptions? Is the ethnological (wine) solution adequate where experiences are described in a series of other ontologically separate terms? Or does the attempt to encircle the description of a flavor become an endless hermeneutic game?
In a review of the commonalties of mammalian taste, Yamolinsky, Zucker and Ryba note that insects and non-insects have distinct neurological structures for taste.[43] On the other hand, despite extensive differences, insects and mammals seem to have reactions that sort tastes into a somewhat similar framework – things that keep you alive (sugars and salts) and things that poison you (bitters). Innate flavors are present, at least at the start, this is not to say that people may not enjoy other flavors that they first found overwhelming.
Standardization is quite difficult. I learned this working as a short-order cook in college, when many of my classmates who were from Nepal found the food of the North Dakota region to be entirely too bland. They described the experience of eating foods at the extreme limit of spicy as containing a different world of flavors that were not present in other cuisines, which is an idea supported in the spicy adaptation literature.[44] The pH of your saliva can change how sweet something tastes.[45] Absent the ability to truly standardize flavor, or even provide flavors that would not seem injurious to some audience members, it seems unlikely that any meaningful standard for human flavor perception could be created. If such a technology were possible, the implications for human health and industry would be profound.
2.4.5 Smell
Olfactory responses pose a number of fascinating challenges for future media technology. Scents are difficult to reproduce, requiring particular chemistry and delivery. Like other senses described in this book smells are culturally specific. Individual reactions in the olfactory system with chemicals come together to form a coherence experience of an odor. There are cultures devoted to a return to a more “natural” way of living that object to the low odor presentation of many Americans. There are foods that are so offensive that they require active policing, like durian. Functional MRI research confirms that exposure to personally relevant aromas is tied to increased activity in the amygdala.[46] Research on smell remains woefully behind research on vision and hearing.[47] The lack of research on smell even allows organizations and companies to take a lead role in education.
Critical to the operation of the olfactory bulb is the flow of molecules over roughly four-hundred receptors.[48] Dr. Thomas Cleleand describes the process of learning smells thusly:
What we think that the first couple of layers of the olfactory system do is to build odors and define their sort of fuzzy boundaries,” Cleland continues. “You get this messy input, and the perceptual system in your brain tries to match it with what you know already, and based on what you expect the smell to be. The system will suggest that the smell is X and will deliver inhibition back, making it more like X to see if it works. Then we think there are a few loops where it cleans up the signal to say, ‘Yes, we’re confident it’s X.’
The future of smell research involves building massive processing models that might accurately model raw number of connections that could be made between different molecules and the bulb and the processes of memory that then encode the experience if encountering a new smell. It is also clear that this varies from taste or touch as it exists in even greater combinations an in a recirculating cybernetic movement toward sensation. Unlike the media of the instant, smell develops with an extended temporality.
There are many places that require careful olfactory planning. Alfred Taubman, an important developer of shopping centers, was careful to avoid errant wafts of scents from food courts into unwelcome places. Stores looking to build a unique brand, particularly those targeting young people, have been known to heavily perfume their entries. Disney World uses pipes to distribute the aroma of cookies in relevant places.
Expert practices in olfactory development include various approaches to tasting particular products. Meister, the coffee columnist for Serious Eats, reports that coffee tasters smell for enzymatic issues, sugar caramelization (mallard reaction), and dry distillation.[49] Each of these flavors has many subexpressions that circle in on a combination of chemicals and relationships that make the smell meaningful.
The standardization of olfactory experience is perhaps the most difficult. A more formal descriptive language comes from the IFF database, which provides an index of olfactory information much akin to Pantones.[50]
Notice the information provided. An olfactory description, which makes reference to other olfactory experiences, and use cases. What might be most important is the concept of chemical stability. Unlike a sound or an image, there are concerns that a distributed scent could ignite, levels of use, density, and beyond.
Benson Munyan, a professor of somatics at the University of Central Florida, has demonstrated that the use of olfactory cues can increase immersion in an experience, the logistics of using these devices are challenging as errant scents linger.[51] Commercial approaches to smell offer far fewer scents. The initial challenges may appear to come in the delivery of compounds (tubes, stickers, wafters) but on a deeper level there is no unifying substance for the production of different aromas. In the context of vision, there is a limited spectrum of light that the eye can process. Sounds are vibrations in a particular band processed by verily specific elements in the cochlea. In both of these cases there is a unifying form of energy and spectrum. Olfactory response involves a much wider variety of media and receptors.
In a world where a basic chemical synthesis method for olfactory experiences remains elusive, and it likely will be, experience design in these media will remain tied to particular places and to particular chemical compounds that might be strategically released. Although the IFF database provides the beginning of a theory of olfactory information, it is important to recall the reasons for the existence of Pantones in the first place. All color mixing methods have weaknesses in their underlying gamut. All reductive methods for the production of stimuli are problematic by their nature. Until micro-synthetic chemistry systems are available olfactory virtual reality will not exist. The underlie revolution in a chemistry plant on a card will fundamentally change the world. It is not a matter of all the chemicals that we might want to smell for fun, but a system capable of producing such a selection of smells could produce any number of industrial chemicals and drugs on a micro-on-demand basis.
2.5 Desire
People want.
This is the shortest and perhaps most important entry in this section. Bertrand Russell argued in his Nobel Prize Lecture that the problem of the human condition is desire. In the first instance the desire for the things that make survival possible. In the second instance, when survival was assured, desires for power and prestige. Power, for Russell, was almost always a violent drive, as that which would allow one to make others do what they would not, is troubling. Friedrich Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, documents the shift in axiology where even basic concepts of right and wrong are continually recirculated within the event horizon of desire.[52] Placing the symbolic codes by which we evaluate right and wrong as secondary to desire is a provocative and important move to this day
People initially present something that they want, this want could be satisfied, but often the chase for the thing becomes more satisfying than the thing itself.[53] Desire is unquenchable. Hannah Arendt supposed that the desire for meaning could be, in the highest form, expressed through creative action. Natality does not escape desire, but for Arendt it is a desire to make new that is the highest point of the human condition, actions that are often confused with work or labor.[54] For Russell, managing excess desire is the key, to resolve his diagnosis that war is a function of a desire for excitement he proposed:
I think every big town should contain artificial waterfalls that people could descend in very fragile canoes, and they should contain bathing pools full of mechanical sharks. Any person found advocating a preventive war should be condemned to two hours a day with these ingenious monsters. More seriously, pains should be taken to provide constructive outlets for the love of excitement. Nothing in the world is more exciting than a moment of sudden discovery or invention, and many more people are capable of experiencing such moments than is sometimes thought.[55]
Desire will not change.
1. Electromagnetic Spectrum - Introduction,” accessed October 5, 2018, https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/scienc...spectrum1.html. ↵
2. Eamono Doherty, “The Need for a Faraday Bag,” Forensic Magazine, February 21, 2014, https://www.forensicmag.com/article/...ed-faraday-bag. ↵
3. Red Lion Broadcasting Co., Inc. v. FCC, 395 US 367 (1969). ↵
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7. Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction(Duke University Press, 2004). ↵
8. Larry Downes and Chunka Mui, Unleashing the Killer App: Digital Strategies for Market Dominance(Harvard Business Press, 2000). ↵
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10. Gearóid Ó Tuathail and Gerard Toal, Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space(U of Minnesota Press, 1996). ↵
11. Evan Dashevsky, “A Remembrance and Defense of Ted Stevens’ ‘Series of Tubes,’” PCMAG, June 5, 2014, https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2458760,00.asp. ↵
12. Broadb et al., “FCC Concludes Satellite Internet Is Good Enough for Rural Broadband,” Broadband Now(blog), February 16, 2018, https://broadbandnow.com/report/sate...ral-broadband/. ↵
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14. “Doped Semiconductors,” accessed October 5, 2018, http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu...lids/dope.html. ↵
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16. Larry Greenemeier, “How Close Are We--Really--to Building a Quantum Computer?,” Scientific American, accessed October 5, 2018, https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...ntum-computer/. ↵
17. Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey Pingree, “What’s New About New Media?,” in New Media 1740-1915 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), xi–xxiii. ↵
18. “Extended High Frequency Online Hearing Test | 8-22 KHz,” accessed October 5, 2018, https://www.audiocheck.net/audiotest...ycheckhigh.php. ↵
19. Christopher A. Shera, John J. Guinan, and Andrew J. Oxenham, “Revised Estimates of Human Cochlear Tuning from Otoacoustic and Behavioral Measurements,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 99, no. 5 (March 5, 2002): 3318–23, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.032675099. ↵
20. “How the Brain Recognizes What the Eye Sees - Salk Institute for Biological Studies,” accessed October 5, 2018, https://www.salk.edu/news-release/br...izes-eye-sees/. ↵
21. “Rods & Cones,” accessed October 5, 2018, http://www.cis.rit.edu/people/facult...p_9/ch9p1.html. ↵
22. Dale Purves et al., “Cones and Color Vision,” Neuroscience. 2nd Edition, 2001, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK11059/. ↵
23. “Rods & Cones.” ↵
24. Ibid. ↵
25. James Davis, Yi-Hsuan Hsieh, and Hung-Chi Lee, “Humans Perceive Flicker Artifacts at 500 Hz,” Scientific Reports 5 (February 3, 2015): 7861, https://doi.org/10.1038/srep07861. ↵
26. “Depth Cues in the Human Visual System,” accessed October 5, 2018, www.hitl.washington.edu/proj...DepthCues.html. ↵
27. Vito Pettorossi and Marco Schieppati, “Neck Proprioception Shapes Body Orientation and Perception of Motion,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, November 2014, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles...014.00895/full. ↵
28. M Chiriuta, Outside Color: Perceptual Science and the Puzzle of Color in Philosophy (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2015). ↵
29. Victoria E. Abraira and David D. Ginty, “The Sensory Neurons of Touch,” Neuron 79, no. 4 (August 21, 2013): 618–39, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2013.07.051. ↵
30. Christopher C. Berger and Mar Gonzalez-Franco, “Expanding the Sense of Touch Outside the Body,” in Proceedings of the 15th ACM Symposium on Applied Perception - SAP ’18 (the 15th ACM Symposium, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada: ACM Press, 2018), 1–9, https://doi.org/10.1145/3225153.3225172. ↵
31. Annett Schirmer et al., “Squeeze Me, but Don’t Tease Me: Human and Mechanical Touch Enhance Visual Attention and Emotion Discrimination,” Social Neuroscience 6 (June 1, 2011): 219–30, https://doi.org/10.1080/17470919.2010.507958. ↵
32. Alexander V. Terekhov and J. Kevin O’Regan, “Space as an Invention of Active Agents,” Frontiers in Robotics and AI 3 (2016), doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2016.00004. ↵
33. Joshua Klein et al., “Perception of Arm Position in Three-Dimensional Space,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 12 (August 21, 2018), https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2018.00331. ↵
34. John C. Tuthill and Eiman Azim, “Proprioception,” Current Biology 28, no. 5 (March 5, 2018): R194–203, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2018.01.064. ↵
35. Anthony Levine, “Star Wars Virtual Reality at The Void in Disney World and Disneyland,” USA TODAY, May 22, 2018, https://www.usatoday.com/story/trave...ity/629435002/. ↵
36. Stephen D. Roper and Nirupa Chaudhari, “Taste Buds: Cells, Signals and Synapses,” Nature Reviews. Neuroscience 18, no. 8 (August 2017): 485–97, doi.org/10.1038/nrn.2017.68. ↵
37. “How Does Our Sense of Taste Work? - National Library of Medicine - PubMed Health,” accessed October 5, 2018, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0072592/. ↵
38. “Scientists Discover Protein Receptor for Carbonation Taste,” National Institutes of Health (NIH), September 27, 2015, https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news...bonation-taste. ↵
39. James Gorman, “A Perk of Our Evolution: Pleasure in Pain of Chilies,” The New York Times, September 20, 2010, sec. Science, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/21/s...21peppers.html. ↵
40. “TRPM8: The Cold and Menthol Receptor - TRP Ion Channel Function in Sensory Transduction and Cellular Signaling Cascades - NCBI Bookshelf,” accessed October 5, 2018, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK5238/. ↵
41. Kokumi and fatty acid citations follow, the general point is that receptors are present for many chemicals. Lisa Bramen, “The Kokumi Sensation,” Smithsonian, accessed October 5, 2018, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-...tion-78634272/; R. D. Mattes, “Oral Detection of Short-, Medium-, and Long-Chain Free Fatty Acids in Humans,” Chemical Senses 34, no. 2 (September 15, 2008): 145–50, https://doi.org/10.1093/chemse/bjn072. ↵
42. Peter Andrey Smith, “Beyond Salty and Sweet: A Budding Club of Tastes,” Well (blog), July 21, 2014, https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/...lub-of-tastes/. ↵
43. “Common Sense about Taste: From Mammals to Insects - ScienceDirect,” accessed October 6, 2018, https://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc...92867409012495. ↵
44. Agneeta Thacker, “FYI: Are People Born With A Tolerance For Spicy Food?,” Popular Science, June 10, 2013, https://www.popsci.com/science/artic...nce-spicy-food. ↵
45. Ken-ichi Aoyama et al., “Saliva PH Affects the Sweetness Sense,” Nutrition 35 (March 1, 2017): 51–55, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nut.2016.10.018. ↵
46. Rachel S. Herz et al., “Neuroimaging Evidence for the Emotional Potency of Odor-Evoked Memory,” Neuropsychologia 42, no. 3 (2004): 371–78. ↵
47. Gordon M. Shepherd, “New Perspectives on Olfactory Processing and Human Smell,” in The Neurobiology of Olfaction, ed. Anna Menini, Frontiers in Neuroscience (Boca Raton (FL): CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, 2010), www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK55977/. ↵
48. “Learning, Memory, and the Sense of Smell,” Text, Cornell Research, May 25, 2016, https://research.cornell.edu/news-fe...nd-sense-smell. ↵
49. Serious Eats, “Advanced Coffee Tasting: What Your Coffee Smells Like,” accessed October 6, 2018, https://drinks.seriouseats.com/2012/...ells-like.html. ↵
50. International Flavors and Fragrances, “Bergamal,” accessed October 6, 2018, https://www.iff.com/en/smell/online-compendium. ↵
51. “Why Smells Are So Difficult To Simulate For Virtual Reality,” UploadVR, March 9, 2017, https://uploadvr.com/why-smell-is-so...imulate-in-vr/. ↵
52. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic. By Way of Clarification and Supplement to My Last Book Beyond Good and Evil (Oxford University Press, 2008). ↵
53. ? ↵
54. Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). ↵
55. Bertrand Russell, “What Desires Are Politically Important?,” (Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1950). ↵ | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/New_Media_Futures_(Faltesek_and_Adams)/1.02%3A_Where_Change_is_Unlikely.txt |
Section 3: Things that are likely to change
This section covers many ideas similar to those in section two with an important difference, these concepts are likely to change. At the core of each idea are things that won’t change.
3.1 Semiotics
Semiotics refers to the study of symbol systems. This is independent of information theory, which considers the capacity of a channel and the capacity of a message to overcome entropy or noise in the channel.[1] Semiotics is concerned with meaning. We can think of meaning on three levels: semantic (did the communicators reach agreement about meaning), pragmatic (did the meaning coordinate action), and alterity (what meanings were precluded by the presentation of the sign). An important problem comes in the degree to which meaning can be communicated at all. Communication is constitutive.[2] The following statement is rich with mysticism: you are the meaning that you use and are used by. This does not mean that you are dominated by language or that you have no decisions, but that meaning is a central dimension of human existence.
Communication is not sending meaning packages through tubes to each other. Meaning is constantly produced between people. This does not mean that there is no agreement, but that the slippages between potential agreements produce many productive errors. Network research suggests that over-convergence is a major problem, if messages are too similar people distrust them.[3] Further, ongoing message divergence is evidence of error correction, which could itself evidence of an effective system. People make meanings, those meanings are unstable, and this instability is productive.
3.1.1 Signs
The sign is the basic unit of semiotic theory. It is important to understand that signs are not stable. For Charles Sanders Pierce, the sign is triadic:
The object, the intepertant (the sign that is created in the mind of the receiver), and the sign are all in relationship.[4] Although the object is very much involved, but there is no objective basis for the sign, the sign itself and the sign produced by the sign are equally as important. Notice that the idea in the mind that matters in this model is that which exists in the mind of the receiver, not the sender. This model takes the intent of the speaker out of the center of the model. It does not matter what you intended if that cannot be produced as an interpretant.
Sassure’s model has a slightly less complex circulation.[5]
In this context, the thing (signified) is imperfectly represented and in circulation with the signifier (the label). The signified can be almost anything, often including another sign. The signifier is constantly being loaded with additional content.
What should be clear in both models is that meaning is continuously in circulation. The ways that we manage this constantly shifting meaning are many and likely the reasons why you will be employed after college. A key distinction made by Saussure that is helpful: langue and parole. Langue refers to the formal code, while parole refers to everyday speech. This is why we teach multiple methods for determining what meanings are at any given time. There is no encyclopedia or dictionary for symbol systems, corporations are constantly searching for the ways that terms and ideas function at any given time.
3.1.2 Typology of Signs
Pierce has three kinds of signs:[6]
Icon: signs that look like things.
Index: representations of action (such as smoke is a sign for fire).
Symbol: an entirely artificial system (such as the text of this book).
Notice that these categories are not absolutely clear. Smoke may be a probabilistic sign of fire, but it can also be a symbol for something being hot. It is less likely that you thought that smoke was a sign of a smoke monster, a creature made of smoke. It is the probability that the sign is what you were thinking that is what makes it function. You see smoke and reasonably guess fire. This is the core of abductive reasoning, we make a number of probable assumptions and work as if they are confirmed. It should be apparent at this point that there are not easy logical answers or transcendental operators.
These signs can help you make decisions about how particular messages work. An iconic sign that includes an image may function quite differently than a description of that sign. You can see that in each of these contexts all three dimensions of a sign are always subtly shifting. Consider the iconic representation of a telephone, to some degree that is still most likely presented with an older handset on a desk cradle. Younger people may be less familiar with such a phone, however the icon for phone will likely remain the handset and cradle for some time.
Symbolic signs can be incredibly dense. This book is made up of almost entirely symbolic signs in the form of written text. Unless you are already quite a reader, the symbols in this book would be difficult to guess. Feelings and sensations can be exceptionally difficult to represent with a sign, often hinging on multiple signs that encircle what would be described.
3.1.2 Codes
It is important to keep in mind that Saussure contended that meaning existed in opposition. We know what a sign means through it’s relation to other signs.[7] Codes are organized systems of signs. Some codes are more sophisticated than others. People use codes all the time, they are not particularly special. For Roland Barthes the role of codes, as myths, allows the interposition of codes and facts:
In fact, what allows the reader to consume myth innocently is that he does not see it as a semiological system but as an inductive one. Where there is only an equivalence, he sees a kind of causal process: the signifier and the signified have, in his eyes, a natural relationship. This confusion can be expressed otherwise: any semiological system is a system of values; now the myth-consumer takes the signification for a system of facts: myth is read as a factual system, whereas it is but a semiological system.[8]
Symbolic forms have the status of facts, like marriage proposals, names for ships or highways, and statements of financial data, among many other possible codes. This is why semiotic critique is so useful, at each stage of recirculation the products of code become the facts that produce reality. It is not required that one fully establish all of the grounds on which they might argue, this would be boring and wasteful. You operate using the assumptions inherent in a code as if those assumptions were facts.
It would also make sense that the highly iterated symbolic signs would begin to play an increasing role in society. Once someone has gone to all the necessary trouble to learn a sign and all the content that comes with it, the deployment of that sign again in more sophisticated systems would be efficient. In a highly complex system of signs, the ways in which the meanings of certain signs might shift becomes an important topic of negotiation. This takes the form of a kind of meta-talk: you can identify it in many different kinds of communication. In relational communication, it can take the form of the “where do we stand” conversation with a dyadic partner; in political communication the discussion of the “narrative”
3.1.3 Ideograph
Special case of signs that have lost all content but still interpolate the social field. Examples of these special terms include freedom and the people. We all know that you are supposed to love freedom, but the meaning of freedom and any discussion of the internal dynamics of what might make someone more or less free are not up for political contestation. Likewise, the idea of the people is very important in many political cultures. The general will of regular folks is seen as excluded from what would be an elite conversation, which is then claimed and included by elites in the form of the will of “the people.” Measuring the will of the people is imperfect, there is no method to directly combine an understanding of the will of thousands of people. The term ideograph was developed by Michael Calvin McGee, it proposes that certain terms take on this special status where they can stitch together the social totality.[9] The key to studying these systems is to evaluate the use of the term presently (synchronically) and to juxtapose that with the development of the term over time (diachronically). This method can provide you some insight into how the term functions and the role it plays in the code of society. At the highest levels, certain signs can have powerful effects on the structure and meaning of a code, even moderating the function of multiple layers of other signifiers. There are many other signs like an ideograph that are very important – these are the core topics of your course work in Rhetorical Studies (should your program include Rhetoric).
3.1.4 Publics
Public sphere is a mistranslation of publicity which is a verb, not a noun: publicity is a process by which ideas become visible and circulate. Much of the thinking in this field is organized around Jurgen Habermas Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, a key work which proposed a theory that a rational, critical public sphere could emerge through the circulation of texts. This book is a rich starting point as Habermas is willing to sketch the historical, psychological, and sociological dimensions by which the pubic becomes possible. It is also important to note that even at the time of publication, he was not optimistic about the future of the public sphere.
Nancy Frasier’s classic “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” gets at the key problems with this account, with a particular emphasis on exclusion.[10] Women and minorities were excluded from the bourgeois realm of the public sphere. This did not mean that they did not communicate, but that they formed counter publics all along. The exclusions and rules that come along with the public sphere can become an oppressive ideology on their own. Frasier is clear that these counter publics are a structural element of the theory, they are not intrinsically positive: they simply are. Frasier makes four key points: inequality cannot be wished away, there is not a single public, excluding “private” issues misses much, and better models of the multiple interactions of publics offer a lot for understanding social change.
Along similar lines, Michael Warner has further explored counter publics as they form in discourse and through attention alone.[11] You can become a part of a public without giving a speech or wearing a campaign t-shirt: you join by paying attention. Ron Greene on the other hand has recuperated the centralizing functions of the public sphere as a sort of postal service: the public as an idea allows letters to find their addressees.[12] What if the public sphere is the process by which ideas are moved around, even if that process deeply flawed? The key idea here is that a public forms when those that could be addressed are exposed to a possible message.
This says nothing of the far older debate between theories of publics and masses. Publics are those who are engaged in some kind of deliberation while masses are a herd to be steered. It is also important to notice that publics in this formulation are asked to have an idea of themselves. Publics are a powerful form for the organization of everyday life, but the ways that publics are hailed into existence and organized are always changing. To this point these constructs are in continuous revision and discussion.
3.1.5 Argumentation
How we argue and how we evaluate arguments is constantly changing. Arguments are another special form of code. The idea of the syllogism is thousands of years old, but ultimately the form of the syllogism is only useful in cases where a clear formula in the context of a dialectical regime of truth is possible. What does that mean? The syllogism depends on the idea that there is a truth and that by ascertaining proper premises an accurate statement can be confirmed.
Consider this syllogism:
Dan is a person
People have opinions
Dan has opinions
Or to put in an abstract form:
Dan is a member of group A
All members of A have property B
Thus, Dan has property B
In terms of a structural logic, his operates through a right hand left hand movement that is also used in some computer programming languages. The problem with the syllogism is that it can only handle one operator at a time. What we find in the analysis of complex issues of policy or value is that there may be multiple contingent identities and relationships in any given argument system. You also may have noticed the implicit use of the idea of ‘all’ in the example –a further problem. How do we make arguments when identities are unclear or are in flux?
Argumentation theorists have developed alternative models that can appreciate the complexity and contingency of real speech and reason. Toulmin’s model supposes that an argument has the following parts: claim-warrant-backing-data-qualifier-rebuttal.[13] The key to this model are the warrants, the inferential leaps that connect claims and data, the data can be other claims. The power of this model is that it opens up a lot of space for nested argumentative functions, where one argument contains many others. Not necessarily the best for analysis of value claims, this model is useful for finding the sites where probabilistic claims about the future become stronger and weaker.
What is spoken:
Claim: Deflation is worse than Inflation
Data: Historical financial data for two-hundred years, indicates that depressions were more likely to be correlated with deflation, and that deflation linked events were longer and more severe.
What is unspoken:
Warrant: the use of correlation across examples provides a reasonable account of cause and effect
Backing: long term financial data are the appropriate information for this question, in the discussion of a causal claim a strong account of correlation can be developed as causation especially when definitive causation is impossible
Qualifier: the claim was structured around the idea of worse than
Rebuttal: the argument is designed to respond to the idea that inflation is the paramount fear for economists
This claim about deflation could then be situated as if it were a fact in a larger system of claims which we could call a case. The great strength of this approach for understanding practical discourse are the multiplicity of possible warrant and backing formulations. In the introduction to this book we established the idea of abductive reasoning, the prospect that a claim can be probabilistic and that we might decide between rival probable models of reality or facticity. For many interesting claims of policy, the collection of probabilistic claims is the most important dimension of the argument in the first place. It is not merely that deflation is worse than inflation, but that if the central objection to the development of good social policy is the risk of inflation, avoiding the risk of deflation would be a reasonable consideration. The next line of argument in the debate for this side should be clear at this point: we are closer to deflation than inflation.
For a full discussion of warrant structures, please take an argument theory class in the communication department.
Just as this model is strong for evaluating systems of probabilistic policy claims, it is unable to account for the multiplicity of value claims. Or if one did use such a model to account for values and aesthetics they might trend toward bizarre conclusions.
Luc Boltanksi and Laurent Thevneot offer a theory better suited for value based on Justifications.[14] Claims of value happen in different worlds of value. In this model, we are not judging policies but values and aesthetics, given their capacity to work with in established regimes of value. This is important as it gives us a way to deal with the empirical dimension of values discussion which is more than the stark utilitarian calculus that accompanies policy. It is in the alignment of the value and the test that a legitimate transfer of value is established. Illegitimate tests are those that attempt to use the wrong values and tests for a situation. It is conceivable that one might argue that something belongs in a different world, thus becoming subject to a different economy of value.
This model of value hinges on the agreement of people in a community to the development of a relevant test. For example, in the world of celebrity, the appropriate test is popularity. The actual means by which the tests function, often aesthetics, are not easily contested and are not of particular interest. You cannot declare: “fallacy, you felt wrong.” Legitimate orders are those that can be justified.
The standards by which we evaluate argument and the ways that ideas are moderated are always changing. When argument moves beyond a single simple claim of fact, argument itself is contested. The power of the code of argument is that we freely move between the levels of dialectical and rhetorical judgement: the ideas of logical validity and desirability continuously play into each other.
In practical terms, a justification must be provided, this must be a claim that declares a world (a setting), with a polity (a form or organization appropriate to that world), who then have a value (economy of worth), which can be judged with an appropriate test.
Example: who is the more important pop star today, Taylor Swift or Cardi B?
This is the world of fame. The polity are those who are a part of the larger manifold of the recording industry. Importance is judged by recent chart performance, the test being Billboard Hot 100 performance. In the last calendar year, Cardi B has out-performed Taylor Swift. Swift’s last album was a commercial disappointment, one of the fastest dropping ever. Furthermore, Bodak Yellow (Money Moves) by Cardi B displaced Swift at the top of the chart. We could thus reasonably say that Cardi B is the more important pop star on the basis of the rules of this community, the economy of worth, and appropriate test.
Value arguments are typically about the alignment and transfer of value. It is important to understand that the ability to access a reliable test decreases asmptopically as you approach the horizion of the individual and that this is a rhetorical rather than dialectical form. You are likely persuading the about the efficacy of the test as much as you are deploying it. At the lowest level, the test may be purely aesthetic.
3.2 Design
Design is a translational practice where insights from a number of distinct fields are applied to the making of something. The evaluation of the things made exists along a number of dimensions including the function and appearance of that thing. Donald Norman’s classic The Design of Everyday Things, applies a number of ideas from social research to make objects less bad, or even possibly good.[15] Celebrations of good design in this context tend of focus on stories of highly successful consumer products. Critical design researchers emphasize that this translational approach to design leaves too many assumptions to those that would commission a design, those in power.[16]
Any design needs a framework. At times this comes in the name “design thinking” which is typically associated with a particular firm.[17] It is not that design thinking is bad, but that there is no one special magical process for making a good design or even evaluating that design. The framework design thinking becomes a buzzword for the consideration of the aesthetics and function of a particular thing. The future oriented design proposed in this book focuses on the ways that we might think of design as enabling a broader conversation and collaboration, not as a mystical replacement for the university or skill development.
3.2.1 Affordance and Signifier
To avoid confusion, we should start by describing the use of signifier in design practice. For designers, signifier refers to a label, like instructions in an elevator. This is a more specific use of the term than one might find in semiotic theory. As Donald Norman describes in his work on complexity and design, often signifiers appear when a design has failed. The non-signified in this sense would refer to a design that would function with a minimum of symbolic or synthetic signifiers.
James Gibson coined the term affordance to refer to the properties of an environment to a creature.[18] Properties can include many things, like stairs. A door affords you entry, a car affords you transportation. Not all affordances are clearly visible. The idea of affordance is important because it offers a dialectical conception of the purpose of a design of a thing: it is about what becomes possible, not what is intentional or obvious. The provenance of this idea in the psychology of perception should not be forgotten. At stake in the affordance is the idea of the awareness of the user – this is a theory which enhances our awareness of the user by decentering their subjectivity. In other words, you can only truly understand how a person interacts with a system when you take the limits of that person seriously.
Given the preference for seemingly effortless communication, many designers would prefer that awareness of the affordance of a system be as liminal as possible. This is important because it tells you about the way of knowing that is present in design – the idea is that the designer can produce a world of almost effortless meaning. The code of the design invention melds into the thing as if it were an inevitable fact.
3.2.2 Simple, Complicated, and Complex
Following the definitions area derived from Donald Norman:[19]
Simple: in design simplicity refers to the occasion when a system fits with the psychological expectations of the user.
Complicated: the occasion when a system or thing does not fit with the psychological expectations of the user, or is emotionally fraught.
Complex: a thing has a lot of parts.
Simple and complicated have somewhat oppositional meanings. The optimal case for conventional design is when a complex thing is made simple. The biggest concern with simplicity is that designers, unchecked, have a penchant for inserting their own psychological position as that of the user. This is why a central tenant of usability theory (discussed later in this chapter) is “you are not the user” Design is a process of concealing and revealing, strategically, for a particular effect.
Once a student learns about brutalism, they see it everywhere. Many university buildings of the 1960s and 1970s are wonderful examples. Unfortunately, Oregon State is not lucky enough to have great examples. The repeated use of form that ostensibly reveals the structure of the building, the raw use of concrete. Brutalism is in a real sense the tangible result of high modernism. This was an approach to building that could transcend the everyday condition.
Nikil Saval concluded in the New York Times style magazine that the return of brutalism may be the harbinger of the end of the brutalist ethic:
But the renewed interest in the movement has yet to produce any meaningful change in the culture of what gets built and how. This resurgence has not — not yet anyway — led to any revival of interest in public-minded development. Politics has been divorced from architecture. In fact, love for Brutalism has often led to gentrification. Many social housing projects, such as Erno Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower in London, have become much sought-after private housing. Architecture bookstores sell postcard packs of the greatest hits of Brutalism; you can buy a Trellick Tower mug to sip expensive coffee in your pricey Trellick Tower flat. The aesthetic of Brutalism may at last triumph over its ethic.[20]
Brutalism offers what should be a simple solution to complex problems, yet the legacy of this approach to construction is terribly complicated.
A dualism of simple and complicated resonates with the design of our social networks and experiences in media research. Not all complicated things are bad – some things need to be complicated, others should not be simple. Design is best when use structured prompts to drive a chain of questions that can provoke a rich discussion. Even this starting point will fall away.
3.3 Aesthetics
Aesthetics are much maligned. The surfaces of things are positioned as being less than the things. The ways that we position discourses of beauty and value have profound effects on how the world is understood. Anti-aesthetic discourse is an aesthetic just as much the discussion of a particular appearance. This discourse supposes that one would have a preference for depths and timeless truths, rather than the things of the moment. Beauty is both a cause and an effect.
Aesthetics are a particularly useful point for understanding how desire functions in everyday life. The things that people prefer, the ways that they are valued and how those valuations interact in code are important and reveal much about how people are and want to life in the world. This is a powerful point with regard to both design and ethical theory as themselves depending on some conception of beauty. Aesthetic theory becomes something of a base level for reconstructing studies of design and persuasion.
This book does not contain a full theory of aesthetics, hopefully you will receive this in one of our courses that is dedicated to such concerns. The key point that you need to understand is that appearances matter and aesthetic concerns are not trivial. They are a key aspect of the development of codes and the moderation of desire. Your instructor is likely preparing examples for class that hinge on contemporary aesthetics.
Charlie Tyson, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, notes that the aesthetic is making a comeback in academia.[21] The hinge for the aesthetic is quite similar to section two of this text: aesthetic experience when evaluated in an embodied sense is not mere decoration. Aesthetic judgement is real and important. Beauty is not the opposite of truth but something entirely different. It might be strange to think that an important function of college is to help you understand beauty, but it is an essential function.
3.3.1 Clothing
Walter Benjamin, one of the key figures in media studies, focused often on fashion. When people come up with new ideas and new approaches, a case of emergence, the conditions by which that novelty was produced collapse back into the same. This is why Benjamin was so concerned with the cyclical passage of vivacious creative energy into death. Clothing is a particularly useful site for classroom examples in this area, especially logos and novelty brands like Supreme.
In 2014, the New York Times fashion section reported that the hottest clothing trend was called “Normcore.”[22] It became apparent that the idea could just as easily be seen as something of a hoax: is it really a fashion trend to report that people are continuing to wear common items? It seems quite likely that people wearing “normal” clothing would be quite happy and comfortable. What is notable here is not so much the object of the sign, but the reflexive uptake of it. The idea of capturing a fresh new trend is a news story in itself. The idea of the trend, the code, and that fashion reporting without a concrete object rely on the idea that the code itself has become a social fact.
3.3.2 Cuisine
It should be apparent that all cuisine is a matter of culinary code. Food is a deeply contested site: strict rules govern the production of ideal food stuffs, ranked by complex mechanisms, scientific hygiene regimes aim to make the food safe, cultural codes with regards to what may be eaten are common.
We have already created the virtual in food. In the sense of advanced technique, we have the absolute peak of modernist cuisine, Myhrvold. In the everyday sense of the same thought Keji Lopez-Alt.[23] The approach to flavor here is to understand the chemical and process dimensions that make a particular food what it is. When embedded in an anthropological context this project is expressed by Alton Brown as Good Eats.[24] This is a model of the virtual and food that is personal, still very food like. Cookbooks are a fascinating code. Issac West argued that the cookbook is one of the most important sites where domestic everyday life interplays with ideology.[25] Some cookbooks are designed to help people learn in difficult situations, such as the Joy of Cooking, the books described this paragraph reinterpret cooking through the world view of techno-science.[26] Instead of a massive compendium of all that one might do with ingredients or a full tabulation of recipes, these scientific cookbooks select particular food products and then isolate the exact semiotic resonances of the sensory experience of the food. Recipes are then redesigned around the maximization of gustatory pleasure based on those codes. Idealized aesthetic visions of the food stuff reimagined around the chemistry and biology of the food itself.
Chemical labs in New Jersey and Minneapolis have already given us virtual cuisine.[27] Foods stabilized and flavored continually. Stabilized seasonality. Consistent flavors. No spoilage. Technologies like McDonalds represent the precision stabilization of that which would be tasty.[28] It becomes possible to think of culinary codes in terms of the production of sensations that were never possible before.
Food is the place where we can see what an enfolding really is – a blending of technology that has remade the earth, makes life possible, and is deeply enjoyable, yet wracked with danger. This short section on food is included as many semiotics texts rely on extended discussions of different foods, such as McDonald’s French Fries. Why the fries? McDonald’s technique for the management of potato moisture was a major advancement, the transcultural mythos of McDonald’s in terms of organizations and branding, and the seeming excellence of the product itself, as testified to by the legendary food writer James Beard.[29] Of course you can’t have these fries, the underlying technology that produced them relied on beef tallow and was retired in 1990.
Cuisine here is a chance to consider the simulacrum: what happens when flavor is more real than reality?
3.4 Recording Devices
For the most part, many media systems require some means of recording perceptible reality. It is possible that a system could produce a synthetic video or something else without a recording in the first instance. Yet, these systems still maintain a recording that can be reproduced as if a recording had existed in the first instance. In section begins with technologies for recording and then moves into the discussion of transport and reproduction. Paper has been common for many years, although the paper of the past may differ from what you are expecting – the ‘rags’ of nineteenth century journalism were literally fabric newspapers. The means of recording have a critical imprint on the text.
3.4.1 Image Recording
Recording devices allow the transmission of information through time, which is the inverse of the momentary transmission of information through space. Among the earliest methods for transmission we have are cave paintings and architectural forms like pyramids. Many of our recording technologies quickly degrade.
Film is an emulsion on a thin, transparent, flexible strip. When light is projected through that strip, an image is recreated. The chemistry of such a strip is an important consideration in the development of a recording system. Early film strips were extremely unstable and flammable. Chemicals used in a system like this would need to be extremely photosensitive and reactive. Some older films have literally decayed into vinegar. The design of these emulsions is important.
Lorna Roth described the problem of film color standardization: getting film developers to produce emulsions that could adequately render all people, with the wide variety of human skin tones was difficult.[30] Even the basic idea of color standardization depended on checking against Shirley Cards, which privilege certain ways of looking at film. Even today, computer filters are unable to fully map the faces of people who do not look a particular way. Image recording technologies, as they are designed to record particular people in a specific way, rely on assumptions about how people look or should look. This is not to say that those assumptions will not change.
Television broadcasts were recorded using film systems, as video tape did not exist. Even the underlying tape technology was not fully developed until after World War 2 when the cellulose tape technology of Europe was introduced in other places.
Images today are recorded as computer files for storage on flash memory. There are two chips, discussed at some length in section two: CCD (charge coupled devices) and CMOS (charged metal oxide semiconductor).
Likely changes in the future of the camera include longer battery lives and more sensitive chips, these would work better in lower light. Things less likely to change are the lenses that organize the light that is focused on the sensor.
Non-lens technology has been developed at CalTech using optical phased array sensors. Cameras in this sense are two-dimensional planes.[31] These sensors are currently limited, but they could present new possibilities.
The biggest change in image recording in the last decade was not the reduction in price of CMOS, but the ubiquity of cellular phones. Each of these devices includes a camera that people can use at any time. Mirrorless cameras with larger sensors will also become ubiquitous.[32] These cameras may lack the sophistication of professional equipment, but for many purposes they are more than enough.
3.4.2 Sound Recording
The basic technology of sound recording is the microphone, which is a fundamentally similar technology to the speaker. Before the digital, the signal passed through a sound system was fundamentally similar, the recorded electrical signal would pass through the wire which then reproduced the sound with no reprocessing. If you played with a crystal radio set as youth, you know that analog radio is magic in as it broadcasts enough energy to receive the signal and a usable signal as well.
The traditional types of microphones include those that produce an electrical signal including:[33]
Condenser: a diaphragm produces a signal in a capacitor
Moving-Coil (dynamic): an external magnetic source producing a signal in a coil that is allowed to vibrate
Ribbon: a ribbon of material instead of a coil
Crystal: certain crystals transduce a signal in response to a vibration
Optical microphones measure vibration using a fiber optic lead or a laser. Changes in the reflection drive the detection of the signal. The key to reproducing a sound is the production of a document with the frequencies of the sounds present at the time of recording. It makes sense then that if someone could simulate those waveforms, thus allowing entirely synthetic sounds to be created with far greater control and precision than those that came before.
Sound is then either recorded as an analog signal or processed using a quantizing chip and stored as a digital audio file.
3.4.4 Recording Experience
This is a horizon for future technology. Our current modes for storing experience are for the most part literary. Walter Benjamin seemed to find that Proust offered something of an attempt to store the experience of a thing through rich description.[34] There is an important idea best expressed through psychoanalysis that can help us understand why experience is so hard to process – when more signifiers are added to a system or code, they retroactively shift the meaning of those that came before. A full representation of a place or space will likely require extensive mapping both of the physical environment but also of the person experiencing it.
3.4.3 Codecs
All information that is recorded is stored in some format. On a film strip, the image was retained as a discrete cell that would move as the strip crossed the light source. In terms of the images processed by digital sensors, the raw volume of data can be striking. Early digital field production cameras used heavy cards (like the P2) that would allow high resolution footage to be captured and stored on an array of flash chips. Those early cards could store gigabytes of data, which in raw meant about ten minutes of footage. At this level, streaming video would be bandwidth prohibitive. For transmission over the internet, the information must be encoded differently. The H.264 codec allowed much lower bit rates, the VO9 codec came later, and more recently the AV1 codec has allowed Netflix to further reduce the total volume of data flowing through the internet.[35]
The drawback to encoding the video differently is the loss of data. Courts may not accept transcoded video, it is too easily faked. When data is transcoded, a great deal of what is lost is the internal structure, color data that may not appear to the viewer but is lost. If one then tries to do substantial editing to the file after it has been transcoded from, for example, Apple Pro Res 422 to H.264, the corrections will not look as good as if they were made on the original file.
Codecs are the medium of the future. New media experiences exist between ultrahigh capacity sensors and display systems.
3.5 Editing systems
The editing of information is one of the essential properties of the production of new media. Editing before the advent of digital technology was often destructive, a film strip would be cut and taped back together to make a coherent strip. With the advent of the digital nonlinear editor the capacity for the production of new media was dramatically increased. There are a few types of digital editors that we need to consider:
3.5.1 Image Editing (Orthogonal Layer Interfaces)
If you are editing a single image you have likely used an orthogonal editing interface, this allows you to create a series of layers that may modify an image or mask parts of that image from modification. Some familiar editors in this space include Adobe Photoshop. The layers dimension is present in many different products, providing a high level of control and simplicity for image development. The most recent developments in this field are those that can produce new content in ways that sample the underlying image, such as a content aware fill. Although this interface metaphor is unlikely to change, the new element here is the likelihood that these elements will appear in other systems.
This model presumes the painters algorithm where the view of an image is composited along a z-axis from the top down. The distinction between raster and vector based editing systems is falling away.
The key to this system is that we must have some way to render a static image element.
3.5.2 Digital Non-Linear Editors
The fourth dimension of video and audio is time. Music, after all, is the organization of tones in time. When we organize video or sound clips the combinations can produce rich results that vastly exceed the sum of the parts. The timeline provides a well-structured way of apprehending the project itself and controlling the dynamic state of the product as the viewer encounters it. Before 2002, this technology was unproven, it did not take long for DNLE to prove that Hollywood films could also use these techniques to produce powerful libraries of clips and rapid plastic changes.
As of 2017, only thirty-one major motion pictures were shot on traditional film.[36] Conventional workflows use a DNLE system to produce a list of edits to be made to the film proper. Typically, this is produced in the form of an Edit Decision List (EDL) which is presented as a form of metadata.[37] For sound manipulation, the technology relies on the same organizational theory. Music is produced by organizing tones in time.
Once situated in a stream of time, cinema becomes possible. The dimension of the perception of time is the key to the understanding of cinematic experience. The cinematic itself is unstable, the presumption to this point has been that the frame order of the time axis would drive the experience. Interactive systems challenge this in profound ways.
3.5.3 Integrated Development Environment
The interactive element of media depends on the design of systems which have the capacity to respond to user intervention into the state of that system. Keyboards allow users to provide sophisticated text strings to the system. Pointing devices all users to experience the graphical user interface. These systems then are being manipulated by users and produce a variety of different states depending on the input. These editing systems can range from basic text editing programs (where code can be written) through sophisticated development platforms like xCode.[38]
What these systems are providing is the capacity for users to use a variety of provided abstract representations to write economical code that could produce the intended results. The complex structures produced with these systems could include autopoetic systems which organize and produce content for the users as an ongoing flow.
Each of these approaches to editing will continue, it is likely that interfaces for each will continue to have an appropriate use.
3.6 Output devices
In this section, we will consider the devices that allow us to access the information encoded.
3.6.1 Optical
3.6.1.1 Resolution
Optical media are presented for the most part on screens. Early screens relied on tubes with scanning beams or projectors that would modulate light from a powerful source. Technologies that operate on this property include movie screens and tube televisions. The refresh rate of the device depends on the principal of persistence of vision. For a film system, the refresh rate was typically 24 frames per second, for a television system the refresh rate of the system was linked to the AC frequency of the power grid. In the United States, this means approaching 60 hertz, in Europe 50. When the beam would scan, it would go every other line. The total resolution, or pixel density, was a function of the persistence of the two fields of scan in time. On those old televisions, there were 525 lines, 480 of which were visible.
For an analog television, the interlaced scan with the number of lines would be expressed as 525i. Students today are accustomed to resolutions of at least 720p. P in this case stands for progressive scan, every line is illuminated on every scan, which typically now is not a scan but a refresh of pixels which happens at far higher rates than 29.97 fps.
Contemporary systems use high densities of individual pixels. When the pixel density exceeded 300 pixels per inch Apple branded this the “retina” display. At extreme resolution, the eye is not capable of seeing the individual dots, much like how the eye could not see the individual dots of the offset printer. The pixels are OLED (organic light emitting diodes) which are a form of transistor integrated technology that produces light. These diodes are capable of producing very high contrast images with deep black colors. For larger devices, the future technology is the QLED, also known as quantum dots. Each crystal of this system can produce a pure color, which then can be blended through the additive scheme to produce an image.
As of this draft, 4k displays are increasingly common. It is highly likely that resolutions will continue to increase. The more interesting question: do these higher resolutions have a great impact on semantic and aesthetic dimensions of experience?
3.6.1.2 Stereo-optical
In the mid 2000s there was a surge of interest in stereo-optical films. These were the next big thing, and films were being reprocessed for display on a stereo optical system. The hype was short lived – many users do not enjoy stereo-optical films and the quality of such experiences was poor. Stylistically stereo films seem to insist upon simplistic jump scares and crude objects reaching out of the screen. On a very technical level, the stereo film misses were discussed in our vision section – most visual cues are in fact mono-optical. Depth can be interesting, but it needs to be aligned with the other codes of the filmic experience. Thus, a well-produced and designed Avatar could be a spectacular stereo epic, while a buddy comedy run through an algorithm would not be.
There are two primary stereo-optical cues: stereopsis and convergence. Stereopsis refers to each eye receiving a slightly different signal. Convergence is the slight crossing of the eyes to focus on an object at short or intermediate range. The addition of these factors in a scene can produce the perception of depth.
There are three major technologies for this display:
Lenticular overlays: lens layers attached to a flat image, the lens produces a level of stereopsis.
Anaglyph: a filter is positioned in front of each eye corresponding to a colored filter on one of two projection cameras. Typically, this is done with red/blue or magenta/green pairs which tend to correspond with the color response of the retina (discussed in section 2).
Polarizing: the same basic design as anaglyph but with an angled polarizing filter and lens combination for the glasses and projectors.
Exercises
Demonstration 1: EYE DOMINANCE
With both eyes open, point at a spot somewhere in the room, like a clock. Now close each eye, you will notice that one of your eyes likely steered your hand despite both eyes being open while you were pointing. This is your dominant eye – you now have proof that the integration of your visual field is not perfect.
Demonstration 2: POLARIZING FILTER
Polarizing sunglasses are common, find a friend with a pair (anything from Warby Parker will work). Find an older cell phone, an iPhone 5S will work beautifully, newer phones will work as well. Place the sunglass lens between you and the phone. Rotate the glasses. You will see the phone screen darken or even disappear. When the filter and the photon source are aligned, they come through, when they are not aligned, they light is blocked.
Holograms: Instead of recording the image itself, a hologram records the interference pattern produced when two beams of highly focused light intersect.[39] The film becomes an interference recorder. When hit with another laser the film produces a reproduction of the interference from the original scanning laser. The advantage to this method of scanning is that many possible points and angles are recorded on the film.
Holography is not a new technology. The necessary elements for holograms are decades old, and unlike many forms of contemporary stereo optical photography, are technically difficult. If you use a contemporary flagship phone, interesting images cued by the movement of the phone relative to a static image source are quite impressive.
3.6.1.3 Rendering
Bob Ross’ painting programs are enjoyable. When you watch him, you will notice that he has a very precise method for rendering objects. He starts with those furthest and layers over them. His assumptions about light and color follow a clear painter’s algorithm, where that which is closest to the foreground is rendered last and in the most detail, distances are rendered with a broader brush and less detail. This is much the same way that most computer graphics are rendered.
The alternative is called ray-tracing. In this method, objects are supposed to exist in the world and light (shadows and reflections) are not determined deductively but inductively. Cars was the original film to use this method for rendering and it offers superior results for complex scenes. Now, the methods in rendering are working through the objects once again.[40] With increasing power in graphics rendering the capacity for real time ray tracing of games is in the very near future. If this will increase the degree to which games are meaningful or impactful is another question.
Photorealism is the end goal of all current rendering technology, which makes sense given that the end perception point is the human eye. Realism on the other hand is a far more flexible concept. There is in some sense an assumption that the future of graphics technology hinges on the production of ever more photorealistic images, at the same time some particularly powerful experiences like That Dragon, Cancer have demonstrated that a lower level of detail in some parts of the envelope can be offset by enhancements in others. This game, which you may be assigned to play for class, removes critical macro details like faces, while emphasizing the small details like the textures of surfaces and real sounds.
3.6.2 Sonic
Speakers use magnets to convert an electrical signal into physical motion. Sound is a vibration. For the most part these sounds are produced by vibrating a cone, other technologies may use incisor diffusion to vibrate larger surfaces.
The key is that the underlying physical properties of the system do not change. Smaller objects cannot resonate at the low frequencies of a great bass performance. An ear bud will not rock your body. Yes, woofers do real work.
Innovation in this space will likely come with the use of larger fields of speakers, more precise tuning, and careful, meaningful sound design. Sound is a case where the resolution of the underlying technology (what a speaker is) allows further refinement of the experience of that thing (sometimes paradigm shifting innovation is less robust than simple improvement). Systems in the future may detect the locations of pared devices and the space around those devices to optimize how many speakers and in which bands those speakers operate.
The most profound dimension of sonic development is not in the entertainment space, but in the creation of adaptive devices. Mara Mills history of the miniaturization of the hearing aid is powerful: it was both the original use case for the integrated circuit and a form of technical miniaturization that transformed everyday life for many people.[41] It is the social role and image of technology, rather than the elements of the system which drive reality. At the same time the demand for invisibility of the device and continued stigma is a powerful factor:
Today, the imperative of invisibility largely persists as a design standard for hearing aids, with the demand for miniaturization often limiting device functionality. Recent examples of fashionable earpieces compete with new models of ‘‘completely-in-canal’’ invisible aids. As a long view of hearing aids makes plain, hearing loss has been stigmatized despite the increasing commonness of the diagnosis, and despite the fact that moderate hearing loss can be remedied bytechnical means. Just as inexplicable is the obduracy of the stigma that adheres to the technology itself—when hearing aids have otherwise represented the leading edge of personal electronics, and when they exist as one configuration of the same components found in so many other appliances.[42]
This is a powerful example as the benefits and expansion of communication enabled by the device, yet the coding of culture continues to dramatically shape how sensation is produced. Speaker technology is relatively stagnant, when we expand to consider what hearing and listening technologies could be the realm of possibilities and representations dramatically expands.
3.6.3 Haptics
The primarily strategies by which sensations are produced come in the form of small electric motors and electric charges. When these are mapped to other stimuli a full faceted haptic experience may be produced. At the same time, the dimensions of perception tied to the position of the body and perception of relative space may not be fully simulated by the system. More importantly, the actual kinematics of a human body are not effectively reproduced by an electric motor bar, point, or puck. Consider your perception of a brush against the skin of your forearm: there is both the friction of skin on skin, but also warmth, pressure, and variation across the stroke. There are at least five dimensions to plot. It would make sense that scandalous applications of the technology have been dominant so far – these are the low hanging fruit for the production of sensation with a simplistic criterion for success.
An important question raised by David Parisi, the major theorist of haptic communication: Are touch-screens haptic? His answer: to a degree.[43]What is important to understand about touchscreen systems is that they are not fully haptic – they are not the entire enfolding of sensation, but a very limited slice of that envelope. Force reactions on a Nintendo DS or a cell phone screen are intended but for one patch of skin and one set of interactions. The rhetoric of the touch screen is instructive here: the image always features a finger touching the screen, it does not move through the screen to form a contact point with the world beyond.[44]
What is especially striking from an interface studies perspective is the degree to which the ostensibly haptic interface of the touchscreen displaces what would have been richer interaction points like sliders.[45] Haptics demand the consideration of the relationship between the limited slice and the entire sensory enfolding.
3.6.4 Aroma and Flavor
Devices for the production of virtual smells and tastes were discussed in section two. For the most part the strategy here is to simply load a handful of relevant chemicals into a system that can then produce those chemicals on command. What is so difficult about these senses, is that they lack the deep similarity of basic inputs that the first three output systems share. There is no EM spectrum of spicy. There are technologies for taste which can use electrodes in the mouth to produce an electrical signal that tastes like something. An 800hz signal in the mouth tastes like lemon.[46]
It is possible that our best technologies in this area are in fact barred from use. Increasingly consumers are interested in natural foods, the taste of strawberry must come from the shattered cell walls of a morsel, not from a bottle. This is an interesting case where the purely refined sign is not really what people want, as if the sign of cherry is not so much the almond like taste but something else entirely.
Smell and Taste will not change, but the ways that we feel about particular aromas and flavors will. The new media of the future in these spaces does not look like the simulation of an entire enfolding, but the production of new experiences and technologies that would be consumed in the world as we know it: this is another important point to remind you that the virtual does not depend on goggles, you already inhabit that virtual world.
3.7 Abstraction
Abstraction is a powerful concept. In art, the move toward abstraction allows the artist to be free of the purely iconic or mimetic, to develop works that have qualities that might evoke a feeling without relying on so many established identities. Piet Mondrain and the artists associated with the de stijl movement attempted to reduce the work of art to the most basic elements, in the final form blocks of color set into grids.[47]
In software, abstraction allows the development of many powerful tools. Instead of taking a nearly pointillist orientation toward the encoding of software to actually run on the chip itself. At the lowest level, machine code drives the utilization of the gates that make the computer work. At higher levels, programing languages allow users to deploy abstractions. As the programming moves to higher and higher levels, the abstractions become increasingly understood by users. A page written in HTML and CSS may actually be quite readable by a human. Over time, language developers may produce new abstractions for functions that were once accomplished with much more labor at a lower level.
The grid aesthetic is almost second nature for the web today. Users are not expecting a sophisticated layout that requires them to relearn how to use a computer. These tabular layouts were extremely common and clever websites could be made long before standards for our current layouts existed. Over time, users began to use more devices (such as phones and tablets) and the need for layouts that could adapt became clear. Web developers were then writing div descriptions that would operate in a variety of contingencies. Today, the HTML 5 standard includes abstract representations of positions on the page and adaptations. For APIs and software libraries, many of the functions they offer for data analysis of manipulation are not new. In computer science, this is called refactoring. When code is rewritten with base instructions as functions for repetition and ease of reading, that code is improved.
Abstraction as a semiotic process allows the formation of powerful symbolic signs that greatly increase the power of communication. Yet every abstraction conceals and excludes. An important dimension of our study and production of the future is the role of the abstract in granting access to systems for new developers and designers.
3.7.2 Graphical User Interface
Among the most powerful abstractions for new media is the graphical user interface. Instead of asking that users compose lines of code to access their information of perform operations, the GUI produces a continuous visual state where a pointing device can allow users to move blocks of information or select items in a metaphorical world of positions and objects. Users intentions are then mapped onto visual properties which become the interface with the complex system.
In 2005, Jeremy Reimer wrote a strong history of the GUI (to that point) for Ars Techinca. It is linked here and is suggested reading for everyone. A key detail in this history is the discussion of the Mother of All Demos – the occasion on December 9, 1968 where Douglas Engelbart demonstrated the first computing system with a graphical user interface (a mouse moving abstract blocks on a screen). You may notice that aside from a few changes, the basic technology from his round screen, the basic theory of the GUI is unchanged.
Graphical user interfaces hinge on the use of a pointing device. Typically, this has meant a mouse, trackball, touch-screen, or touch-pad. These devices allow the user to direct the system to recognize the importance of a functional point in virtual space. More recently, the role of the dedicated pointing device has been supplemented by touching directly on the screen. As multi-touch interfaces become increasingly common, users will begin interacting through touch in increasingly sophisticated ways.
Keyboards are relatively static. There are a number of ergonomic alternatives to the current layout. If the hands are positioned slightly differently repetitive stress injuries may be mitigated. Some new designs suppose that a projection of a keyboard, paired with sensors for where the fingers move over that light will replace the physical interface.
A great deal of change can be expected in this area, with-in some boundaries. It seems that the underlying trajectory toward less typing will continue. Typing has a high level of information entropy, people misspell things all the time. Further, it is reasonable to expect pointing devices to become more sophisticated but to so sophisticated that they will become cognitively taxing. Beyond the cognitive, a new set of limits may come into play: the structures of the human wrist. This also goes for keyboards. Is it really cognitively worth it for people who keyboard to learn a non-QWERTY format? For this author, the answer is decidedly no. The future of the keyboard does not hinge on creativity, as much as it does on cognitive and physical limits. Any new innovation in the keyboard space will need to replace the functions of the existing keyboard for many users in a way that provides some very real benefit. Change in pointing devices is more likely than a change in keyboards.
In the market, currently there are roughly three major philosophies for GUI design. Apple’s human interaction guidelines push for a more photorealistic system of icons and animations. Google’s Material Design tends to push of a geometric look that uses a variety of layers to indicate priority and control. Microsoft’s Fluent Design emphasizes the underlying usability of a particular thing.
It is highly likely that all three of these frameworks will change. You will also notice that this list does not include the standards proposed by Facebook, Snapchat, or any number of other firms. Approaches to the graphical user interface will be various and important for understanding interaction on the whole.
3.7.3 Human Computer Interaction
The study of human computer interaction has become a robust field onto itself.
Usability studies, developed by Jakob Nielsen, contends that the primary focus for understanding interaction should be the user task.[48] The designer of a system has some particular thing that the user needs to be aware of and able to manipulate. Usability research deploys a number of different social science strategies for the analysis of user tasks, especially those that can work across the life cycle of the project. The drawback to this approach is that it is involved in problem-solving, not necessarily problem finding. Tasks are provided by the client, the goal is to make the thing work so that the task can be completed.
The challenge of these approaches to affect and HCI (human-computer interaction) is the question of ends. Consider these four major paradigms for the study of human-computer interaction in the introduction to a major research volume: Emotional Design, Hedonomics, Kansei, and Affective Computing.[49] Emotional design is best described in this book as it is tied to usability studies. The aesthetics and configuration of a system are matched to the design of a system through a number of approaches to the evaluation of both the users and the system. Hedonomics supposes that a system must be designed to maximize the pleasure of the user, while Kansei engineering is an example of a framework that supposes a strong ontological typology of users. Consider for a moment the continuing popularity of personality types: what if we designed systems to match with the results of the Meyers-Briggs inventory? Finally, affective computing is a cybernetic model which would describe a situation where the computer might try to continuously adapt to, and modulate the affect of the user. The differences between these approaches are useful for our theory. Each one of these approaches must theorize who the user is, how many different types of users there are, if they can be designed for in advance, and if a universal design is possible.
Human-computer interaction is not a single concept that one simply learns as a set of best-practice recommendations, but an entire domain that fuses an ongoing trajectory of research and development. Every time Facebook, Snapchat or any of the other big social network companies change their interface you see this in action. They have particular ends that they must satisfy – keeping you engaged with great content while inducing clicks on advertisements. The balancing act between those goals is not solved directly by an equation. Furthermore, the aesthetic progression produced by these interfaces changes the conditions by which they are designed.
3.7.4 Brain Interfaces and Other Inputs
All media technologies are providing a poor substitute for telepathic communication. The goal for interface technology is the development of interfaces that would allow thoughts to be scanned directly from the brain and then delivered directly into the brain of another. This seems to be a long way off. The deepest problem here would seem to be neuro-plasticity: the brain of each person is decidedly different. Consciousness, as much as it is understood, is not a mechanical property of the brain that can be located in a single point but an emergent force of a number of different processes all blending together.[50] In 2008, Gary Small’s research was commonly discussed as providing evidence that Google searches prompted the brain to utilize more oxygen than reading – of course the problem, as he maintained, was that the interpretation of more oxygen utilization meant nothing.[51]
N. Katherine Hayles argues this in the context of the development of literacy: there is no single part of the brain that produces the ability to read, and we know that the development of reading and writing appeared as a paradigm shift in human behavior.[52] The key seems to be that multiple parts of the brain were developing reading like parameters at the same time, when these were linked the possibilities were dramatic.
Consider the model necessary for full telepathy: thoughts must be extracted and transcoded into a meaningful for reproduction through a decoding process at the receiver. Anything less than that, and we are once again dealing with a semiotic process where signs are presented to the senses. Thus, our concerns throughout this course with simulation and standardization. Singularity is unlikely.
This does not mean that interfaces involving the brain are not promising. Scanning methods have allowed scanners to read text from the brain. It is possible that new systems will allow those who are locked in to rejoin the world of symbolic production. This is wonderful. Cognitive pupillometry is a well-established concept, as the pupil dilation changes we can detect shifts in the level of cognitive work.[53] Eye focus scanning allows military helicopter gunners to track targets. Galvanic skin response and body position detection can offer rich interface possibilities. Motion scanners offer great fun for headset games, artistic work, and software interface.
In a world where people elect to carry computers (cell phones) there is much data to be collected about the physical location of phones, their relative speed, the accelerometer information (how is the phone moving in space), among other sensor inputs. People elect to use these devices to store biometric data as well, meaning that all of these ambient inputs also provide a world of information for interface with virtual worlds. What the challenge is with these other interfaces is that they are not so neatly intention driven.
There will be much change in the world of alternative interfaces. It is important to keep in mind that the change here is likely limited by the capacity for input into the human as well as the interposition of semiotic code relationships. This returns to the metaphor of the enfolding of the virtual: it is not simply finding a way to get thoughts into or out of a person, but that the ways that those thoughts refer to each other and others held by other people is an equal dimension of the experience of that which is virtual.
3.8 Games
Game theory has offered an important set of conceptual tools for the analysis of complex iterative systems. What does that mean? Games are important because they have multiple turns, and within those turns, the players consider the actions that others may take, in the context of multiple constraints, mechanisms, and story elements, crafting provisional strategies to reach victory or defeat.
Katherine Ibster provides two key points that distinguish games from non-game media: choice and flow.[54] The two points are interlinked – it is not merely the game continues to move but that the choices you make along the stream effect the flow. Flow exists in a tenuous equilibrium between challenge and player skill, great emotional design allows the user to stay in this seemingly ideal zone where they are learning and experiencing change.[55] It can be useful to consider the types of uncertainty generators that are present in games, as proposed by Costykian, including the player, a random generator, and other players.[56] Games vary greatly based on where they find the randomness necessary for fun.
Beyond the solitary game, playing together is important: it is the depth of interaction between people that makes these game systems truly deep.[57] Game theory relies on this assumption to provide critical insight into human behavior akin to the results of a system of equations: the assumption in a game involves active people attempting to arrive at some outcome.[58] Games are everywhere and are deadly serious.
Ian Bogost’s conception of procedural rhetoric is particularly useful for understanding the future of media, the ways that particular software affordances can be mapped to the experiences of the game player.[59] Rhetorically the video game must be understood both through its total semantic content and the coded means of delivery. The peak of games for Bogost is a complex system where a user is made to disidentify with their own position by manipulating a complex system: Sim City.[60] This perspective is ludological.
Kishonna Gray makes the counter point: rather than evacuating games of identity the identities in the game must be challenged.[61] This is narratological: the game is a story that is a way of understanding the world, it is not a psychological procedure but a way that people experience stories that make their personal worlds. Games are stories that deeply compelling. To see them as less than that or as flat objects that people are not invested in misses their power.
This framing device, a debate between positions, has some truth in it but also is largely artificial. I present it this way so that we might understand the two lines as they braid into the future: there will be new stories, but also new ways of interfacing with the system that will produce many new affordances. There is some value in debunking such a distinction between play structure and story, but also great utility in reading each.
At the same time, games are critical for understanding human behavior. As both a literal structure and a metaphor, games describe a recursive pattern of behavior. Thus, as a form for thinking about the future, games are important as they give us some sense of the real dynamics by which strategies form.
3.9 Narrative
Stories are everywhere. Stories increase emphatic awareness of others situations. Stories may even be the basic structure of being itself. Stories aren’t going anywhere – but the content of those stories will change. It is also important to understand that ideas from prior stories are referenced in future stories. This is called intertextuality. The play between the present consideration of a text and all of the meanings loaded into forms and tropes are important.
Joseph Campbell identified a commonly used structure known as the hero’s journey: this formalist template can be identified in many successful stories.[62] This does not mean that those stories are all the same or that there is no variation, but that rhetorical forms evolve over time. Changing stories have a low velocity. The mythic structure is particularly enduring regardless of the choice to include vampires or Mr. Darcy.
Leslie Baxter and Barbara Montgomery provided a different approach to understanding narrative in everyday communication – flowing from Bakthin, they see our personal stories as a product of forces that push people together and pull them apart.[63] This is an important idea as it can give us a way to read stories that are developing and those that are less than logically coherent. Reading the future is not a matter of binary logic, but of complex fuzzy interaction across space and time.
Kenneth Burke approached the use of narrative in public life through the idea of the pentad. The core of the pentad are the five basic units of a drama: scene, act, agent, purpose, agency.
Scene The Setting
Act The Action
Agent The Character
Purpose The Reason Why
Agency The Method of Action
The pentad provides us the foundation of a theory called dramatism, where a formal structure can be applied to any number of communication phenomena. Professor Ragan Fox at CSU-Long Beach has a spectacular full chart that anyone interested in learning Rhetoric must review.[64] These appear as “ratios,” where two elements of a story combine to form the core logic of that story.
Where Campbell’s approach leads us to consider the sort of stock stories that populate our worlds, Baxter and Montgomery provide resources for seeing how those stories are translated into action in our everyday lives. Burke, on the other hand, provides a near guide to how the ratios might be deployed in everyday life. This returns to the point of the semiotic interposition of signs and facts.
3.10 Immersion
Marie Ryan argued in an essay over a quarter of a century ago that the real immersive power of the game is in the intertextual enfolding of the user.[65] Team chat and interaction are what is really interactive, merely pushing buttons is not. This is an important idea. What does it mean to have enough contact with an interface to say that you are in communication with a conscious system? The common answer to this question is the idea of the Touring test – the idea that a system that could simulate relatively banal interaction over a textual transmission would be AI. In this time period, we can see a remarkable number of systems which are capable of producing far more vivacious simulations of human interaction.
It is likely that what constitutes immersion will change. As social media systems have reached maturity, it has become clear that they are a vector for hateful and hurtful communication. The friendly banter that would have made a world compelling has fallen away.
Interactivity is merely the chain of indexical reactions to user input. Ryan proposed a useful framework for evaluating interactive controls: speed, range, and mapping. These controls allow us to have some vocabulary for evaluating different levels of interactivity with a system.
The most interesting question: do people actually want immersion? Are any of our new technologies that much more immersive than an excellent television show or a novel?
3.11 Language
It is likely that language, particularly the semantic dimensions of everyday code will change most. This is totally tubular. As much as ideas are constantly in flux in an attempt to symbolize what we mean, which is always to a very real degree barred from what other people might mean, language will be dynamically shifting in an attempt to keep up. This is not just a property of idioms, grammatical structures and spellings shift often as well. There are so many languages and codes. It should be clear why humanistic research is so important, we need to understand how these code systems work and how they are changing.
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2. John R. Stuart, Language As Articulate Contact: Toward a Post-Semiotic Philosophy of Communication (State University of New York Press, 1995). ↵
3. Kathryn E Anthony, Timothy L Sellnow, and Alyssa G Millner, “Message Convergence as a Message-Centered Approach to Analyzing and Improving Risk Communication,” Journal of Applied Communication Research 41, no. 4 (October 2013): 346–64. ↵
4. This is a strong resource developed for a course at the University of Chicago in 2007. Hua-Ling Linda Chang, “Semiotics,” Keywords Glossary::semiotics, 2007, http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/semiotics.htm. ↵
5. John E. Joseph, “Ferdinand de Saussure,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics, June 28, 2017, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/978...384655.013.385. ↵
6. Sean Hall, This Means This, This Means That: A User’s Guide to Semiotics (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2012). ↵
7. Daniel Chandler, “Semiotics for Beginners: Signs,” 2006, https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazel...BIB/semio2.htm. ↵
8. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Jonathan Cape (Paris: Noonday Press, 1991). ↵
9. McGee, Michael Calvin, “The ‘Ideograph’ a Link between Rhetoric and Ideology,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 66, no. 1 (1980): 1–16. ↵
10. Nancy Frasier, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text 25/26 (1990): 56–80. ↵
11. Michael, Warner, “Publics and Counter-Publics,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 413–25. ↵
12. Greene, Ron, “Rhetorical Pedagogy as Postal System: Circulating Subjects Through Michael Warner’s ‘Publics and Counterpublics,’” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 433–43. ↵
13. Thomas A. Hollihan and Kevin T. Baaske, Arguments and Arguing: The Products and Process of Human Decision Making, Third Edition (Waveland Press, 2015). ↵
14. Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, On Justification: Economies of Worth, trans. Catherine Porter (Princeton University Press, 2006). ↵
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16. Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (Duke University Press, 2018). ↵
17. Lee Vinsel, “Design Thinking Is a Boondoggle,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 21, 2018, www.chronicle.com/article/De...ng-Is-a/243472. ↵
18. Chapter eight is the classic on affordance theory. Your instructor should likely provide you a copy of this chapter for additional discussion. James Jerome Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Psychology Press, 1986). ↵
19. Norman, Living with Complexity. ↵
20. Nikil Saval, “Brutalism Is Back,” New York Times Style Magazine, October 6, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/06/t...e-revival.html. ↵
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22. Alex Williams, “Normcore: Fashion Movement or Massive In-Joke?,” New York Times, April 2, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/03/f...e-in-joke.html. ↵
23. J. Kenji López-Alt, The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science, n.d., accessed October 26, 2018. ↵
24. Good Eats was an important culinary television program that may be in production when you read this. ↵
25. Isaac West, “Performing Resistance in/from the Kitchen: The Practice of Maternal Pacifist Politics and La WISP’s Cookbooks,” Women’s Studies in Communication 30, no. 3 (2007). ↵
26. ? ↵
27. “Why the Fries Taste Good,” Lexicon of Food, November 2, 2015, www.lexiconoffood.com/post/w...ies-taste-good. ↵
28. Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2012), 234. ↵
29. “Why the Fries Taste Good.” ↵
30. Lorna Roth, “Looking at Shirley, the Ultimate Norm: Colour Balance, Image Technologies, and Cognitive Equity,” Canadian Journal of Communication 34, no. 1 (March 28, 2009), https://doi.org/10.22230/cjc.2009v34n1a2196. ↵
31. Robert Perkins, “Ultra-Thin Camera Creates Images Without Lenses” (CalTech, June 21, 2017), http://www.caltech.edu/news/ultra-th...t-lenses-78731. ↵
32. Steve Huff, “The Future of Cameras, Gear and Photography. The Mirror Is Dying.,” Steve Huff Photo, June 7, 2018, http://www.stevehuffphoto.com/2018/0...rror-is-dying/. ↵
33. “Recording Studio Microphones: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide,” E-Home Recording Studio, May 28, 2012, https://ehomerecordingstudio.com/typ...f-microphones/. ↵
34. Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project, ed. Tiedemann, Rolf, trans. Eiland, Howard and McLaughin, Kevin (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002). ↵
35. Janko Roettgers and Janko Roettgers, “Netflix’s Secrets to Success: Six Cell Towers, Dubbing and More,” Variety (blog), March 8, 2018, https://variety.com/2018/digital/new...ts-1202721847/. ↵
36. Vadim Rizov, “~31 Films Shot on 35mm Released in 2017,” Filmmaker Magazine, April 5, 2018, https://filmmakermagazine.com/105050...eased-in-2017/. ↵
37. Phil Green, “DI - The Conform,” The Digital Intermediate Guide, 2006, http://www.digital-intermediate.co.u.../DIconform.htm. ↵
38. Xcode ↵
39. “What Is Holography? | Holocenter,” accessed October 31, 2018, http://holocenter.org/what-is-holography. ↵
40. “Stories | Racing for Realism,” accessed October 8, 2018, https://renderman.pixar.com/stories/cars-3. ↵
41. M. Mills, “Hearing Aids and the History of Electronics Miniaturization,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 33, no. 2 (February 2011): 24–45, https://doi.org/10.1109/MAHC.2011.43. ↵
42. Ibid. ↵
43. The discussion of the touchscreen genealogy as it intersects with the haptic is perhaps the strongest point. Parisi ↵
44. 280 ↵
45. 286 ↵
46. Honor Whiteman, “‘Digital Taste Simulator’ Developed That Tickles the Tastebuds,” Medical News Today, accessed October 31, 2018, https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/269324.php. ↵
47. Mondrain ↵
48. Jakob Nielsen, Usability Engineering (Boston: Academic Press, 1993). ↵
49. Affective computing ↵
50. Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (Penguin, 2005). ↵
51. “Digital Nation,” Frontline (PBS, February 2, 2010), https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/f...digitalnation/. ↵
52. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farr, Strauss, and Grioux, 2013), 33. ↵
53. Kahneman, 33. ↵
54. Katherine Isbister, How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design (MIT Press, 2016). ↵
55. This is an important claim in a number of different works on games. The “flow state” is theorized as a form of positive interested attention, as opposed to obsession or addiction. Isbister, 6. ↵
56. Greg Costikyan, Uncertainty in Games (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2013). ↵
57. Marie-Laure Ryan, “Immersion vs. Interactivity: Virtual Reality and Literary Theory,” Post-Modern Culture 5, no. 1 (1994), www.humanities.uci.edu/mposte...ings/ryan.html; Isbister, How Games Move Us. ↵
58. Ken Binmore, Game Theory, A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). ↵
59. Ian Bogost, “The Rhetoric of Video Games,” in The Ecology of Games, ed. Katie Salen (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2008). ↵
60. Ian Bogost, “Video Games Are Better Without Characters,” The Atlantic, March 13, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/technolog...acters/387556/. ↵
61. The Editors, “The Futures of Game Studies,” The Velvet Light Trap 81, no. 1 (February 23, 2018): 57–57. ↵
62. Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers (Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions, 2007). ↵
63. Barbara M. Montgomery and Leslie A. Baxter, Dialectical Approaches to Studying Personal Relationships (Psychology Press, 2013), 53. ↵
64. “Ragan Fox Breaks Down Kenneth Burke’s Pentadic Ratios,” Musings in Pop Culture & Pedagogy, October 21, 2013, ragan.blog/2013/10/21/ragan-...ntadic-ratios/. ↵
65. Ryan, “Immersion vs. Interactivity: Virtual Reality and Literary Theory.” ↵ | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/New_Media_Futures_(Faltesek_and_Adams)/1.03%3A_Things_That_Are_Likely_to_Change.txt |
Section 4 – Methods
You should not be universally skeptical, but also not universally trusting. You need to understand how and why certain methods work and others do not. Aligning methods and questions may be the most important skill for the future. In this section I will layout a number of methods for doing research in media, with the hope that you will understand what good research looks like in each area, so that you may ignore and refute the bad.
Methodology is a loop. Without qualities, there are no meaningful qualities. Without some sense of quantity, qualities are unmoored from reality. There is no qualitative answer that can eliminate the need to count, just as there is no way to count to an assembled claim. Communication Studies is a lucky discipline as our questions are not welded to a single methodological chassis.
4.1 Qualitative
Qualitative research presents descriptions, interpretations, and criticism. The question of description: what was the text? What does it mean? How do the codes work? To what end were those codes selected?
Qualitative research is primarily concerned with the qualities of the cases in the study in question. Computational methods tend to impart indolence with regard to the question of the data themselves or worse an aggressive pruning of ambiguity which makes for clean data, but poor models of human communication. Great qualitative research is rigorous, deeply informed, and essential to decision making, ethics, and meaning.
4.1.1 Ethnography
As a practice of tracing the everyday performance of individuals, ethnographic research, particularly field work, sees the body and experience as the basis for analysis. Researchers in this tradition conduct interviews and spend time in the field. Rigor comes from demonstrating that one was really embedded in the system of meanings that are used by a group of people or in a particular context. To maintain a structured system of thinking, the researcher continuously produces field notes, which serve as an intermediate document of what things meant to the individual at a particular point in time. These structured notes then allow the researcher to remember key details to construct the finished account later. Finalized research then is the product of a review of these notes and a reconstruction of the symbolic system. This research is not published as a sort of abstract formula, but as a rich account of the meaning itself. Great ethnographic work may read more like a novel than a lab report.
Dwight Conquergood, a major ethnographer of communication, in his development of a critical ethnographic practice called for the ongoing revaluation of the sources of authority for those who would claim to know what meaning is in a culture. The key to this performance ethnography is constant self-reflexity: the researcher needs to understand how their mode of presenting themselves and the world produces their own academic authority. Descriptions of hardship often seem to provide ethnographers credibility. Why such an intense struggle? Meaning is owned by a group, it is not hard to find many troubling examples of cultural appropriation where information is scooped up and resold as a product with little remuneration of the original producers. More instrumentally, there could be multiple explanations of the same phenomena. Ethnographers have many interesting strategies for demonstrating rigor and building credibility. When these are well deployed, and when the account is ethical and engages the community, the results are profound. It makes sense why large corporations like Microsoft pay for academic ethnographic research. These are the insights that can make a game changing product.
It is the power of reflexive ethnography that is often mistaken as the seemingly magical dimension of design. If the designer is truly, reflexively integrated into the use context of a thing or idea their designs will really resonate in a powerful way. At the same time, it becomes comically excessive when people who are not embedded claim the same sort of authority or to make the same claims to meaning as those who have not engaged. But wait – notice that in the creation of authority for the ethnographer in the last sentence I have already deployed a rhetoric of effort and time, as if that work somehow gives a person the right to make authoritative claims about meaning simply on the basis of duration. Would it make the claim more powerful if I said they experienced hardship?
Ethnography is a powerful approach, and people who have the patience and the reflexive sense to do this well are rare. At the same time, this is not a special property of some people, but a skill that is refined over many years. It is entirely possible to do meaningful work in this area that does not rise to the level of publishable ethnographic research. Interview and observation methods have real value, and can contribute to your efforts. Good research in this vein will be deliberate and reflective, making modest claims with abundant evidence. Bad research will be quick and easy, a cover for pre-established conclusions and bad ideas.
4.1.2 Hermeneutics
The hermeneutic tradition comes from an ancient sort of grandmother discipline called philology which focused on textual interpretation. Many of the discussions of semiotics and particular media in this book offer approaches to understanding meaning.
The traditional seven question typology of hermeneutics as presented in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
1. Who (is the author) (quis/persona)?
2. What (is the subject matter of the text) (quid/materia)?
3. Why (was the text written) (cur/causa)?
4. How (was the text composed) (quomodo/modus)?
5. When (was the text written or published) (quando/tempus)?
6. Where (was the text written or published) (ubi/loco)?
7. By which means (was the text written or published) (quibus faculatibus/facultas)?[1]
I often recommend these as a starting point for any student looking to understand their readings in class. These questions can help you reconstruct the state of an academic discipline or in the original case, to reconstruct the text of the Bible. Many of the ideas in hermeneutics are similar to those deployed in the theorization of the conditions of possibility in communication studies.
Hermeneutic approaches follow a tradition called close reading, this employs an interpretive strategy to be used on a particular text. Good work in this area will employ a structured framework and demonstrate how different parts of the code work. Ultimately it is about the code. Or as Jacques Derrida put it: there is no outside of the text.[2] A deep account of who wrote what, when, where and why can change how you think.
For undergraduate audiences, hermeneutic critique is presented as the work of the “masters of suspicion” (Nietzsche, Marx, Freud) as designated by Paul Ricoeur – this presentation flattens a number of unique interesting questions presented by each author, and tends to position the world in a troubling critical/non-critical binary.[3] In her critique of this binary, Rita Felski argues that the binary misses the range of possibilities and texture that come from any number of approaches to interpreting the text:
In a related essay, I scrutinize some of the qualities of a suspicious or critical reading practice: distance rather than closeness; guardedness rather than openness; aggression rather than submission; superiority rather than reverence; attentiveness rather than distraction; exposure rather than tact (215–34). Suspicion, in this sense, constitutes a muted affective state—a curiously non-emotional emotion of morally inflected mistrust—that overlaps with, and builds upon, the stance of detachment that characterizes the stance of the professional or expert. That this style of reading proves so alluring has much to do with the gratifications and satisfactions that it offers. Beyond the usual political or philosophical justifications of critique, it also promises the engrossing pleasure of a game-like sparring with the text in which critics deploy inventive skills and innovative strategies to test their wits, best their opponents, and become sharper, shrewder, and more sophisticated players.[4]
Skilled critics working with codes can do great work. We should take Felski’s warning seriously as we develop new interpretative frames for the future but also to understand when we should engage in the practice of translational critique. This is an important political moment in any academic project: when is the theory complete and the time for intervention?
4.1.3 Historicism
In 2015, a film crew went on a dingy quest in New Mexico in search of lost video games, in this case 881 ET Atari cartridges.[5] The question is why? The cartridges were dumped because of the lack of meaningful control of the production of games for the 2600 which resulted in a glut of terrible games. For undergraduate teaching this is a wonderful example – you can teach the political economy of the game industry, touch on the legal structures which enable production, and teach key points in history of the product: all at the same time.
Media history is a nexus that allows the introduction of compelling questions. Much of the excellent work of John Durham Peters has been concerned with the development of logistical media technologies (like calendars and towers).[6] The inspiration of Frierich Kittler on Peters should be apparent, with an important caveat: Peters tends to assume that the driving force for media development is longing, Kittler assumes armed conflict.[7] There are any number of ways of thinking and assembling evidence, for media historians the work is always translational, the assembly of ideas and archives are intended to work along an explanatory line. For more traditional academic historians this may be premature, as the inductive collection of facts in bulk is necessary before embarking on a structured pattern of noticing.
Good historical work actively reduces its own scope. Historical research expands geometrically – every time the project attempts to explain something else it grows to include the new idea and all the contact points between the idea and the existing project.
History, when done well, provides the most detailed possible accounting for the conditions of possibility for the present.
One of the most common forms of historical reason that you will see is not the academic history, but the business case study. A case is isolated in time and reduced to what Wes Rumelt describes as a kernel, where a single set of coherent policies could have produced actions that would have changed the direction of a business enterprise.[8] Business reasoning, as a form of historicism, assumes that the understanding of past forces can then be inferred as a continuous function that will shape the future. The greatest flaw to this sort of media history is that the accounts created will almost always feature “winners” discussing their brilliance. Narrow, self-serving, yet historical. Both undergraduates and MBA students will be writing cases for the foreseeable future. It should be clear that this mode of reasoning is in common use in everyday life and it can help us understand why it would be a good use of time and money to dig up a landfill.
4.1.4 Rhetoric
Rhetoric is an academic field that emphasizes the probability of effect for a particular utterance especially if that is a persuasive utterance. This field deeply informs this book and the impact of it can be seen across the text.
4.1.5 Policy
Policy analysis is concerned with the translation of other findings about the world into a meaningful course of action. This is normative, meaning that it concerns what SHOULD be done rather than what is, was, or could be. Normative work is elegant and enjoyable, but it often misses the messy scene that it would intervene into.[9] Human judgement is the final arbiter of political truth. The earth is getting warmer. It is likely that this will cause problems. These are facts. What is tricky is how these facts of techno-science are translated into a meaningful policy. Is the solution to outlaw cars or airplanes? Should all electrical generation be nuclear? Are hydroelectric dams (a major source of power at my current location) on balance better than coal?
Idealistic students are often vexed by the inability of the public to understand “science.” As Damien Pfister argues, the issue is not that the science of warming is in particular dispute, but that the translation of that into a viable policy is not a matter of techno-science but a question of policy, and the hockey stick graphic became a point where science, expertise, and participation interweaved.[10] Scientific authority is constructed around the discourse of description, the scientist’s instruments tell it how it is. The problem is that a measurement of atmospheric pressure is not particularly interesting. Among the most profound facts in our world are social facts – these include things like the unemployment rate and public opinion. These are deeply imperfect facts where the means of measurement were designed for the resolution of a problem, not the seeming objective question of science.
This is not to say that warming isn’t real, but that debates about warming are discussions of policy, not statements of fact.
4.1.6 Legal
Legal reasoning then is the application of an interpretation of what the law is to a particular set of facts. The framework for interpretation is largely determined by professional jurists, while the facts are determined by the rhetorical process of the jury trial. Juries serve as fact-finders. Once the jury determines what the facts are, courts up the chain of review operate on the basis of those facts when making their interpretations. Courts operating above the trial level, or appeals courts, are considering questions of interpretative theory.
The law itself is a combination of the laws passed by legislatures (like Congress), orders by executives (like the President), and regulations by agencies (like the FCC). These are then situated within the Constitutional framework that produced those laws and the tradition of common law. Common law principles provide a number of ideas in general operation, for example the common law would say that no one may be their own judge. In a country that recognizes the common law, the President would not be able to pardon himself as such a function of judgement cannot be done by alone.
Precedent is set by the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS). They typically hear about ninety appeals each year. Cases are selected by the justices, this is called a writ of certiorari. The court only evaluates questions in the cases before it and the court is only the original jurisdiction for a handful of cases involving particularly thorny matters between state governments.[11] When we think of this in the context of the design of state institutions or speculative civics, the Courts in this sense are a trailing institution. They wait to take action.
Within the courts, precedent shapes the interpretation of what the law is. Precedents bind vertically, meaning that a court above makes a determination that should be followed below. This is called Stare Decisis.
Generally, the Supreme Court is unlikely to overturn an existing precedent, opting instead to distinguish the current situation from that which formed the precedent in the first place. The law as such is the current interpretation of text and precedent. Black and Spriggs have found that depreciation occurs within a twenty-year window, it is not a question of all meaning over time, but how the courts have ruled recently.[12] If a case is not cited within the window, it is not likely that it will be included in the current understanding of the law. It is important to find a lawyer who is active in a domain of practice to understand what the law is actually understood to be in any particular area. A tax attorney may not be up to speed about current cable franchise law, and in areas where the court has been inactive in recent years, results may be far less predictable if half the justices on the court have never ruled in an area. Lawyers use many resources, including reference books like the restatement of law for a particular area to understand what the law actually is.
Why isn’t there a single answer or book with clear directions? There are many situations and different sets of facts. Much like the inability to directly translate the measurements of scientific devices into a policy finding, the analysis of the desirability of a result is very difficult to translate into an abstract legal rule.
Legal research is much like policy research, but tied more to a handful of hermeneutic frameworks. A central tenant of critical legal studies, a sub-discipline appreciated by communication researchers, holds that the law itself is indeterminate, that the text can be interpreted to have a wide variety of meanings. This is not to say that the legal text has no meaning, but that if there is an interpretive question it is more likely that the question will be resolved in favor of the side with more power.
4.1.6.1 Freedom of Expression
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution reads:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
This provides a right for Americans to distribute information, practice religion, and organize movements. If you have been doing your reading, you likely know many reasons why this is good. At the same time, you notice that this does not apply to non-state actors. If anything, private organizations have a first amendment right, in the context of the freedom of the press, to make editorial choices. It is not that we have a clear imperative to speak more, but that communication researchers are very interested in the careful balancing of public and private restraint and editorial judgement.
You may notice that this is a fairly limited right, it does not protect your right to say whatever you want without consequence, prohibit compelled speech, or state speech. There are powerful questions here:
• Should we protect lies?
• What do we do about hurtful speech?
• Should it be acceptable to say true things, even if they are hurtful?
• Does the truth actually win in public debate?
• How does speech intersect with intellectual property?
• What is journalism and should it have special protection?
• How should states respect the expression laws of other states?
• Should well-meaning restraints on communication be struck down if they both stop bad communication and chill good communication?
Freedom of expression is a major topic in communication and is a major theme for the future.
4.1.6.2 Intellectual Property
At this institution, Oregon State, IP law is covered extensively in Introduction to New Media. Intellectual property law includes:
Area Topics Protection
Copyright The protection of texts and authorship Life of the author + 70 years; statutory protection for all registered texts (\$250,000 per violation)
Patent Inventions that are useful, non-obvious, and correctly filed Injunction, Damages
Trademark Derived from the Common Law, protection for the uniqueness of a brand or mark. Non-exclusive. Injunction, Damages
Trade Secret Protection against theft of confidential information; criminal law Criminal penalties and action to redress theft
These regimes of law have distinct sources. Copyright and patent law are derived from article one section eight of the US Constitution. Trademark is a common-law protection. Trade secret is primarily a matter of uniform state law with new Federal law, and is primarily criminal law related to theft.
To be actionable under copyright law one must have made a derivative work for more than a transitory period of time. This means that parts of another work could be included in your work, and despite the originality of your new work you could be sued. The defense in this case is called “fair use” which supposes that there are legitimate uses of copyrighted material such as parody. There is no fair use for patented subject matter. Known as the patent bargain, the idea is that the invention is disclosed for the continuation of the process of science and improvement. Thus, new inventions that include another must pay royalties during the twenty-year period. In some cases, the period may be extended to make invention in a critical area more rewarding.
Patents were common in our area until the decision in CLS v. Alice – where the Supreme Court roundly rejected patents for applications that attempted to computerize existing business processes. It is unlikely that you will see business method patents in our area again. At the same time, you are likely so see patents protecting many technologies that we love. Without artificial scarcity, prices in this sector would drop below viable levels.
4.1.6.3 Open-Source
Many software libraries are open-source, meaning that they are provided to freely use and distribute. These resources like development platforms: Lens Studio, Android Studio, Xcode, Rstudio allow us a great deal of flexibility in making things. Proprietary API systems and the law of the API are likely major factors in our future. The underlying legal structure, at the point of this writing the Computer Abuse and Fraud Act of 1986, is quite unclear. This will be a major area to watch in the future, access controls provide a powerful and dangerous form of private law.
4.1.6.4 International
Data sovereignty is a very hot area right now. Countries around the globe are enacting laws regulating how information is managed in their jurisdiction, with Australia going as far as to require extensive backdoors into systems. There are extensive discussions in Global Media that were seemingly resolved by the techno-utopian vision of the internet that are clearly still very active. A deep understanding of the major frameworks for international relations: realism, neo-realism, liberalism, democratic peace theory, and constructivism will be critical going forward.
4.2 Quantitative
Hadley Wickham and Garrett Grolemund open their handy book R for Data Science, with an important distinction between hypothesis generating and hypothesis confirming quantitative research.[13] For the most part you are likely used to hypothesis testing as the horizon of quantitative research. The elision between quantitative methods and positivism can obscure the potential of other modes of assembling ideas. Hypothesis generating social science can use mathematical techniques and visualization to promote the creation of new interesting questions. In this section I am interested in discussing the foundations of a number of quantitative methods and how they contribute to media studies.
4.2.1 Discrete vs Continuous
Discrete implies that something is a single category. JL Austin’s classic example from speech act theory: one is either married or not married. There is no “sort of” married. There are thus two output variables. Continuous measures have a range of possible outputs, like temperatures. It is possible to render continuous as discrete through binning. We might say temperatures >50 and <50. Now if 50 is a meaningful number, describing a change in state, temperature could become discrete. Boiling versus non-boiling for instance is a meaningful discrete category.
4.2.2 Mathematical Moments
The central processes by which we consider the moments are: central tendency, variance, skewness, and kurtosis.[14] First, we are concerned with the center of the distribution, this can be found with mean or median. Mode is the most common value.
Variance is described by standard deviation of any individual data point from the mean. This is most commonly presented as standard deviation. If we consider a plot of a distribution, the skewness shows how the plot leans, and the kurtosis how sharp the peaks of the distribution.
These ideas allow you to think carefully about where measurement of a thing or a probability. Most of our statistical methods work with manipulations of measurements of central tendency and variance.
4.2.3 Hypothesis Testing
Hypothesis testing is an intrinsically digital way of knowing – it relies on the creation of an if-then construction which can be tested against a reference value. Confusion often comes in the discussion of what is truly tested, meaning the null hypothesis rather than the hypothesis itself. Hypothesis testing research seeks to confirm that something happened, thus rejecting the null hypothesis. Do we necessarily know what happened? No.
The ideas of type one and two error come from a foundational 1928 paper by Jezey Neyman and Egon Pearson:[15]
Accept Null Reject Null
Null Accurate Correct – nothing for nothing Type 1: False Positive
Non-Null Accurate Type 2: False Negative Correct – Something for Something
The recurring remark is that there must also be a type three error related to answering the wrong question with the right method. In designing a study to use traditional hypothesis methods we consider the validity and reliability of the tests intended for the hypothesis.
Reliability means: do we get the same result twice when testing the same sample? Would you trust a glucometer that returned very different blood sugar readings on the same vial of blood? The reliability and margin of error for a test is important in designing an experiment. Studies are only as strong as their least reliable method.
Validity refers to the idea that the test in question actually answers the research question. These are divided into internal and external validity. Internal validity is the coherence of the design of the original logical statement, if X then Y. As you remember from the discussion of logical operators and transistors, these processes go in order and only one way. External validity is the ability to see that the result makes sense in the world, that it can be generalized. If a study of 300 undergraduates at a large state university who claim to have never heard of the rapper Drake (one of the most popular figures in popular music at this writing) crosses your desk you know that either A. the data are not legitimate or B. the undergraduates in the study are a highly atypical population and any extrapolation from them is risky at best.
There is one more substantial hurdle: the study needs to be physically possible. Consider the study of food and nutrition. To be ethical, a study must be beneficent, meaning that no one is harmed. It would be unethical to do research that involved intentionally starving people to see what vitamin does. Many social research questions may require surveys that exceed the capacity of the researcher or their funds. Research involving social network data is limited to the data that you can actually extract from that network, Facebook is not cooperative. There are many questions that are not practical to answer.
Consider the following study: This study is intended for 15 year olds. Question one: how many minutes of drinking have you seen in the last year on television? Question two: how many drinks do you have per day?
What do you imagine the results would be? Would you be comfortable with this use of self-report data? If the correlation was positive and the null hypothesis was rejected, would it be prudent to ban representations of beer drinking on television? Should you believe the recollections of the fifteen year olds over the last year or their current use reports?
Correlation, even if you assume the study is sound, does not imply causation. Although only a very silly person would reject the correlation of being hit by a bus and grievous physical injury.
Correlations are generally reported from -1 to 1 (meaning the slope line and relative noisiness) with zero being no relationship. Different coefficients have different properties. There are many other tests including T-Tests that compare the differences between populations. For example: if two comparable populations were exposed to some treatment and then asked for attitude change, the analysis of the variance within and between groups would be a useful measurement. These methods are not a perfect truth machine, they offer important information about central tendency and effect size. The key is understanding the limits of the tests in question and how they align with your research.
4.2.4 Iteration
It is unlikely that a social scientist will dream up the exact single experiment that could make sense of reality. The universe is simply too weird for that. We can expect many studies to be developed that circle in on a possible causal relationship that makes sense of the world. Keep in mind, that this process never ends. Methods become more reliable, our analysis of validity more-fine grained.
As we circle in on the hypothesis confirmation step, it is likely that the visualizations and thought processes will generate even more new hypotheses. As you may have notified in the discussion of policy research there is no quantitative translational moment. Good science is autotelic – it produces more of itself.
What is required is a sense of meta-awareness of what the field has done before. This is why the literature review section of a paper is so important, researchers need to know which hypotheses have already been rejected. This is also why replication is necessary, there need to be important checks both on hypotheses that seem to be true and those that are rejected as false. Most of all, science isn’t magic.
4.2.5 Phacking
The underlying criterion of many of these studies involves the use of the threshold for significance, which in social science is .05 which refers to the likelihood that the null would be rejected in error. The default condition is to reject the null if the level exceeds .05. Phacking refers to the intentional manipulation of a study to arrive at the .05 threshold, which seems both possible and suspiciously likely as so many studies tend to cluster at the key level.[16] Christine Ashwanden argues the problem is not necessarily that there is a great deal of cheating, but that doing really good research is really, really hard:
People often joke about the herky-jerky nature of science and health headlines in the media — coffee is good for you one day, bad the next — but that back and forth embodies exactly what the scientific process is all about. It’s hard to measure the impact of diet on health, Nosek told me. “That variation [in results] occurs because science is hard.” Isolating how coffee affects health requires lots of studies and lots of evidence, and only over time and in the course of many, many studies does the evidence start to narrow to a conclusion that’s defensible. “The variation in findings should not be seen as a threat,” Nosek said. “It means that scientists are working on a hard problem.”[17]
The popular rhetoric of science does little to help in this case. Science is presented as magical and somehow value free offering simple answers to political and ethical problems. In reality, science, like publicity, is a process. Easy answers are not coming.
Hypothesizing after the fact is another version of this problem where many measures are deployed and after some significant result is found a study is reconstructed around it. We should be careful not to delegitimize inductive qualitative strategies. Someone searching for a foothold might test thirty hypotheses. They would then report them and iterate the positive findings to generate more results. Perfection only matters for those with the least at stake. Exploratory data science is important for future hypothesis generation, at the same time exploratory work should not be passed off as something it isn’t.
When we consider the rhetoric of statistical design, there is a discourse that supposes that the double-blind controlled experiment is the only way to access the truth. If we reduce what we can know to only be that which is tested in this particular manner with a null rejection, there will be no knowledge left. Authority comes in the debunking of what would be meaningful results just as the skeptical game of hermeneutics becomes self-defeating when it hyper-signifies, statistics becomes decadent when the empirical is lost to the purely quantitative.
4.2.6 Bayesian, effect sizing, ANOVA, multiple hypothesis
For the purposes of this paragraph, you do not need to pretend that you care about football, but you need some awareness of what it is. How do we determine the best college football team in the country? Do we simply count wins and losses? There will be many teams with many wins, are we sure that the farm lads of Iowa play the same level competition as the engineers of MIT? Perhaps we should simply ask some keen sportsball fans? There are no easy answers.
Rankings are hard, especially when there are many teams (around 120) and only ten or eleven games per season. What do you do as the season progresses, how quickly should rankings change from week to week?
In the context of chess competition, a potential solution was proposed by Arpad Elo, which used a slow-moving evaluation of the quality of a player by adding the relative quality of other players to their ranking and dividing.[18] This is an important idea – we can assume that a player who has a very high ranking has likely beaten other very good players and lower ranked players have likely not won such difficult matches. Translating this back into the football example, we can assume that a 9-0 team from the University of Alabama (an institution known for superior football performance) would very likely defeat a team from Concordia College (a team known for its remarkable corncob mascot). Our assessment of Alabama anterior to the test (the game) would be that they were a very good football team, after the win (Concordia has no chance) it would not appreciably increase (we gained little new information). The ranking after would be the posterior measurement.
Instead of seeing the game as a chance to reject the hypothesis that Concordia is better at football than Alabama, the Bayesian method allows us to actually think about the level of information encoded in the game in an intuitive way. Bayesian methods are preferable as they are more easily sized to datasets, allow researchers to think about the world as it is (they are more empirical), and they are concerned with the analysis of variance and effect size. Playoff games would produce far more meaningful information as they involve seeded interactions between teams which we know to be excellent.
In his open letter calling for Bayesian methods in the psychological sciences, John Krushke make the following excellent points:
Some people may have the mistaken impression that the advantages of Bayesian methods are negated by the need to specify a prior distribution. In fact, the use of a prior is both appropriate for rational inference and advantageous in practical applications.
* It is inappropriate not to use a prior. Consider the well-known example of random disease screening. A person is selected at random to be tested for a rare disease. The test result is positive. What is the probability that the person actually has the disease? It turns out, even if the test is highly accurate, the posterior probability of actually having the disease is surprisingly small. Why? Because the prior probability of the disease was so small. Thus, incorporating the prior is crucial for coming to the right conclusion.
* Priors are explicitly specified and must be agreeable to a skeptical scientific audience. Priors are not capricious and cannot be covertly manipulated to predetermine a conclusion. If skeptics disagree with the specification of the prior, then the robustness of the conclusion can be explicitly examined by considering other reasonable priors. In most applications, with moderately large data sets and reasonably informed priors, the conclusions are quite robust.
* Priors are useful for cumulative scientific knowledge and for leveraging inference from small-sample research. As an empirical domain matures, more and more data accumulate regarding particular procedures and outcomes. The accumulated results can inform the priors of subsequent research, yielding greater precision and firmer conclusions.
* When different groups of scientists have differing priors, stemming from differing theories and empirical emphases, then Bayesian methods provide rational means for comparing the conclusions from the different priors.[19]
The advantages of working from a set of priors are clear: when you can debate the nature of the priors the underlying validity of the study can be determined in great detail. Rouder, Haaf, and Aust noted that Bayesian models are already becoming common in communication research.[20] Through a comparison of both approaches to a study of a story about refugees, they show that the null hypothesis would have rejected findings that could move the understanding of political communication forward. The sticking point would be the lack of a clear moment where the BayesFactor would call for the reporting of significance – the authors rightly critique such an assumption. The context of the discussion, more than some arbitrary number should drive the evaluation of the significance level.
Beyond Bayesian developments, methods like ANOVA which can deal with variance between multiple groups, structural equation modeling, and multiple hypothesis approaches are becoming more common. Even the basic techniques of social science are advancing, scientifically. Sometimes better science means a less convenient test of significance and a greater discussion of the qualitative.
4.2.7 The Replication Crisis
If Malcolm Gladwell has taught us anything, it is that counterintuitive results sell books. Among the fields that can produce the most fascinating counterintuitive results is social psychology, where seemingly small things are resented as having systemic effects on beliefs over a long period of time. One of the trickiest representational problems for media research is that many of the effects that we discuss should have some relatively simple experimental evidence.
One of the most commonly cited examples of the lack of reproducibility is priming theory.[21] Priming supposes that exposure to a word or image would unconsciously effect the cognition of a person afterward. For example, one of the most ridiculous examples is the idea that seeing a single image of an American flag can durably increase Republican voting intentions for months to come.[22]
Replication problems are endemic. Artificial intelligence researchers rarely share code or facilitate reproduction of their work.[23] Oncology papers had a 90% failure rate on replication.[24] In basic biological science, error rates for cell line identification are substantial.[25] What does that mean? When scientists apply a chemical to a sample of cells, they may not know what kind of cells they actually are.
Does this mean that science is bad or entirely fraudulent? No. It means that science is hard and the performance of credibility may often imbue unearned ethos for ostensibly scientific results. Researchers need to publish positive results that are interesting to continue their work. Aligning career results with experiment results is a short-circuit that will burn down the house of knowledge.
Some methods are not designed to produce identical results – network methods based on random walks vary based on the point at which the walk started. Unless random seeds in the methods are intentionally fixed, the graphic will not render the same way twice. Topic modeling systems will not assign the same topic number on multiple runs.
4.3 Big Data
MC Elish and danah boyd argue that the discourse of big data depends on “epistemological duct tape.”[26] The underlying methods of big data are quite routine, they are simply bigger. To hold things together, they identify the role of the rhetoric of magic – it becomes something of a strength as the model exists in a special place where normal rules don’t apply. The example of duct tape that is especially pressing is the idea of a “face detector,” as it is not a true detector of faces but a system that detects things that it was told fall into the category, faces.[27] Although this may seem like a trivial distinction it is really quite important as big data presents a difference in degree, not kind. In less abstract terms, if you had the wrong model on the small scale, getting bigger won’t make it right.
4.3.1 Resolving Assumptions
Given that most major models in big data are relatively straight forward, the major challenges in big data are in the area of validity. How do you resolve the collection of datasets of varying ages and qualities? If big data sets continue to affirm what we already know, is it better to made a decision without the cost and time of big data?
As you work with data science methods in communication, it will become clear that the fastest part of the process is executing the code. The much longer part of the process comes in cleaning and structuring the data and the code.
4.3.2 Inductive models
For the most part we begin with constructions that work abductively, we have probabilistic ideas about the truth and we work forward from there. What we can do with big data sets is run correlations and variance analyses on massive datasets. From these explorations, we might begin to see real power in running thousands of trials. These methods are implemented through neural networks, instead of looking for properties and directly testing, a neural network might use a chain of inductive cases to find an outcome. This outcome variable is not itself inductive – you selected by other means.
A key distinction to keep in mind is between supervised and unsupervised modeling. Supervised modeling retains regular human interaction, quality checking and maintaining the dataset on a regular basis. Unsupervised modeling would turn a process loose on a dataset without regular human intervention. There is still a real degree to which this is supervised in as much as the human operator selects which inputs to for the unsupervised process are present. One of the most important inductive moments today is the use of neural networks in unsupervised learning.
The first place you will see this as a student is in the selection of stopwords for natural language processing. In order to find more semantically rich terms, many articles and prepositions will be excluded from the dataset. This supposes that the terms that give sentences structure are unimportant, it seems possible that they are important as well, especially in ngrams. At the same time, as you tokenize and filter the data, you are losing information. If you have already taken the discussion of Bayes to heart, the use of stopwords will not be a huge problem for you. At the same time, you should feel a bit of trepidation as the level of interaction necessary to produce the results would seem to shift the study back toward the qualitative, you would be using less of that magic computational duct tape.
4.3.3 Direct Detection
The promise of big data for media research is direct detection of phenomena. Self-report data is notoriously unreliable. As one of my colleagues said to me on the street, “you know that anytime you ask an eighth grader if they do weird stuff, they are going to say yes – like lizard people.” This is an important problem. We can’t trust people to tell us real things about themselves. If you have time to work through the layers of fakeness and facework, ethnographic fieldwork can provide robust data with seemingly reversed data.
Social network scraping methods provide one sort of direct data. We can use APIs for the platforms to access Twitter and directly extract swarms of Tweets. Analysis of the Tweets themselves is possible. Unfortunately, this does not allow us to see how exactly the information diffused without response. In public sphere theory, the most common formulations of publics and counter-publics form by the attention of the audience rather than their participation.[28] Continuing with big data along these lines would require even more data about how systems work and some evidence that particular individuals saw something in the first place.
Other methods might involve securing sensor input data, such as information about the location of cell phones and their activity. Selfies could be reverse engineered to look for changes in the medical status of users. This is not the passive big data of magic, but a very active form of big data that calls for the active ingestion of massive datasets.
Self-reports and surveys are messy and inaccurate. Direct detection of the data offers a real transformation in social research. The challenge is getting access to directly detected data. Companies with such data are not often willing to share it, and publics increasingly wish to protect their data.
Topic modeling and sentiment analysis offer researchers the potential for working with directly detected data. Topic modeling produces a probabilistic model of the topics that should be assigned to particular documents within a corpus. This is limited by the relatively narrow confines of the interpretative frame detected. Sentiment analysis may be more limited, functioning primarily on the basis of join and count methods against existing dictionaries. At the same time, direct detection is promising as it offers new possibilities for the analysis of information.
Another form of direct detection comes in the form of bio-foundationalism. This could include the use of sensors, scanners, or other means to monitor the physical state of a person experiencing media. An EEG can allow detection of electrical activity in the brain through a skull cap, saliva samples can measure some chemical levels, blood is better in other cases. Deployed through less invasive methods an fMRI machine (which can detect the utilization of oxygen in the brain) or a PET scan (which detects the utilization of glucose) can give us indications about the use of faculties when exposed to certain kinds of media. These are direction detection methods and they offer a selection of answers to important questions but they are not themselves the entire answer to the problems posed by future communication.
4.4 Artificial Intelligence
Lt. Commander Data is a wonderful television character. As an emotionless, sentient android he offers a fresh take on the human condition. The promise of AI in this televisual sense provides a referent that is both profoundly human, creative, and more than human as a mechanical form. It is Data’s capacity for growth and adaptation that makes him a remarkable and is the magical promise of the system, much as the magic of big data is the prospect that we might ignore epistemology.
Much of what we call AI does not hinge on the development of a synthetic sentient form, but on raw processing power. Ian Bogost argues that the threshold to be called AI has dropped so far that simple string processing methods meet the term, meaning that your command or apple F in word is AI, as he put it:
By protecting the exalted status of its science-fictional orthodoxy, AI can remind creators and users of an essential truth: today’s computer systems are nothing special. They are apparatuses made by people, running software made by people, full of the feats and flaws of both.[29]
Computer vision technologies will allow more effective categorization of media products. Neural networks and other inductive methods will allow increasingly complex simulations of thought.
True artificial intelligence will be special and weird. It will not be quickly and easily added to a discussion board system.
4.5 Digital Humanities
The term digital humanities primarily refer to computationally enhanced literary studies. Consider a claim about the historical evolution of books, let’s say a book by Jimmy Jimmerson had a major impact on syntax as it moved across Italy. Instead of taking the word of scholars seriously that this book really was the hinge point, you can look at a comparison of the texts produced in the region during those times. If the style changes after the introduction of Jimmerson, you know that Jimmerson mattered. What if scholars made a claim that a certain film had an extremely balanced pattern of interaction among characters, would you take their word for it, or find a way to read the interactions in the next to produce a fingerprint of interaction? What would it mean for narrative scholarship if the ostensibly balanced story was, in fact, unbalanced?
What digital humanities typically means, is that contemporary quantitative tools are integrated into the quantification/descriptive side of a study. This does not mean that the qualitative interpretative or critical side of that study are eliminated. It is likely to be the reverse. Scholars now spend a great deal of time struggling with the layers between micro and macro, or invoking incomplete systems theories that skip levels. An economical computer model that can account for the selection of a key exemplar or provide a concise model of diffusion can make our research much more vivacious. This model of humanities scholarship has less hedging and qualification of claims, a better model for iteration of claims.
4.6 Visualization
A central concern for the future of research is the capacity to develop new graphics that can effectively communicate complex concepts. Narrative is underrated: good writing is an amazing vector for information transmission given the synthetic dimension of imagination and sensation. The technology of the novel is superior to the holodeck. Visualization can be misunderstood as the top of the continuum for digital humanities when there are really a number of important, next level, digital methods that intervene into debates and theories. To produce a visual, information must have been cleaned and organized. Visuals may include augmentations of reality, simulations, and abstract graphics. The simulations may be fruitful as they provide evidence of the structure of a system or they may provide this insight through the affective dimension of play.
Of the theorists of the rhetoric of the graphic, Edward Tufte is a clear leader. His theory of graphics rests on a seemingly linguistic break between “nouns” and “verbs” which is then framed by a procedure to reduce all graphics to their minimum necessary content.[30] The point of a great graphic is then to encode enough information for the viewer while maintaining a certain aesthetic sensibility. Some graphics intentionally over encode the information, becoming what Tufte refers to as “confections.”[31]
For the most part, efforts in contemporary information visualization do not pose new methods for graphical production, but increasingly smooth workflows. Data science coursework is really about the development of skills in R, Python, or another language that can facilitate these thoughts.
New immersive systems can provide complex models of the real physics of systems. These new models can provide real insight into the world in ways that were not possible without new displays and interfaces.
What is most important is that you understand that each of these new methods will have a grammar and a rhetoric. The best uses of these new tools will have a balance of aesthetic and conceptual information.
1. C. Mantzavinos, “Hermeneutics,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Winter 2016 (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2016), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/.../hermeneutics/. ↵
2. Bryce, “There Is Nothing Outside of the Text,” Bryce E. Rich (blog), February 27, 2011, http://www.brycerich.com/2011/02/the...-the-text.html. ↵
3. G.D. Robinsion, “Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion: A Brief Overview and Critique,” Premise 2, no. 8 (September 27, 1995), http://individual.utoronto.ca/bmclea..._Suspicion.htm. ↵
4. Rita Felski, “Critique and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion,” M/C Journal 15, no. 1 (November 26, 2011), http://journal.media-culture.org.au/...ticle/view/431. ↵
5. Megan Geuss, “881 E.T. Cartridges Buried in New Mexico Desert Sell for \$107,930.15,” Ars Technica, August 31, 2015, https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/...for-107930-15/. ↵
6. John Durham Peters, “Calendar, Clock, Tower” (Media in Transition 6, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2009), web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit6/papers/peters.pdf. ↵
7. John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (University of Chicago Press, 2001); Kittler, Fredrich, Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey and Wutz, Michael (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). ↵
8. Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy, Bad Strategy (Currency, 2011), www.amazon.com/Good-Strategy.../dp/0307886239. ↵
9. Pierre Schlag, “Normative and Nowhere to Go,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 1 (1990): 167–91. ↵
10. Damien Smith Pfister, Networked Media, Networked Rhetorics: Attention and Deliberation in the Early Blogosphere (Penn State Press, 2014). ↵
11. “Jurisdiction: Original, Supreme Court | Federal Judicial Center,” accessed November 20, 2018, www.fjc.gov/history/courts/j...-supreme-court. ↵
12. Ryan C. Black and James F. II Spriggs, “The Citation and Depreciation of U.S. Supreme Court Precedent,” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 10, no. 2 (2013): 325–58. ↵
13. “R for Data Science,” accessed November 20, 2018, https://r4ds.had.co.nz/. ↵
14. Eric W. Weisstein, “Moment,” Text, accessed November 20, 2018, http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Moment.html. ↵
15. J. Neyman and E. S. Pearson, “On the Use and Interpretation of Certain Test Criteria for Purposes of Statistical Inference: Part I,” Biometrika 20A, no. 1/2 (1928): 177, doi.org/10.2307/2331945. ↵
16. Christie Aschwanden, “Science Isn’t Broken,” FiveThirtyEight (blog), August 19, 2015, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...e-isnt-broken/. ↵
17. Ibid ↵
18. His name is literally the name of the function. This is one of many implementations of the process. Nate Silver and Reuben Fischer-Baum, “How We Calculate NBA Elo Ratings,” FiveThirtyEight (blog), May 21, 2015, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...a-elo-ratings/. ↵
19. John Krushke, “An Open Letter to Editors of Journals, Chairs of Departments, Directors of Funding Programs, Directors of Graduate Training, Reviewers of Grants and Manuscripts, Researchers, Teachers, and Students,” 2010, http://www.indiana.edu/~kruschke/AnOpenLetter.htm. ↵
20. Jeffrey N. Rouder, Julia M. Haaf, and Frederik Aust, “From Theories to Models to Predictions: A Bayesian Model Comparison Approach,” Communication Monographs 85 (December 18, 2017): 41–56, https://doi.org/10.1080/03637751.2017.1394581. ↵
21. Christine R. Harris et al., “Two Failures to Replicate High-Performance-Goal Priming Effects,” PLOS ONE 8, no. 8 (August 16, 2013): e72467, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0072467. ↵
22. Travis J. Carter, Melissa J. Ferguson, and Ran R. Hassin, “A Single Exposure to the American Flag Shifts Support toward Republicanism up to 8 Months Later,” Psychological Science 22, no. 8 (August 2011): 1011–18, https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797611414726. ↵
23. Matthew Hutson, “Artificial Intelligence Faces Reproducibility Crisis,” Science 359, no. 6377 (February 16, 2018): 725–26, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.359.6377.725. ↵
24. C. Glenn Begley, “Reproducibility: Six Red Flags for Suspect Work,” Nature 497 (May 22, 2013): 433–34, doi.org/10.1038/497433a.b ↵
25. JH Duhnam and P Guthmiller, “Doing Good Science: Authenticating Cell Line Identity,” Corporate Page, Doing Good Science: Authenticating Cell Line Identity, 2012, https://www.promega.com/resources/pu...s-2012-update/. ↵
26. M. C. Elish and danah boyd, “Situating Methods in the Magic of Big Data and AI,” Communication Monographs 85, no. 1 (January 2, 2018): 57–80, https://doi.org/10.1080/03637751.2017.1375130. ↵
27. Ibid, 71. ↵
28. Michael, Warner, “Publics and Counter-Publics,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 413–25. ↵
29. Ian Bogost, “‘Artificial Intelligence’ Has Become Meaningless,” The Atlantic, March 4, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/technolo...igence/518547/. ↵
30. E. R. Tufte, Envisioning Information. (Graphics Press, 1990), psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1990-97726-000. ↵
31. Edward R Tufte, Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative (Cheshire, Conn.: Graphics Press, 2010). ↵ | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/New_Media_Futures_(Faltesek_and_Adams)/1.04%3A_Methods.txt |
Section 5 – Provocations
5.1 The Truly Alien
We often project ourselves into our fantasies of others. An important assumption of this book has been to look just a few iterations forward, to consider things that are slightly like us or possibilities that are still very much tied to the conditions of the present. Wells was for the most part concerned with war, as we are now. Martinetti wanted to throw off the romantic vision of the country side that held back progress. The MIT futures conference wanted to extend techno-managerial science into the near future.
One of John Durham Peters best critical moves, one taken by many cited in this book, is the identification of artificial simplification. His critique of the Turing test and dialogic are both important. Dialog can’t solve every problem, there are people who you definitely shouldn’t talk to. The Touring test doesn’t speak to artificial intelligence because it only proves that in the highly contextual situation of one text game that a guess has been provided that is satisfying for a very weak set of priors. Any encounter with a contemporary text bot will leave you knowing the critique well, merely identifying the right next turn does not arrive at the quality of intelligence. The Turing test was never enough.
Artificial intelligence is thus sublime, it appears outside the confines of what you already know. Much of what goes by the name machine learning is merely the arrival of adequate computing power to use old methods. We have many methods across the social sciences and humanities to cope with the idea of such a sublime.
When you imagine the truly alien, it is likely that you can’t imagine a form of life without a symbol system. Aliens on television and in the movies, are too close to humanity to be interesting. Nearly all of your attempts to think of these will reduce the other intelligence to semiotic qualities. Among the most truly alien was the Borg of Star Trek. Their deep drive is the annihilation of subjectivity, resolving the problem of the human condition by liquidating the enfolding of the single mind. Even The Borg were lowered in the form of leaders like Locutus (Jean-Luc Pickard himself) or other symbolic avatars who provide some relief from the image of pure, depersonalized drive. The Borg are just that terrifying.
What if the truly alien is more monstrous than you can possibly imagine?
5.2 Torn Enfolding
Existence depends on sensation. Metaphysics is among the few fields not discussed extensively in this text, the closest appearances come in the discussion of simulation. What this book offers for communication instead is a three-fold model of the enfolding: sensation, textuality, and reproduction. It is not simply that we must consider all the sensations that we produce, but the degree to which those sensations are affected by their means of production, envelopment with other sensations, and memories.
The enfolding is an unstable foundation for academic work. There is no consistent ontology, sensation itself is inadequate. From an academic politics perspective, this is one of the greatest liabilities for communication and media studies. We have no territory to defend that is not quicksand. This is also one of our greatest points of appeal for students: there is no basic communication research, we are always concerned with the world and how research on that world is evolving. This is what it truly means to be virtual in this time period: meaningful new thoughts in this field will come from the intersection of possibilities, not from the isolation of existing meaning. To become virtual is to accelerate the process of abstraction.
What humanist critiques so often depend on is the idea of an outside – some sensation that is sublime or beyond the regime of the already known. Leverage gives the humanist something to move the world – this could be in the form of eschatological fantasy in the scene of global warming or in the idea of touch as outside of regular communication. One of the important dimensions of this book has been to situate the entire sensorial envelope. Although it seems difficult to produce satisfying haptic, somatic, and neuro media, it would be folly to exclude them from the regime of simulation. Taste and touch are just more of the enfolding – not the outside.
5.3 The Impossibility of Alterity
Decision is inevitable. The question is what decision will be made. Pure alterity, leaving space open, is an enchanting possibility, but only a meaningful one once a text has been made. It would be too easy to stop there, to see the potential of alterity as an answer to the violence of signification. But that misses the point: reaching some form of stasis in the name of not deciding is still a decision. Alterity as an alternative to signification is an intoxicant to be used in moderation. What if we push these forms to their limits by embracing forms that push toward alterity itself? Can the Dankest memes and the haze Vaporwave overcome the harsh rules of the symbolic? Perhaps the play of signs of poetry is the answer…
Within this is the question of the ethics of the future. Where and how do we make choices about proceeding? The answer is almost always a leap of faith, a passionate choice to engage the world. This is why the opposition of reason through Hegel and passion through Kierkegaard is worth considering with each new cohort of students. Reason is almost always elevated, passion denigrated. The promise of the future is that our new virtual worlds will be rational and collected. But how do you weigh the lost possibilities, all of those worlds not realized by the discourses that actually circulated? Is there a duty to the unlimited future? If so, how do we deal with the multiplicity of intervening actors and probabilities?
5.4 The End of Work
The critical idea in the presentation of liberalism, used here with a small “l” to describe the intersection of labor and capital. The promise of liberalism was that something like effort or merit would replace the traditional role of hierarchy of birth and station. If you were to use your hands, your labor, to modify natural material, you would reap the rewards. This is not a new idea: the concept of liberalism appears in the Book of Isaiah.[1] The capacity of a person to engage in this work and thus become a productive member of society is a central feature of American culture. Liberal culture was not devoted collection of money, but to a number of other values.[2] Capital accumulation was not viewed as an unlimited good, if anything financialization was nearly a form of idolatry.
Why so much build up? Because work is such a critical part of the philosophical fabric of this culture. The recent deformation of liberal work into neoliberalism (exchange economy with no value except prudence) has been difficult for regular people to process. Extreme concentrations of wealth simply have no tie to the hands of the ultra-wealthy worker, if they even continue to fall into that category. On a more threatening level, the arrival of self-driving vehicles and automated factories displace human workers from what would be high paying jobs. Technologists promise that lost long-haul trucking jobs will be replaced by something better. Promises that cannot be enforced carry little weight with workers.
As automation of intellectual tasks continues via topic modeling software and automated customer interfaces the human will be replaced as well. Why see a doctor when the next level WebMD will do? If the legal system were made to conform more to a civil law orientation, a program could replace the judge and jury. There is nowhere to hide from automation.
Increasing corporate profits and stagnant wages are the first glimpse of this future world where success is delinked from the economy of work entirely, more than in the development of a financial system that fully decouples rewards from labor. The threat or robots is not that they will attack us, but that they will cause such social strain that the reaction against those systems will tear us apart.
5.5 The Nightmare of Satisfaction
Replacements for meals and simulated experiences are important. Over time the idea of meal replacement, minimally sufficient food stuffs, or ubiquitous cafeterias have been common. I mean, who really wants to eat? Eating as an activity is pleasurable and social. Once these distractions are removed we will all be so much more efficient.
The reason why replacements and deactivated forms fail is that they are unable to be as satisfying as the originals. If this holds, it makes sense that drive (and desire) will continue. What happens if the simulations finally become completely satisfying and the drive is eliminated? The existential threat of simulation may not be that we are simply on a holodeck, but that we might apply adequate simulated stimulation to ourselves to short circuit the human condition.
But eating is never satisfying. You will be hungry again as your friendly mitochondria will combine glucose and oxygen via the Krebs cycle to power your body. As time winds along your senses will dull and foods that were once too strong will become palatable. Tastes, techniques, and technologies will change and the foods you want will be old and unfashionable. Eating is an easy topic to consider here: you need to do it. There are other desires that are also unquenchable, people chase them for their entire lives, or even build entire structures of desire around the chase itself. Psychoanalytic communication researchers discuss this as the transformation of desire into drive. You are driven to continue doing your behavior, this seems to be the human condition.
But what if you could satisfy your desire? What if a meal replacement could take on a symbolic role that would make it satisfying? One way of thinking about the future would see the real promise is that which eliminates desire and drive or a future where corrected, purified simulations replace dangerous real things. Do you want to live in a world without want?
5.6 Hacking the Mind
Let’s for a moment say that our neural interface technology improves, that we can get information efficiently in and out of the human brain. Advocates of the singularity focus on the idea that this would mean unlimited communication. The idea of singularity is positive as it offers immortality and likely omniscience. At the same time, this promise of immortality hinges on the technology working and not being wiped out by a solar flare. More troubling, this technology would need to encode human consciousness through some kind of relation of logic gates. Security is difficult if not impossible. The gates will be reprogrammed. You will be made to think.
Choices are difficult: this is a world of conflicting incentives, incomplete information, and flawed human minds. Libertarian paternalism supposed that we might “nudge” people toward the right options. Agency was never absolute: when allowed to hypertrophy it becomes ineffective just as much as if it were never there. We are always trying to change behavior, to make things slightly different and better. This fails when people know about it: how dare someone try to shape their choices? No one should manage their desire.
Is immortality without agency really worth it? Perhaps The Borg were right: individuality is the problem.
5.7 Without Plurality
Liberal pluralism has been one of the greatest breakthroughs in political form in the last few centuries. There are two terms: liberal and pluralism. Liberalism has been explored earlier in these provocations: this is the idea that one might work and keep the rewards of their labor. Pluralism implies an acceptance or even celebration of diversity. In a state which is not tied to a nation, pluralism is essential, there is no single group with clear practices, no inside or outside.
The problem with pluralism is that political formations that hinge on resentment can break apart the social whole at fragile seems. Cyber-utopianism was insipid. Theorists assumed that everyone was just like them – that if they had access to computer games and the internet they might become California libertarians. They did not.
Legitimation is at a premium. In the opening of this book, legitimacy was presented on a perpendicular pair of axes. Pluralism seems to depend on a combination meaningful symbolic action and physical supply: the problem is that even the most symbolically legitimate and satiated populations fall prey to the discouragement of the future anterior. We can speak of the future to come as if it is going to happen, the promises of the distant future are deployed to make failure in the present palatable. As these promises build up, discouragement accumulates. The old promises of the group and the nation become an easy fall back.
Movements promising unity offer an alternative to the state as we know it, but at the same time, are fundamentally limited as they lack symbolic legitimation of the group, even if they provide materially. Even when they appear to function, they often leave underlying antagonisms unresolved.[3] This returns to the problem with HG Wells prayer for the future: how do we actually convince all humans to join one world peace, one movement for the future? The Other is holding special enjoyment, you have been excluded, this demands violence, exclusion, and war. Magritte’s painting of war is powerful here: the war looks appealing, the ugly face hidden by the bouquet.
If the threats of apocalypse in the forms of nuclear war, pandemic, hunger, or climate change have not been enough, why should we hope that anything will come along that will change minds?
5.8 Infinite Text
Content comes from somewhere. During the golden age of the social network era, it came from the users. Beyond the phatic posts of lunches and television schedules, were actual expressions of emotion. Those halcyon days when the first political Facebook posts made everyone an activist. Of course, this could not last – the research on boundary coordination is clear that once the rules we use to coordinate our ownership are broken, we rarely feel the same way we did before. Facebook denied for years that it could be broken, it was the unstoppable giant of the social network universe. Well before the 2016 election, the cracks were beginning to show. What the election brought was something more profoundly negative, something deeper, and more hurtful: our source of positive emotional energy and support had been deeply corrupted. Why post when you feel hurt? Why post on a platform that clearly doesn’t share your values? Why post when there is no one there to comment because your content isn’t so interesting that it deserves to be placed between two great advertisements?
We need more content. Where will we get it? What fake news reveals is not the capacity of hackers or propagandists, but that the public is willing to accept even rickety texts as if they were excellent. There is no collective intelligence that will engage in large scale downstream editorial judgement. This is a zombie virtuality – an enfolding that is continuously moving and consuming but only at the most basic level. Every expression refactored into the most abstract and simple quality. Publicity, automated, will learn to produce whatever works. The editorial role in shaping the circulation of the public will be lost. Algorithmic content systems will shuffle about mumbling “clicks, clicks…”
Romantic genius is often presented as the answer to this problem: the greatest content will surely rise to the top, the technological will connect many more with the sublime. Gruesome fare that never would have seen the screen during the broadcast era is now common, this is passed off as a new golden age of television. More short writing and publishing than ever before, riddled with propaganda and anti-social meanings, treated as a profound new literature. Genius won’t save us. The truth is that the vast majority of publicity processes mill over dreck. Many of our thoughts are not worth thinking. Why do we care about agency when so many of our choices are between fetid and fusty? The problem: there is no floor in the preference level of the market, but definitely a lack of demand at the top. Without intervention, the marketplace of ideas becomes a collection of hawker booths for multi-level marketing scams. Information theory holds: as the noise level reaches cacophony, the signal becomes unrecognizable. It isn’t simply that noise fills the channel, but that the infinite text that floods through will be acidic, dissolving the future like an astringent wave of chaos, order, pain, and pleasure in unpasteurized forms.
5.9 Me and My Bots
Privacy is real and important. Becoming visible is risky – you can be seen by others but are subjected to power in new and different ways. The expanded surveillance regime does mark a real change from that which came before – are you comfortable with the idea that you cannot have a sensitive conversation in your living room anymore because your smart television is listening? The true living room, rather than the formal parlor, is your primary space for living. Open concept homes expand and converge the roles of core spaces to create a more expansive space for interiority. Privacy is a tricky concept, it is both essential that one have a place and space of their own, but can serve to entrench existing power relations by excluding the domestic from the political.
Little strips of tape offer user’s protection from their own bots, but this does nothing for the mall kiosk checking in on your location for a central database, or your selfies being read as an index of your liver function. Expanded use of cryptography in the form of public-key messaging and bitcoin offer some escape from the regime of bots. One of the major themes of the Federalist papers was the impossibility of full awareness or communication: this was a form of natural protection against tyranny.[4] Facilitated by heavy duty processing and bot driven detection, it becomes possible to produce a new kind of virtual awareness that flattens the distinction between people and machines. More troubling, we often treat the results of these assemblages of human and machine as machine alone: the results of process are seemingly objective. For how we still require temporally proximal or the operation of war machines, someone needs to confirm the operation. As our metamorphosis continues, it seems likely that we will assume that the machine-human hybrids are just as good as humans.
What is truly striking is not that people need space or that the seeming benefits of mechanization of observation would be seen as outweighing the cost, but that the interplay of people with machines does not seem to make the machine more human, it makes the people more machine like. The hacker ethos extends not only to the manufacture of things, but to the quantization of the self. Perhaps interiority won’t be needed anymore, the ambiguity of the unseen will have passed.
5.10 As Good As It Gets
The promise of the future has been continual improvement. Just beyond our horizon is exponential increase, the jetpack future. When the expectation of that future is revealed as hollow we must either push out the future beyond the horizon or take stock of our wounded attachments to a world that never was. Things have improved, utter poverty has decreased, treatments for many diseases are available, there is more than enough food, but the utopian future has not been realized. Extreme inequality tears at the foundation of plenty in advanced democracies, even basic treatments like Insulin are now scarce as a result of pure avarice, food continues to be allocated on political lines resulting in hunger, and resurgent nationalist movements seem to be arming the world for war.
What if this is as good as it gets?
A future is coming, it seems possible that this will include consumer goods, medicine, and conflict. The law of diminishing returns is real. Too much can be enough. The idea here is relatively straight forward: sometimes we reach the best version of a thing or an idea. The Wall Street Journal reported in a feature on the Future of Everything, that some products (wallets and luggage) had already reached perfection as they were functional, durable, and stylish.[5] The claim to trans-historical style aside, the premise is sound, if one wishes to carry paper money and coins a wallet is likely the best mechanism. The idea of style does offer a sort of depth: this is not a simplistic structure for utility maximization, more pleasure and less pain, if those terms really mean what they think we do. The best wallet has properties that are not simply those that increase or total units of pleasure. This is a good thing. Objects in the view of those interviewed for the story become better with age, they become part of the symbolic lives of the owners, they are really in a sense virtual.
In this chapter of provocations, I have provided an argument against satisfaction, it is also important to consider the profound importance of being satisfied. Psychologists move toward this idea in the context of mindfulness or the contemplative life. Philosophers have the pleasure machine and many other useful thought experiments. Business theorists describe disruption as the replacement of a superior good with one that is merely satisfying at a lower price.
From a perceptual standpoint, the reason why the coming era of more must be so incredible and impressive is that this future must outweigh the pain of the passage of time and mortality. We will not arrive in the utopian future. The day when you realize that your ticket is marked for a station before the end of the line is difficult.
How do you tell people that they should be satisfied, there isn’t more, or that they really shouldn’t have jetpacks? This is where the communication perspective on futurity is so important: our proper object is not the coolness of new gadgets, but the prospect of producing meaning and coordinating action against all the possibly that we have foreclosed, not simply the potential of a limitless future.
We must consider the real possibility that this is as good as it gets, that our success is complicated, in a complex world.
1. “Isaiah 65:22 No Longer Will They Build Houses for Others to Inhabit, nor Plant for Others to Eat. For as Is the Lifetime of a Tree, so Will Be the Days of My People, and My Chosen Ones Will Fully Enjoy the Work of Their Hands.,” BibleHub, accessed November 21, 2018, https://biblehub.com/isaiah/65-22.htm. ↵
2. McCloskey, Diedre, The Bourgeois Virtues(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). ↵
3. The work on the Hugarian context is especially pressing, as the socialist moment did not resolve underlying antagonisms along lines of racism, sexism, or nationalism which would also be further inflamed by neoliberalism. József Böröcz and Melinda Kovács, Emperor’s New Clothes: Unveiling EU Enlargement(Telford, Shropshire: Central Europe Review, 2001), www.rci.rutgers.edu/~eu/Empire.pdf. ↵
4. James Madison, “The Utility of Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection,” Daily Advertiser, November 22, 1787. ↵
5. “The Unimprovable Awards: Indestructible Items to Buy and Hold,” Wall Street Journal, October 10, 2018, sec. Life, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-uni...old-1539183011. ↵ | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/New_Media_Futures_(Faltesek_and_Adams)/1.05%3A_Provocations.txt |
Introduction
News refers to novel information about recent affairs.
News has been a part of human societies for as long as we’ve been able to communicate complex ideas. Going back to our early times, you can think of travelers, priests, and soldiers as individuals who would learn something about a recent affair — such as the outcome of a battle or the emergence of a plague nearby — and would share that news with others. Perhaps you have even heard about the 'town criers' who would learn some news — perhaps an official decree from the king — and share it with a public audience.
News is the lifeblood of journalism. And, in the context of journalism, news usually entails novel information about recent affairs that is in the public interest. This emphasis on 'public interest' is influenced by Enlightenment principles, which emphasize objectivity and rationality in order to engage with social problems in a fruitful way. Moreover, this view considers newsgathering to be an important activity within a democratic society. That activity involves having individuals (news gatherers) systematically collect novel information about recent affairs and convey that information in a way that allows citizens to engage productively in debates about matters that impact the public.
That interpretation of newsgathering is similar to what we tend to call reporting today. However, if we were to require news gatherers to be hired and dedicated reporters — basically, limit them to people who get paid to report the news — then we would find that there was fairly little newsgathering until the 1800s, and only in a few places around the world. Put another way, our current imagining of newsgathering (or reporting) as a distinct, semi-professionalized activity is a historically recent development.
News and The News
While we can define "news" in these more-academic terms, it’s important to keep in mind that it also has a colloquial meaning, and also to distinguish between "news" and "the news." It is not uncommon to hear "news" be used colloquially in reference to a particular way of conveying novel information about recent affairs, and "the news" as some monolithic aggregation of it. For example, the phrase, "What’s 'the news' today?" implies that there is one relatively small group of news stories, drawn from a much-larger pool of possible news stories, that a large group of people would accept as being particularly important at that moment in time.
It is thus important to recognize that "news" and "the news" are modern cultural constructs that reflect particular understandings of what is news and what is newsworthy. Those understandings, in turn, are shaped by the histories and cultures of particular places and peoples. Put another way, "news" and "the news" are not natural things but rather things a group of people collectively agree to accept as "news" and "the news."
For example, a news story is rarely understood to mean a simple chronological listing of observations. You wouldn’t expect the lead news story in The New York Times to read that Dr. Zamith woke up, went to his office, ate lunch, stubbed his toe, and found the cure for dementia. Instead, most people expect "news" to resemble a particular format. In the United States, you would likely expect a journalistic account of that news to start with the fact that Dr. Zamith found the cure to dementia — and probably not even mention the fact that he ate lunch that day. Moreover, given the prevalence of dementia in the United States and the significance of the discovery, such a story would likely be considered a part of "the news" for that day.
The News and Newsworthiness
What is understood as "the news" varies considerably across and within places because it reflects not only different ways of thinking about what "news" should look or sound like but also who has the authority to define what "news" is, as well as what is newsworthy. Some stories tend to have more universal appeal — for example, dementia is a serious concern in much of the world, and not just the U.S. — but other stories (e.g., stories about violence against transgender people) may be treated as more newsworthy in some societies.
Returning to that earlier question, "What’s the news today?" we must therefore recognize that there is a finite space for "news" — because, after all, we only have so much time to consume news and newsgatherers can only follow up on so many stories — and that "the news" consequently requires someone (or, more accurately, some group of people) to define what matters, both in terms of what news is important as well as what is important about that news.
While "news" can be understood as simply being novel information about recent affairs, it can therefore also be understood more broadly as a form of knowledge about the world we live in. Consequently, those who are recognized as the primary definers of "the news" — be they journalists, some other group of people, or a mix thereof — are granted power in shaping how we understand the societies we live in as well as those we’ve never seen ourselves.
Key Takeaways
• Within the context of journalism, the term "news" usually refers to novel information about recent affairs that is in the public interest.
• While news has long been traded by different people, the notion of newsgathering as a distinct professional activity is a historically recent development.
• "News" is an evolving cultural object. It is rarely just a chronological listing of observations. Instead, it reflects local ways of thinking about things like presentation formats and ways of organizing information.
• There is also the notion of "the news," which suggests that there is a collection of particularly important news. Those who are recognized as the primary definers of "the news" have power in shaping societal priorities and what is particularly important about emerging developments.
• News can be understood as more than just a collection of information. It is also a form of knowledge. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/01%3A_Conceptual_Foundations/1.01%3A_News.txt |
Introduction
The term "journalism" can mean very different things to different people. As such, you will often get a wide range of responses when you ask a group of people to define "journalism."
For example, you can define "journalism" as a product. Under this view, an investigative news story about the mayor taking bribes might be treated as "journalism" because the product (an online article) contains certain things thought to be journalistic, like a clear headline and quotes from multiple interviewees. Similarly, that story might be treated as "journalism" because it appears on a television show that looks a certain way — maybe it has someone dressed professionally sitting behind a long table describing the incident — or follows certain linguistic patterns.
"Journalism" can also be defined in terms of the people who are involved in the creation of a news product. If something is produced by a certain kind of person, perhaps someone with a college degree in Journalism or some related form of professional training, then some people might treat their work as "journalism." In some countries, people have to be recognized (or certified) by the government in order to legally produce "journalism" or receive certain legal protections.
Similarly, "journalism" can be defined in terms of the institutions that create such products. If something is produced by a particular kind of organization, such as The New York Times or BBC News, then some people will treat that product as a form of "journalism."
More broadly, "journalism" can be thought about as a set of activities through which news is collected, organized, presented, and circulated. For example, someone might believe something to be "journalism" only if it involved first-hand observation by the would-be journalist, or interviews with multiple witnesses. That person may also require all accounts to be subjected to verification practices by the would-be journalist.
Even more broadly yet, "journalism" can be understood as a service that is guided by certain goals and values, such as identifying issues that are important to a community and holding elected officials to account, or connecting citizens with opportunities for civic engagement. From this perspective, "journalism" is less about what the product looks like, who made it, or how they made it, but rather about what one hoped to accomplish through their endeavor.
Finally, "journalism" can also be understood as an occupation that is bound together by a particular ideology spanning different elements of product, people, practice, and service. For example, in the United States, this might entail values like seeking to provide a public service to citizens; striving to be objective, fair, and trustworthy; working independently from governmental officials; being committed to an approach that emphasizes gathering first-hand accounts of events in a timely fashion; and deferring to a shared, professional sense of ethics. In other contexts, that ideology might be different. For example, the ideology may instead seek to promote societal stability by having journalists be more deferential to government authorities and less critical of the status quo. Those who act in line with the dominant occupational values of journalism within a society — whatever that may look like — may thus be seen as practicing "journalism."
Why Definitions Matter
As we can see, there are many ways to define "journalism." Not only do different places and different groups of people within those places often understand the term differently, but those same places and groups have also understood it differently through history.
What this tells us is that journalism is a fluid and contested thing. Changing social, cultural, economic, political, and technological conditions change how people understand journalism. For example, technological advances have made it possible for a kindergarten teacher to regularly blog about their city’s public Board of Health meetings to a large online audience — in effect, arguably allowing that teacher to perform acts of journalism in ways that were not previously possible.
This matters because the way journalism is broadly understood within a society impacts how symbolic resources are translated into material rewards. For example, think about a press conference or a trial that has limited seating. Some of those seats may be reserved for those who practice journalism. To determine who is eligible for those seats, someone has to first define what "journalism" is.
Definitions and Expectations
In many societies, journalism also receives a special social status as being the authority on "news." You can see evidence of this in the way journalism is enshrined in foundational documents and legal protections of some countries. For example, in the United States, the First Amendment protects a "free press" because of its presumed importance to a well-informed democracy.
With such status comes expectation, and perhaps even deference, from individual citizens and the broader public. For example, if someone considers The New York Times to engage in journalism but does not consider Fox News to do so, then they will typically hold The New York Times to a higher standard when the Times makes a mistake. At the same time, they will be more likely to give the Times the benefit of the doubt when that someone can’t independently verify some reported information themselves. Put another way, that someone is effectively granting The New York Times a degree of legitimacy that they are not granting Fox News because of how that someone understands journalism.
The consequence of this is that it grants the individuals and organizations that are perceived to be legitimate brokers of journalism considerable power as they are deemed to be authoritative by some group of people. That, in turn, allows those organizations to become the primary definers of "news" for that group. This is why different news organizations, commentators, and public figures expend so much energy casting some things as journalism and other things as not-journalism (sometimes with disparaging labels like "fake news").
Journalism as Plural
Although we have talked about "journalism" in the singular form, it is important to recognize that journalism is not some monolithic thing. Thus, one could very easily talk about journalisms — that is, journalism in a pluralized sense.
For example, we often hear about "sports journalism," "data journalism," and "advocacy journalism." These prefixes refer to more than just genres or technologies. They recognize that there is something substantively different about that particular rendition of "journalism," whether in its purpose, people, processes, or products. Those differences, in turn, result in distinct symbolic associations, material rewards, and social expectations within that area of journalism. Put another way, what is considered to be desirable practice within one area of journalism — like adopting a neutral tone or using an inverted pyramid story structure — may be considered undesirable in another. As such, there is no one "right way" to do journalism, but certain ways are privileged over others in particular contexts.
These definitional challenges and considerations thus help us to appreciate that "journalism" is actually a very dynamic and multifaceted thing.
Key Takeaways
• Journalism can be defined in many ways, which means that "journalism" is a contested term that means different things to different people.
• In the U.S. and many liberal democracies, journalism is associated with certain occupational values that stress a public service orientation, objectivity, independence, immediacy, and professional ethics.
• How journalism is generally understood within a society matters because it affects how symbolic resources are translated into material rewards and expectations.
• There is a plurality of journalisms (e.g., "data journalism" and "advocacy journalism"), each with distinct norms, values, and processes. This points to a recognition that journalism is not a single, monolithic entity. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/01%3A_Conceptual_Foundations/1.02%3A_Journalism.txt |
Introduction
Human beings play a central role in journalism, and we can refer to the individuals who help shape the renditions of news we come across (and the organizations those individuals work for) as social actors within the space of "journalism."
The most obvious social actor in journalism is the journalist. But what constitutes a "journalist" is often debated both within and across societies, and it changes over time. For example, 50 years ago, it may have been enough to say that anyone who was employed to do editorial work for an organization that primarily produced news was effectively a "journalist." However, news organizations and the journalism ecosystem are simply too complex today for that to be a good definition.
Scholars have traditionally found two particularly helpful approaches for defining who a "journalist" is.
From a sociological approach, one could say that journalists are individuals with particular skills and knowledge who both adhere to the shared ideals of what is recognized as journalism within a given context and believe they are participating in shaping the profession’s standards of proper practice. Put another way, the sociological approach looks at a combination of what the individual does, how they do it, and the role they play in shaping the profession.
From a normative approach, one could say that a journalist is simply someone who reports news while holding certain values associated with journalism in a given society. For example, in the United States, such values might include seeking to report honestly and independently from commercial and social pressures, committing to verifying information before disseminating it, and being responsible, methodical, and transparent in their work. Put another way, the normative approach focuses less on what a person does and more on the values they adopt and try to apply in their work. Those norms, in turn, serve as identity markers for the individual, helping them define who they are as professionals (or semi-professionals). Those norms also serve as boundary markers separating journalists from non-journalists, helping those individuals define who they are not, as well as who is not one of us.
While this distinction may seem strictly academic at first, it has two broad practical implications. First, individuals viewed as journalists by one group of people may not be viewed as journalists by another group because they apply different definitional criteria. Second, journalists often try to present themselves as journalists (or not-journalists) in relation to norms and/or professional standards — which underscores the 'soft' power of those cultural constructions.
Editorial Actors
News organizations have a range of social actors who are typically associated with the label of "journalist" — whom we may call editorial actors. These include reporters and correspondents, who collect and analyze information, and then produce news reports about newsworthy events; photojournalists, who try to capture those events through still and moving images; and anchors and presenters, who serve as the faces and primary interpreters in broadcast news programs.
In addition to those more front-facing social actors, you also have individuals who work behind the scenes but are nevertheless also grouped under the "journalist" umbrella. These include editors, who assign stories to reporters, review their work, and have the ability to make substantial changes to the news reports that reporters produce; copy editors, who review news reports for accuracy, grammar, adherence to the organization’s journalistic style, and often write the headlines; community engagement editors, who help tailor content for social media and build community around stories; and news designers, who employ different aesthetics like fonts and visual hierarchy in order to call attention to certain aspects of a story.
There are also some content producers whose work is regularly featured alongside that of journalists but whose practices, norms, or styles result in their being considered "journalists" only some of the time (if at all). These include columnists, who write regular analyses of news that typically convey an explicit point of view or personal experience; cartoonists, who often seek to convey an explicit point of view on an issue through creative illustration; and a news organization’s editorial board, which may write anonymous editorials that convey the organization’s view on some issue. The work from these individuals is often — but not always — explicitly separated from that of the aforementioned actors, such as by being included in an "Opinion" section.
Economic and Technical Actors
In addition to those social actors, there are also individuals who are crucial to the operation of a news organization but are less likely to be labeled a "journalist." Two important groups of such individuals are economic actors and technical actors.
Some of the key economic actors within news organizations are managers and proprietors. Management covers a broad category of social actors who play a role in defining and implementing the organization’s business strategy, including its revenue model, economic targets, budgets and resource allocations, and hiring choices. Proprietors, in turn, refer to the actors who own news organizations. These actors may be hands-off and allow the organization to operate with considerable independence — provided they reach specified economic targets — but they may also actively engage in the day-to-day decision-making by assigning stories of interest to them, shutting down stories that hurt their interests, and serving as the 'final word' in different newsroom affairs.
News organizations also require a range of technical actors in order to operate successfully. These include camera operators, who set up and work the cameras for news broadcasts; sound mixers, who record, synchronize, and edit audio for news segments; and web and app developers, who design and operate content management systems and user-facing applications. Simply put, these individuals help design and operate the tools needed to create the news products that an organization wants to put out — and without whom there likely would not be a polished product.
Interlopers
These are just a small sampling of the many social actors involved in journalism, all of whom could easily fall under a single news organization’s umbrella, provided the organization is large enough. However, it is imperative to note that not only are there many different social actors involved in journalism but that these (and related) actors can work either inside or outside of a newsroom.
For example, consider a news organization’s content management system. Such systems are commonplace in modern news organizations. They allow a reporter to easily write their story on a digital platform, pass it on to an editor who reviews it, and then quickly publishes it on the organization’s website. Although commonplace, the software supporting a system like this is often developed by a different organization — and one that likely produces software for businesses in different industries. That software development organization thus generally operates outside the space of journalism. As such, the coders who create that content management system may rarely ever interact with journalists, and they may even produce the software with a different user base in mind, such as food bloggers. Nevertheless, the coder’s decisions partly shape what the reporter can and cannot do. For example, the editor may not be able to use a 'track changes' function while editing a story because the coders never considered that need, and thus did not program the system to allow that functionality.
We could call such a software development organization (and the coders who worked on the content management system) an interloper because they would likely be seen as a non-journalistic actor that operates outside of typical journalistic spaces, even though that organization contributes meaningfully to journalism (despite that contribution perhaps being unintentional). While some interlopers stumble onto journalism — perhaps as a result of a job or a passion project — others do intentionally seek to contribute to journalism, even as they may not seek recognition as journalistic actors. An example of this might be an open-data advocate who digitizes records of complaints against police officers so that data journalists can write stories about that issue.
Interlopers are important because they often challenge the orthodoxies of journalism. They may do this by explicitly critiquing those orthodoxies or by implicitly introducing new practices and ways of thinking as a result of their non-journalistic background and training. Those challenges, over time, have the potential to structurally reshape aspects of journalism, allowing it to develop in unforeseen ways.
It is important to note, however, that some outsiders may seek to interlope and gain recognition as journalistic actors — if not as outright "journalists." An example of this may be a comedian who claims to be a "journalist" because they regularly feature news material in their performances and provide news analysis through the lens of comedy. Another example may be YouTube personalities who claim to be both an "outsider" and a "journalist," and therefore not subject to the media problems they critique. Such efforts are sometimes successful. However, they are more often unsuccessful because the interloper’s interventions may be deemed too extreme, and instead serve as an example against which a boundary for what does constitute "journalism" is set. Over time, such boundaries do change, though.
Networks of Actors
Given that there are so many kinds of actors within journalism, it can be helpful to think about journalism through a network lens, wherein different actors are connected to one another. Such an exercise not only helps to make sense of the many different actors involved in journalism but, crucially, helps illustrate that producing news is rarely a solitary endeavor. Instead, it involves interactions, interrelations, and tensions among a range of actors. That, in turn, leads to frequent reshapings of the ideas, norms, and practices that define who is (and is not) a "journalist" and what "journalism" is (and is not).
For example, as web developers became more central to creating interactive data visualizations in some newsrooms, they were physically moved to desks that were closer to the data journalists in that newsroom. That, in turn, gave those coders reputational credit within journalistic spaces — they began being seen less as support staff and more as journalists in their own right — and gave them a greater ability to reshape the journalistic culture within those newsrooms.
Finally, although some actors may be thought of as being central to or on the periphery of that network encompassing "journalism," it is important to recognize that their positions within the network are often fluid. This means that they can move from the periphery to a more central position over time — or, the network may become re-centered toward certain kinds of actors. Those fluid linkages within the social network can thus grant different actors different forms and amounts of power over time. For example, as U.S. journalism progressed in its digital transformations, actors who were technically proficient with the so-called 'new media' began to have a stronger voice within newsrooms. Similarly, individuals whose informal writing styles may have relegated them to the periphery of journalism in the past — they may not have been considered 'serious' journalists because of how they wrote — may now find a place closer to the center as a result of the large and engaged online followings they can attract. Journalistic networks thus adapt as the institution of journalism evolves.
Key Takeaways
• The term "social actors" refers to the human individuals (and the organizations they work for) that operate within a given space, like journalism.
• There is a wide range of editorial, economic, and technical actors in journalism, and those actors may operate within and outside the newsroom. Examples of these actors include reporters, proprietors, and web developers.
• In addition to traditional actors, there are also interlopers, or actors who are not typically recognized as journalistic actors and may operate outside of typical journalistic spaces but nevertheless exert substantial influence on journalism.
• Journalistic spaces are shaped in large part through the interactions, interrelations, and tensions within the assemblage of actors in that space.
• Over time, actors can move between central and peripheral positions within the network encompassing the space of "journalism" (or some subset of it). Alternatively, the network can also become re-centered in favor of certain kinds of actors. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/01%3A_Conceptual_Foundations/1.03%3A_Social_Actors.txt |
Introduction
Although journalism is often associated with human beings, non-human entities also play an important role in shaping journalism — especially today. We can refer to the material, non-human technologies that make a difference to how news is produced and disseminated as technological actants within the space of journalism. Examples of technological actants in journalism include word processing applications (used to produce news stories), search engine algorithms (used to find news), and smartphones (used to consume news).
While that definition may seem quite abstract, at its heart is a simple truth: Nearly all of today’s journalistic work is shaped in some part by technology. This isn’t a recent development, though. Technological actants have played a major role in the historical development of journalism. For example, the development of the printing press made the mass distribution of journalism theoretically possible, even as it restricted the formats that journalistic products could take on due to the technology’s limitations. Another technological actant, the telegraph, enabled newswire services like The Associated Press to develop and allowed reporters to transmit their reports relatively quickly from afar. Conversely, the proliferation of the telephone allowed more reporting to be done from within the newsroom since reporters could just call their sources instead of having to meet them in person.
Technological actants are important because they both enable, restrict, and shape different forms of journalism in both visible and invisible ways, and they very much impact the social actors (human beings) who interact with technology. Moreover, although technological actants are often described as neutral entities — after all, they’re machines presumably acting in predictable ways — technological actants are very much shaped by the social actors who create them.
Technology Shaping Human Behaviors
In the aforementioned examples of the printing press, the telegraph, and the telephone, technological actants shaped the behaviors of human actors by creating new possibilities and restricting others.
For a more detailed example, consider the following scenario: A news organization uses a content management system to facilitate its workflow, and all reporters at that organization must submit their stories through that system. When a reporter sees that a star athlete announced, via a video on Instagram, that they’re signing a new contract, the reporter quickly writes a news brief for the website and plans to embed the Instagram post so readers may see the athlete’s excitement with their own eyes. However, it turns out that the particular content management system used by the news organization does not have the technical capacity to embed social media posts in a story — perhaps the person who created the system just never thought to add the functionality. Thus, the reporter must either describe the video through the text in the story or send the reader away from the story through a link to the post.
In that example, the technological actant (the content management system) shaped a particular human choice by making it impossible for the reporter to pursue their preferred course of action, which was to embed the post with the video. Instead, it provided the reporter with a limited set of alternative courses of action that the system could accommodate: linking out to Instagram or presenting a written description of the video. Over time, that system may end up discouraging the use of social media in reporting — such as embedding posts that illustrate a point made by the reporter or that include reactions by other people — and thus impact the way the reporters working for that organization relate with their sources and audiences.
It is crucial to note, though, that just because a technological actant is designed to promote a particular way of doing things does not mean that its users will use them in that way — or use that actant at all. Many innovations in journalism are not actually adopted by journalists. And, when they are, those actants are often adopted in ways that allow journalists to continue doing the things they are used to doing, and in the ways they are used to doing them. In that sense, technological actants can take on the values, operational logics, and biases of their users when they are put to particular uses. For example, when mainstream journalistic outlets began adopting the then-novel blogging format in new sections of their websites, its journalists tended to use the new functionalities in very traditional ways — such as by linking primarily to mainstream organizations, limiting audience participation, and using the same journalistic writing style they were already used to.
Humans Shaping Technology
The relationship between technological actants and human actors is not a one-way street, though. That is, human actors also shape technological actants.
It is easy to think of technological actants as neutral tools due to their mechanical nature. However, they are created and refined by human actors, and thus take on certain cultural norms, politics, and ideological values. These may be intentionally inserted into the technological actant by those humans in order to advance certain commercial, technical, or journalistic objectives. They may also be added unintentionally as a result of the human creator’s biases and ways of thinking.
To illustrate this, consider a scenario wherein a freelance coder is contracted to create a web tool that helps journalists at a news organization quickly produce interactive data visualizations. The coder intuits that most journalists at that organization are not tech-savvy, and thus chooses to limit the range of customization options so as to not overwhelm the journalists. The coder similarly intuits that many of the journalists lack a design background, and thus implements a feature that will quickly inspect the dataset and recommend the chart form that best illustrates the data. Finally, the coder is told to optimize the tool for "a mobile-first experience," and the coder thus further restricts the customization options to ensure that the journalist can only create visualizations that look good on a smartphone.
In that scenario, the coder — a social actor — has shaped the tool — a technological actant — in different ways. First, their biases and perceptions lead them to promote a restrictive logic of simplicity within the tool. Second, the coder’s background shapes the tool’s suggestion for which kind of chart to use for a given dataset, and those suggestions may be more oriented to scientific visualizations than journalistic ones if the coder’s background lies outside of journalism. Third, the economic logic of the news organization instructs the coder to optimize the tool’s outputs for smartphones; the coder, in turn, programs the tool accordingly.
As these examples show, not only do technological actants take on the biases and logics of their users when they are put to use but they are also infused with the logics and biases of their creators as they are built.
Mutual Shaping
By acting upon one another, technological actants are constantly shaping human actors and human actors are constantly shaping technological actants. This is called mutual shaping and it operates in an iterative manner.
Returning to our data visualization tool scenario, the coder’s choice to have the software recommend pie charts when presented with data about proportions may result in that visual format becoming a popular form in data visualizations created by that organization. However, one of the journalists may find that they want the doughnut chart form (an alternative to pie charts) to be an option, and eventually convince the coder to include that functionality. Over time, the journalist’s peers may try that option and come to prefer it. They thus convince the coder to set the doughnut chart to become the default recommendation, which in turn socializes future hires in the organization to consider the doughnut chart first — even as they continue to stay within that general visual aesthetic initially proposed by the non-journalist coder.
As the scenario now shows, a human actor shaped a technological actant, which shaped the behaviors of other human actors, who in turn used the actant in particular ways and had the coder reshape the actant, which had subsequent impacts on yet more human actors. As such, they were influencing one another over time, with the technological actant taking on the ideas, biases, and logics of different people — even as it influenced those very same people in important ways. While this is a fairly simple example, you can imagine similar mutual shaping processes for more complex technologies (e.g., search algorithms, communication platforms, virtual assistants).
Given that technological actants act and are acted upon human actors (as well as other technological actants), it is unsurprising that those dynamics introduce fluid power relationships. Those relationships are oftentimes asymmetric, meaning that a technological actant may ultimately have more power over the human actor — and vice versa.
For example, Google’s search algorithms may play a major role in determining how many clicks a reporter’s story gets, and the reporter may thus try to optimize the language in their story to get more attention from Google. (This is called search engine optimization, or SEO.) However, Google’s algorithms are hardly influenced by that individual journalist, or perhaps even the journalism industry as a whole. Thus, that algorithm has more power over the reporter than the reporter has over the algorithm, as the reporter must adapt to remain relevant but not the other way around.
Such power relationships are particularly important to examine as particular technologies become more and less central to the profession and to everyday life, and as certain kinds of human actors become more and less central to journalism.
Key Takeaways
• Technological actants refer to material, non-human technologies that make a difference to how journalism is produced and disseminated.
• Technological actants shape human actors by structuring their behaviors, both in terms of making it easier to do some things and impossible to do others.
• Technological actants are not neutral. They are developed by humans and take on those humans' values, biases, and preferred ways of accomplishing tasks. Moreover, they are sometimes intentionally employed within organizations (including newsrooms) to address different commercial, technical, and/or journalistic imperatives.
• The mutual shaping of human actors and technological actants creates power relationships that are fluid and dynamic, and are of consequence to the development of journalism. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/01%3A_Conceptual_Foundations/1.04%3A_Technological_Actants.txt |
Introduction
The term audience refers to the individuals and groups to whom products and services, like journalism, are produced for or in the service of. Within the space of journalism, this would typically be the readers, listeners, viewers, and so on that a journalistic outlet seeks to serve.
News audiences in particular are sometimes interchangeably called "the public" or citizens. Those designations typically imply a civic objective: they are individuals that journalists should seek to inform so that they may participate intelligently in democratic processes. However, audiences may also be referred to as news consumers, which sometimes implies a more commercial logic — after all, the consumption of a product is what is highlighted — and thus emphasizes the organization’s economic objectives over its social ones. More recently, the term "news users" has received attention because it moves away from the passive connotation of consumption and instead offers audiences more agency by suggesting that they can actively participate in media use.
Although these terms differ, they all orient themselves toward something we can call "news audiences."
News Audiences Over Time
Although journalistic outlets often depend on their audiences for their financial success — whether directly through subscriptions or indirectly through advertisements — the newsrooms within those organizations have historically wanted little to do with their audiences.
News audiences have historically been treated in a fairly passive sense, as recipients of media or commodities. Put another way, they were often thought about as just people who consumed the work of journalists, and with whom the journalists rarely ever interacted — save for the occasional letter or phone call that a journalist might receive.
Going back to the 1930s, much of the thinking about mass media (which includes journalism) was oriented around a hypodermic needle model wherein 'the audience' was seen as a passive, monolithic group that simply accepted media messages as intended by the sender — in this case, the journalist. This view became progressively less influential throughout the 1950s.
Today, audiences are typically seen as having more agency in how they encounter and interpret media messages. Put another way, they are seen as being more able to determine how they find news, being more able to participate in how news is produced and distributed, and having greater ability to interpret news through their own filters, which in turn are shaped by their individual background and beliefs. This has profoundly changed how news audiences are thought about, both professionally and academically.
Additionally, there are now greater commercial pressures on journalists and journalistic outlets to think about their audiences as potential active participants in news production and distribution, and to enlist their help in order to lower news production costs and increase the organization’s reach. As advertising revenue declined for many traditional media sectors and in many parts of the world, commercial journalistic outlets have begun relying more on audience subscription revenue, which generally increase when audiences feel more engaged (and thus see greater value in a subscription). Even among state-supported and non-profit journalistic outlets, audience engagement is becoming an increasingly important marker for legitimizing those outlets' requests for funding.
News Audiences and Participation
However, just because audiences can participate does not mean that news producers will seek or even want their participation.
It has been argued that part of what gives a journalist a professional sense of identity is that they have a 'sixth-sense' for news, and the training needed to produce it well. Journalists have thus historically rejected high degrees of audience participation in news production because they perceived such participation to be an affront to their independence and expertise, and thus to the quality of the news content they produced.
In recent years, however, there has been a cultural shift within the industry toward welcoming participation — and doing so in ways that are not simply optimized toward economic benefits. Journalists today are generally more open to the idea of co-production with audiences since they have seen first-hand the quality of the work that citizen journalists have been able to produce. They also now have access to technological actants that make it easier to enlist the help of audiences to engage in certain tasks, like reviewing large troves of public documents released by whistleblowers and activists. Furthermore, there is greater acceptance of the idea that audiences have more to offer journalism — whether through story ideas or their own social networks — than they have been able to contribute in the past.
However, just because audience participation is welcomed does not mean that audiences will themselves want to participate. This is especially true if there is no incentive for participation, or if they’re treated as an appendix of sorts in the broad scheme of things. Put differently, audiences are attune to exploitation — such as being asked to simply do grunt work for free — and participatory forms of journalism are therefore most successful when the relationships are perceived as being reciprocal, with both journalists and audiences feeling like they have gained something as a result. As such, discussions about "participatory journalism" now also include terms like "reciprocal journalism."
Fragmentation of News Audiences
Today’s media ecology has also complicated ideas about audiences and the experiences they have. For one, the rapid growth of media choices people have and the ease with which they may access those choices has resulted in the fragmentation of news audiences. No longer do tens of millions of people in the U.S. tune in to see a single news broadcast at the same time, as was the case for CBS Evening News in the 1960s and 1970s. Similarly, news audiences are no longer bound to the handful of channels their TV or radio antennas might pick up, to the delivery zones of their local newspapers, or even to the cultural tastes of the owners of local stores that distribute magazines.
Instead, news audiences today can easily navigate their way to the New York Times' website for national news, the Boston Globe's website for regional news, ESPN’s website for sports news, and SCOTUSblog for news about the Supreme Court. If they want to stream local news from the National Public Radio member station in Minneapolis in the morning, and then download a recorded broadcast from its Miami affiliate in the evening, they can do that, too. If they want to see how the British Broadcasting Corporation, or BBC, covered a particular issue, they can likely find that on YouTube or the BBC’s website.
In short, news audiences have access to far more news content, and far more sources, than ever before — and the cost of switching between journalistic outlets, in terms of both money and convenience, is also lower than ever before in many regards. This makes it difficult for a single journalistic outlet to gain a near-monopoly on audiences. However, it has resulted in a media ecosystem wherein a few large organizations are able to capture fairly large audiences due to brand recognition, followed by a steep drop-off to a long tail made up of tens of thousands of journalistic outlets that can only capture niche audiences and are, in many cases, deemed to be interchangeable by users.
Furthermore, not only do audiences now have access to more options for news but they also have more options for other media. This includes entertainment media, such as a popular show on Netflix or a streamer on Twitch. Such media compete with news for a finite amount of audience time and attention. That, in turn, can further fragment audiences as they turn to many different organizations to satisfy particular media desires instead of relying on a single source, like CBS or NBC, to single-handedly satisfy their want for news, culture, and entertainment.
Technological Actants and Audiences
Although news audiences now have more agency, it is also important to be aware that technological actants play an important role in mediating the interactions between news audiences and journalistic actors, including journalistic outlets. For example, when an individual searches for news about a recent event on YouTube, algorithms developed by engineers at YouTube decide how to order the presentation of the search results. Crucially, those algorithms are optimized to promote certain kinds of content, including provocative or controversial content that will keep users on the platform longer. Thus, news audiences are sometimes given a false sense of control, as the search algorithms work invisibly to promote certain kinds of content while deliberately obfuscating alternatives.
Similarly, the experiences that news audiences have may be personalized in small but important ways. Consider the following example: Dr. Zamith goes to the New York Times' website and finds that the first opinion piece listed is about climate change, an issue he cares deeply about. Other users might be shown a different opinion piece, but Dr. Zamith is shown one about climate change because a technological actant’s analysis of his past browsing behavior estimated that he’s interested in that particular topic. When Dr. Zamith clicks on that opinion piece, he finds that the third paragraph of the story is tailored to describe the average highs and lows over the past few decades in Amherst. That’s because a different technological actant guessed Dr. Zamith’s location based on his IP address, and yet another actant looked up the climate information in that area and generated a paragraph of text describing it. Then, as Dr. Zamith scrolls to the middle of the article, he encounters an image of a map-based data visualization that is automatically zoomed into Amherst. That’s because yet another technological actant determined that Dr. Zamith is using his phone to access the story. Had he used a device with a larger screen, like a laptop, Dr. Zamith would have been shown an interactive map of the entire United States, which casts a broader lens on the issue.
Throughout that example, a series of technological actants intervened in Dr. Zamith’s news experience in fairly invisible ways. These interventions may be seen as positive. By personalizing the news experience, the story may feel more engaging to Dr. Zamith and get him to care more about the issue. However, such personalization can be highly problematic if the technological actants are used to mediate experiences by offering audiences highly different stories based on characteristics like political ideology, race and ethnicity, or economic status. In the extreme, such interventions would make it harder for a public to have a shared sense of reality — something that scholars have argued is important for democratic deliberation.
Technological actants have also altered the way news audiences and journalistic actors communicate with one another, and thus the kinds of relationships they tend to develop. For example, audience members are now more likely to give feedback on a story through brief, immediate, public exchanges directed at the journalist using a platform like Twitter, as opposed to longer, slower, private exchanges like a letter or e-mail. This can result in more meaningful and direct audience participation. However, it can likewise promote negative forms of participation, such as 'brigading' and strategic harassment of journalists.
Key Takeaways
• Audiences are the individuals and groups to whom products and services, like journalism, are produced for or in the service of.
• Historically, journalistic audiences have generally been thought about as passive recipients of media or commodities. In more recent times, journalistic audiences have gained greater ability (and recognition) as active participants in media production and distribution.
• Just because audiences can participate does not mean that producers will want or seek their participation, or that audiences will themselves want to participate.
• Today’s diffuse media ecology permits greater news audience fragmentation, as audiences not only have more choices but also tend to consume different kinds of news from different journalistic outlets. Additionally, journalistic media are competing with even more (non-journalistic) media than ever before for a finite amount of time and attention.
• The relationships between journalistic actors and audiences are mediated to a great extent today by technological actants. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/01%3A_Conceptual_Foundations/1.05%3A_Audiences.txt |
Introduction
Journalistic activities refer to the routinized practices that help shape both news media messages and the ways they are distributed and consumed.
The phrase "routinized practices" underscores that journalistic activities tend to follow certain routines, or ways of doing things. They’re often deeply influenced by long-standing institutional logics, processes, and cultural values that make it possible for different kinds of social actors and technological actants to not only work together but also work efficiently across the multi-stage process of producing journalism.
Although journalistic activities are influenced by their past, they are not static or unchangeable. In fact, they frequently iterate as new configurations of social actors, technological actants, and audiences emerge as a result of social, political, economic, and technological changes within media industries and society at large.
For example, journalism was historically a more insular practice, with journalists often writing for an audience they knew relatively little about and received relatively little input from. Put another way, after the journalist identified a story they perhaps thought was important, the journalist would report it and write it in a way that would help answer questions they thought their audiences probably had. After the editors and production staff processed the journalist’s story, it would appear on somebody’s doorstep. That was often the end of that story’s lifecycle.
In contrast, that same journalist is today more likely to be looking at social media trends to identify story ideas, put out open calls to solicit help in running down a tip, and even receive frequent audience feedback about their story after it has been published. Moreover, that journalist may go on to respond to questions about the story on social media and later tweet small updates to the story based on audience interest. Journalistic activities today are thus more social and less insular.
From Production to Consumption
We can broadly place many of the most consequential journalistic activities into five distinct stages: access and observation, selection and filtering, processing and editing, distribution, and interpretation.
Access and Observation
Access and observation pertains to the information gathering stage of news production. This involves gathering source material, like attending a press conference, being present at a protest, or gaining access to confidential government reports. It also involves identifying patterns in those source materials, like the members of Congress who routinely receive more political donations from certain industries. Regular citizens are now far more likely to participate in this stage than in times past because they can easily serve as observers by streaming events or capturing incidents that professional journalists may not be able to observe first-hand themselves. For example, a Minneapolis teenager received a special citation by the Pulitzer Board in 2021 for filming the murder of George Floyd. That video was crucial to journalistic coverage of that incident, and it helped generate a great deal of media attention to the issue of police violence against people of color in the summer of 2020.
Selection and Filtering
Selection and filtering pertains to the stage wherein gathered information is winnowed down to its most interesting and/or important parts. This involves looking at all potential stories that might emerge from an event, like a protest, and deciding what to include in a news product and where to include it. For example, a journalist may choose to focus the story on the size of the turnout at a protest, on the police response to the protesters, on the history of the issue that is being protested against, on the potential solutions to the issue, and so on. Even if the journalist has the time or space to cover every one of those angles — and they often do not — they still need to decide which aspect of the issue to the lead the news story with.
Processing and Editing
Processing and editing pertains to the stage wherein the gathered and filtered information is turned into a news product, often by following certain stylistic guidelines. For example, the journalist may be expected to organize the information using the inverted pyramid schema, wherein the most timely and important information is placed near the very top of the story, followed by decreasingly important details until you get to the non-essential background information at the end. The journalist may also be expected to generally use non-emotive language, like claiming a policy proposal was "dismissed" instead of "lambasted" in order to signal their neutrality. Within this stage, there may be multiple individuals (from the supervising editor to a copy editor to the layout or web editor) modifying the news product as it moves through the news production chain.
Distribution
Distribution pertains to the stage wherein news products are disseminated to audiences, such as by broadcasting a news story on a television show or trying to place it on a user’s social media feed. Historically, newsroom personnel had a limited role to play in this stage as organizations had a dedicated group of people to handle these activities. For example, dedicated print workers would set up the printing press, print thousands of copies, and stash them in bunches at a delivery dock. Delivery workers would then pick up and drop off individual copies at subscribers' homes. Today, however, newsroom personnel often participate directly in the distribution process by linking to their own stories on social media and sometimes even trying to draw attention to the stories by engaging in online communities where would-be audiences might congregate. Additionally, audiences themselves now play a crucial role in distribution: They’re often the ones driving attention to a story by sharing it, helping some news products go viral.
Interpretation
Interpretation pertains to the discussion around the distributed news product, and more broadly about how it becomes widely understood and accepted by the general population. Journalists can certainly influence the interpretation of a news product based on the specific words and story angles they use in describing an issue or event, and editors can similarly play a major role based on the headline they write for the story and the pictures they choose to accompany it. However, audiences also play a crucial role in this process based on how they talk about the product in associated 'comments' sections, the contexts within which they share the stories on social media, and the rebuttals they may choose to issue themselves via blogging platforms and the like.
Changing Nature of Activities
At the heart of these examples are human actors. This is because journalistic activities have historically been human-led, with technological actants acting largely in a support role to help enact the human-led objectives more efficiently. For example, content management systems made it possible for journalists to quickly write their stories — perhaps with some automated spell- and grammar-checking help — and easily move it up the chain to a human editor. However, human beings were still doing much of the core labor.
This is changing, however. In some instances, the roles are now outright inverted, with the human social actor playing the support role and the technological actant taking the primary journalistic role, and sometimes acting with a remarkable degree of independence. For example, newswriting algorithms are already able to take in large numbers of electronic financial reports, identify the most interesting changes from the previous financial quarter, and write thousands of news stories that look very similar to what a human journalist might have produced. Another algorithm may then take those stories and post them to an organization’s website — with a clever headline and all — and automatically promote it on social media. All of this can be done with limited human intervention, beyond the work that goes into setting up the algorithm.
While algorithmically led user-facing activities are still the exception within the general space of journalism, they have become central in some sectors. For example, The Associated Press publishes tens of thousands of algorithmically written news stories about finance and sports each year, and a major journalistic media chain in Sweden employs algorithms to automatically organize news stories on their homepages using a mixture of personalization and algorithmic editorial judgment.
Thus, while journalistic activities are often organized around predictable routines shaped by history, they’re also continually iterating before our eyes.
Key Takeaways
• Journalistic activities refer to the routinized practices that help shape news messages as well as their distribution and consumption.
• Journalistic activities are often governed by long-standing principles, values, and ways of doing things. However, they also evolve to accommodate new arrangements of social actors, technological actants, and audiences.
• When it comes to journalism, we can broadly place the most consequential activities within five stages: access and observation, selection and filtering, processing and editing, distribution, and interpretation.
• While technological actants have historically been used to support human actors, in some cases they are now able to work fairly independently from them. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/01%3A_Conceptual_Foundations/1.06%3A_Journalistic_Activities.txt |
Introduction
Media dependency theory offers a helpful way to think about the relationship between media and the fulfillment of different audience needs and goals.
At the heart of the theory is the proposition that in industrialized and information-based societies, such as the one we presently live in, individuals come to rely on media to satisfy a range of different needs and goals. These include learning about where those individuals should go to vote as well as staying up-to-date about the latest fashion trends.
Before diving into this theory, it is helpful to be mindful of the fact that journalistic outlets are just one group of social actors within a broader system of information. This broader system includes other mass media actors, like movies and books. It includes other institutional actors, like politicians and non-media corporations. It includes personal contacts, like your friends and family members. It even includes your personal experiences, like your attendance at an event or a study abroad experience that exposed you to a different culture. There are many other potential actors in that system, but this helps illustrate the notion that journalistic outlets operate within an environment made up of many different entities, each of which can offer at least some information that might be of interest to a particular audience member.
This perspective is helpful because it underscores the importance of understanding the context around people’s interaction with information, which is crucial to understanding journalistic media’s role in informing people. That, in turn, is an explicit rejection of earlier, more simplistic theories about the effects of mass media. For example, in the 1930s, scholars and popular intellectuals argued that mass media were incredibly powerful and that people generally accepted the information disseminated by mass media as-is. (This is called the hypodermic needle perspective.) At the same time, this systems perspective rejects the view that mass media have little to no effect — the limited effects perspective began to take hold as the hypodermic needle perspective lost popularity in the 1940s and 50s — as the magnitude of the effect is dependent on the context.
Journalistic Media and Relationships
Returning to media dependency theory, it posits that the impacts of journalistic media on people (and of people on journalistic media) depend on the context and the nature of the relationships within a network of social actors, technological actants, and audiences that are relevant to that context.
The theory further posits that an individual’s characteristics and goals (e.g., how interested they are in some topic), their personal environment and interpersonal network (e.g., whether they know people with first-hand experience with that topic), and the dominant media and social systems they live within (e.g., how free they are to access news media they believe would be informative about that topic) all impact the extent to which they may depend on media for information about that topic.
For example, let’s consider the topic of foreign election interference in the 2020 election. Perhaps, as someone passionate about politics, you were very interested in that topic — and thus have a personal goal of learning more about it. However, because you were (most likely) not an intelligence officer and lacked the security clearance needed to review intelligence reports yourself, you probably didn’t have the ability to gain first-hand knowledge about that issue. Moreover, you might not have had any such intelligence officers in your friend or familial networks, so you didn’t personally know someone with first-hand knowledge, either. You thus had to depend on people other than yourself (third parties) and those close to you for information. One such third party might have been a journalist who has been covering the topic of election interference for months as the National Security Correspondent for The Washington Post. As such, you might have come to depend on that journalist for what you believed to be trustworthy information about the topic. (Or, perhaps, you depended on other journalistic outlets who themselves depended on the Post's reporting for key details.)
However, that could change over time. Perhaps a reputable whistleblower leaked a series of private intelligence reports online. Now, you may find yourself dependent on the whistleblower for access to the information, as they controlled which of the intelligence reports were made available to the public. As you review the leaked documents, you may become less dependent on others' interpretation of the issue — including The Washington Post's reporting. Put another way, as your information network changes, the kinds and degrees of dependence also change.
Importance of Journalistic Media
Although journalistic outlets are just one of many sets of constituents within information systems, they are often important. That’s because people generally need journalistic media to function in modern societies, which are more co-dependent than ever before due to increased specialization and globalization. Put another way, personal contacts and experience are no longer enough to satisfy all (or even most) of the things a person needs to know in order to fully participate in modern social life.
Crucially, media dependency theory contends that the degree of ambiguity about news information impacts the degree of media dependency. Put another way, as news information becomes more ambiguous (less clear to you), audiences are presumed to become more dependent on journalistic outlets for understanding that news.
Ambiguity can come from many different sources. It might involve lack of knowledge about some phenomenon, such as whether a new technology developed by a rival nation poses a threat to your nation’s security. It might involve rapid change associated with a phenomenon, such as whether an emerging coup d’état in a friendly nation might impact the diplomatic relationship between them and your nation. It might also involve simple disagreement among institutional elites about some phenomenon, such as which political group is more likely to be correct about the costs and benefits to a proposed renewable energy plan.
That proposition from media dependency theory can further be extended into an argument that journalism can be especially influential on people’s understanding of emerging international affairs. That is, people typically have less certainty (and thus more ambiguity) when it comes to the world beyond their immediate geographical sphere because they might not have recent (or any) personal experience in those contexts — perhaps they have never been to Cambodia — and they might not have any personal contacts who have expert knowledge or experience in those contexts. Because of this, people become more dependent on media depictions of those places, peoples, and issues, and on journalistic outlets when new developments are emerging about those places, peoples, and issues.
Exclusivity and Dependence
According to media dependency theory, when a media organization has exclusive information, it tends to have more power within its relationship with an audience member (and the broader ecosystem) because it increases the degree of information asymmetry. This is particularly true if the information is in demand to satisfy that individual’s valued goals, and doubly so if access to such information is tightly controlled.
Exclusive information does not have to mean classified information, as with the earlier example. It might simply mean that they are the only source for that information at a given time, such as in the early hours following a chemical explosion at a local manufacturing plant. While local officials may eventually put out their account of the event via a televised press conference, people are likely to first hear about it from the breaking news coverage provided by journalists.
However, journalistic media do not inherently get to have exclusive information about breaking news (or confidential affairs). Indeed, some institutional actors, such as governments or private companies, can restrict both media access to important resources and individuals' access to certain journalistic outlets. In doing so, those institutional actors can try to reorient dependency away from journalistic media and toward their own version of events. For example, a private company may prevent news media from accessing that manufacturing plant or speaking to its employees. Similarly, government officials in some countries may even prevent journalistic media from broadcasting information about the incident until those officials give their approval. Such intervention happens quite often in practice, to varying degrees.
It is important to note that media dependency theory was first proposed during a time of high media concentration, when there were relatively few major broadcast networks in places like the United States. Today’s media ecology is far more complex, though. In particular, mobile devices (e.g., smartphones) and networked media (e.g., social media and messaging apps) have become important elements in today’s media ecology. They allow individuals to serve as intermediaries between mass media and other people. That is, individuals and aggregators with large online followings can become key brokers of news information during an event and thus gain power — even if only temporarily — by virtue of others' dependence on them. Additionally, people can now more easily find videos and accounts of an event posted by a range of other people who observed it first-hand, thus reducing the exclusivity that any one actor might otherwise have.
Key Takeaways
• Media dependency theory is a systems-level theory that views journalistic outlets as just one group of actors within a broader system of information.
• Media dependency theory focuses on understanding relationships within a system, with the strength of the relationships impacting the degree of dependency.
• Media dependency theory contends that the degree of ambiguity impacts the degree of media dependency. Journalism can be especially influential on people’s understanding of things that they have limited personal experience with, such as international affairs.
• When a journalistic outlet has exclusive information, it has more power in a relationship as the relationship becomes asymmetric. However, different institutional actors, like governments and private companies, can restrict access to important media resources. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/02%3A_Media_Effects/2.01%3A_Media_Dependency_Theory.txt |
Introduction
Framing theory provides us with a helpful lens for understanding how people develop their perception of reality, and the role that journalistic outlets play in shaping those perceptions.
Framing is deeply indebted to another theoretical perspective — the Social Construction of Reality — which was formalized in 1966 by sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman. At its core, this perspective argues that a person’s perception of reality is not entirely, or even mainly, objective. Instead, what we perceive to be reality is actually a human and social construction that is deeply shaped by our previous lived experiences and the ways in which we are socialized via everyday interactions. As such, the theory contends, reality becomes socially constructed as we experience it and learn about it, and we each therefore develop differing perceptions of reality. Those differences may be fairly minor: Perhaps two witnesses agree that a police officer acted with the needed force in response to a threat but one of them thinks the officer could have toned things down a little. However, they might also be significant: Perhaps those two witnesses disagree over who the aggressor was, and whether any force was needed on the officer’s part.
This perspective is important because it presumes that individuals act based on their unique perceptions of reality. For example, if someone perceives the officer to have acted with unnecessary force, they may be more likely to protest against police brutality than someone else who perceives that exact same situation to have involved an appropriate response. As this example suggests, the theory posits that different people experience different constructed realities — even when they inhabit the same spaces under the same present circumstances.
A World With Multiple Realities
It follows from this theoretical perspective that the world consists of multiple perceived realities. Those perceived realities are shaped by a range of factors, operating from an individual level (e.g., one’s preconceptions, perhaps resulting from their particular upbringing) to a social systems level (e.g., the dominant systems of thought within their culture). In short, while there may indeed be a singular 'true' reality out there, made up of material things and governed by the laws of physics, an individual’s perception of that reality is just an approximation of it. And, sometimes, it’s not a very accurate one.
A crucial implication of this perspective is that it is simply impossible for journalism to mirror reality. That is, if a journalist cannot fully capture a 'true' reality because of their human shortcomings, then they cannot possibly replicate it in their work. Instead, journalism is, at best, a good approximation of reality, with the journalist’s job being to approximate that reality as best they can.
Even if one rejects the proposition that individuals inherently cannot mirror reality, there is also a practical issue at play that makes framing theory useful: Even if journalists could accurately replicate reality, they simply do not have the time or space to show everything about that reality. Instead, they can only show a small portion of it.
For example, consider a televised broadcast of a protest against police brutality. One may think that setting up a camera and pointing it at the crowd offers a mirror of reality — after all, it is a simple, mechanical recording of what’s happening. However, the camera can only show one angle of what is happening. Depending on where it is placed, it may be too close and miss the entire scope of the crowd — or, it may be too far and make the crowd appear small or miss important details about the interactions. As such, the journalist must make a choice to place the camera in the place that they believe offers the best representation (approximation) of the 'reality' of that event.
But journalists rarely ever just point a camera at something and call it a day. A large part of their job is to make sense of what is happening. Put another way, even if they just report 'facts' — and facts are themselves contentious things — they must still connect those facts. The process of making sense of reality is inherently an interpretive (and thus constructive) act.
Media Framing and Frames
One way to conceptualize that process of sense-making is through framing theory and, specifically, media framing. Sociologist Robert Entman refers to media framing as the process by which an individual "selects some aspects of a perceived reality and makes them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described." That’s a lot to take in, so let’s break it down.
First, this conceptualization of the framing process — and there are other ways of conceptualizing it — involves two key sub-processes. The first is selection, or the choices about what to include or exclude about that perceived reality. The second is salience, or the choices about what to emphasize about that perceived reality and what to downplay. These choices, again, are often driven by the necessity of communicating something within a finite amount of time or space — like a handful of live tweets or a 30-second broadcast segment.
Second, this conceptualization describes four main acts of framing. The first is diagnosing problems, or defining the issues associated with a topic. For example, the aforementioned broadcast segment on a protest may choose to diagnose the problem as police using excessive force against detainees or as the vilification of police. The second is diagnosing causes, or identifying what or who are the main forces driving the problem. For example, that segment may choose to focus on a hurtful culture within policing or an inadequate amount of police training. The third is making moral evaluations, which may include asserting whether the causal agents or the consequences of an issue are good or bad. For example, that segment may assert that these protests are good because they may serve as catalysts for change, or bad because the protests are divisive within society. The fourth is recommending treatments, which describe potential 'solutions' to the identified problems. For example, that segment may assert that systemic reform is necessary or that police should receive more support from other actors and institutions.
The result of that process is the media frame, which refers to the written, spoken, graphical, or visual message that a communicator uses to contextualize a topic, such as a person, event, episode, or issue, within a text transmitted to receivers by means of mediation.
Again, there’s a lot to unpack there, but the key takeaway is that media frames are the tools that communicators — including journalists — use to simplify and contextualize an issue or event. A single frame (or media text, like a news story) does not need to include all four of those acts of media framing. In fact, news stories rarely do, especially when they aim to be as neutral as possible.
Moreover, media framing and frames involve both conscious and subconscious processes of selection and salience. Put another way, a journalist may consciously adopt a particular frame because it addresses questions they believe their audiences will want answers to, even as they subconsciously reject alternative frames because they recall seeing those frames in recent coverage by a competitor.
Finally, it is crucial to recognize that news stories often include information from different sources, which in turn shapes the frame. For example, a journalist may only diagnose the problems associated with the aforementioned protest with their words but add elements of moral evaluation to the story’s frame by including quotes from a source that asserts the police acted in a brutal and unprofessional way.
Impacts of Journalistic Frames
Journalistic frames often impact audiences' understandings of and attitudes toward a topic or issue. In this way, they influence the realities that those audience members construct. This may include interpretations not only of basic elements, like what happened, but broader (and no less impactful) notions about what is most important or problematic about a topic or issue, who are the good and bad people involved, and what are or aren’t sensible solutions to a given problem.
To illustrate this, consider the two following news briefs about two emerging treatments for a group of 600 people who have been infected by a dangerous virus.
The first news brief notes that if Treatment A is adopted, 200 people will be saved. However, if Treatment B is adopted, there is a 1/3 chance that all 600 people will be saved and a 2/3 chance that nobody will be saved.
The second news brief notes that if Treatment A is adopted, 400 people will die. However, if Treatment B is adopted, there is a 1/3 chance that nobody will die and a 2/3 chance that all 600 people will die.
The depictions in those two news briefs are functionally equivalent, with Treatment A being the risk-averse option and Treatment B being the risk-seeking option. However, if a random set of 50 readers were shown the first brief and another 50 random readers were shown the second, the theoretical expectation is that the people shown the first brief — which is more positive — would be more likely to select the risk-averse option (Treatment A). In contrast, the readers who were shown the second depiction — which is more negative — would be more likely to select the risk-seeking option (Treatment B). This is an example of what we call gain/loss framing, one of the many different approaches to framing in psychology.
However, the extent of those impacts is neither uniform nor universal. Modern theories of message processing reject the view that audiences are passive and just accept journalistic frames. Instead, audiences process those messages in light of their existing knowledge and attitudes, which is in turn shaped by their lived experiences and non-media messages (e.g., discussions with friends and family). For example, a person who has had a negative encounter with the police is generally more likely to accept a frame that centers them as the aggressor — or, conversely, to reject such a frame if their experiences have been exclusively positive.
Repeated exposure to particular frames can develop associations over time. For example, seeing repeated images of police brutality may link the concepts of police and brutality over time, such that when the concept of police is triggered — even in other contexts — the individual will also think about brutal actions. Alternatively, that repeated exposure may make it so that when the concept of brutality comes up, the individual may think of the police as an example. Such connections can be both strengthened and weakened by frames. For example, if that same individual is repeatedly exposed to media examples of police engaging in good deeds, the existing negative connections are challenged and may thus become weaker.
Journalistic frames tend to be most impactful in situations where individuals are highly dependent on journalistic media for their understanding of an issue, and especially when there is greater ambiguity around an issue. That is because there are fewer preexisting associations, allowing the media associations to serve as the primary driver. Thus, journalistic frames are especially impactful when they involve contexts, people, and ideas that are new or foreign to an individual.
Finally, it’s also important to keep in mind that journalistic actors are themselves audiences. They therefore not only have their own lived experiences to draw upon but also regularly consume media messages crafted by other actors. As such, they are also impacted by repeated exposure to certain frames and associations. They may consequently go on to subconsciously repeat elements of dominant frames and associations within their work, which in turn reifies those frames and makes those associations even more salient within society. Conversely, those journalistic actors may seek to use their awareness of the dominant frames to challenge them by including counter-frames that weaken problematic associations.
Key Takeaways
• According to the Social Construction of Reality perspective, an individual’s view of reality is not entirely (or even mainly) objective. Instead, it becomes socially constructed as that individual filters things through their own existing knowledge and experiences.
• The framing process involves both conscious and subconscious processes of selection (what to include or exclude) and salience (what to emphasize or downplay). Journalistic outlets can thus depict the same topic in different ways.
• Media frames may impact individuals' understandings of and attitudes toward a topic or issue, but those impacts are not uniform or universal. That’s because media frames interact with existing knowledge and attitudes.
• Journalistic actors are themselves influenced by frames, and may therefore reinforce (or challenge) dominant associations through the framing choices in their work. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/02%3A_Media_Effects/2.02%3A_Framing_Theory.txt |
Introduction
Bernard Cohen famously wrote in his 1963 book, The Press and Foreign Policy, that journalistic media "may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about."
Although that statement came before the formalization of agenda-setting theory, it aptly captures its essence: Even if journalistic outlets have a limited ability to shape their audiences' attitudes toward an issue, they nevertheless exert influence over how important the issue is perceived to be by those audiences. (That perceived importance may be very different from the actual importance of that issue according to other measures.)
While agenda-setting theory and framing theory both address the potential impact of journalistic media coverage, they are very different. Agenda-setting theory focuses on the relationship between media coverage and the perceived importance of an issue, while framing theory connects media coverage to the formation of attitudes toward those issues.
Agenda-Setting Theory
In a nutshell, agenda setting refers to the process by which mass media — including journalistic media — present certain issues (e.g., gun violence) frequently and prominently, with the result being that large segments of the public come to perceive those issues as being more important than others.
The central causal mechanism is a very simple one: The more media attention an issue receives (issue salience), the more important it is perceived to be (by audiences). For example, if there is sustained journalistic coverage of immigration over the course of a few months, then news consumers will think that immigration is an important issue at that point in time — even if they don’t have strong opinions about it.
Although the term 'agenda-setting theory' may be seen to imply a conspiratorial effort to manipulate public opinion, this is far from the case. It simply reflects twin processes: First, journalistic media are bound by time and space. For example, an evening news broadcast often has just 22 minutes to transmit information about the day’s most important issues and events. This forces journalists to focus on specific issues and simplify them, and thus make decisions about what they believe matters most to the audiences they serve. Even with a news website, where space and time to cover a topic are less restricted and an online editor could theoretically cram 500 stories on the homepage, journalists must still make decisions about how to organize the information they publish. Indeed, the decision about which story to place at the top of a website’s homepage offers a salience cue — it is placed first because it is presumed to be the most important story.
The second process occurs on the audience side: Audiences turn to journalistic media because they have a need for orientation, or a desire to understand new or emerging situations. That need for orientation, in turn, is impacted by two elements: relevance and uncertainty. Relevance pertains to the question, "Do I think this issue is personally or socially important to me?" Uncertainty pertains to the question, "Do I feel I lack the information I need about this topic?" When both relevance and uncertainty are high, audience members pay greater attention to journalistic outlets' cues about salience, and thus the resulting agenda-setting effect is stronger.
Similarly, when the issue at question is unobtrusive — that is, it is an issue people have little to no personal experience with, such as international affairs — then they are more likely to rely on media cues for assessing the importance of that issue. This may be countered by certain contextual factors, though. For example, scholars have found that agenda-setting effects are weaker in closed media systems (those tightly controlled by governments) with the idea being that people trust those journalistic media less. They thus actively seek out other sources of information and draw even more upon personal assessments.
Agenda-setting effects are therefore not uniform or universal. They are instead dependent on the context. Indeed, as Cohen wrote about the relationship between journalistic media and foreign affairs, "the world will look different to different people depending on the map that is drawn for them by writers, editors, and publishers of the paper they read."
Intermedia Agenda Setting
Journalistic outlets do not just influence ordinary citizens, politicians, and the like. They also influence one another. Within the context of agenda-setting, we refer to the process by which journalistic media influence one another as intermedia agenda-setting.
The core argument for this hypothesis is that just as regular citizens turn to trusted journalistic outlets for cues about what is important, journalistic outlets themselves turn to other journalistic media that they perceive to be leaders within a given context. For example, The New York Times may cover a story about U.S. troops withdrawing from Syria, which leads a local newspaper to perceive that to be an important issue and thus devote resources to covering a local angle about the same topic (e.g., covering local families who might have a spouse or child returning home from deployment).
This has led to a broader argument that audiences have historically developed reasonably consistent perceptions of which issues are most important at a given point in time because journalistic outlets generally follow similar issue agendas. This does not mean that they all cover the exact same issues, and certainly not in the same way. Instead, it contends that dominant coverage patterns often emerge across media — such as a period of intense and widespread journalistic coverage of climate change, before that attention wanes and the issue later re-emerges as a priority — and that many people within similar contexts will often identify similar sets of issues as being "important" at a given point in time.
Intermedia agenda-setting has required some reconceptualization in recent years, though, because the news ecology has become more complex. The perspective was initially proposed during a time when traditional media dominated audience attention. This is no longer the case, as niche and alternative media have grown immensely — leading to more specialized information sources — and social media have transformed the ways people engage with news.
As such, while elite journalistic outlets like The New York Times may still shape the initial perception of issues and their import, active audiences will blend messages from a greater range of journalistic and non-journalistic media. This ostensibly weakens the Times' agenda-setting power. Additionally, the transformation of the distribution of news — which is also more social today — and the emergence of new ways for audiences to engage with journalistic actors has enabled those active audiences to increasingly shape media agendas themselves.
Key Takeaways
• Agenda-setting theory proposes that issues that receive relatively more media attention tend to be perceived by audiences as being relatively more important.
• Framing theory shares some conceptual similarities with agenda-setting theory, but they differ in that agenda-setting emphasizes the relationship between media coverage and the perceived importance of an issue, while framing theory connects coverage to attitude formation.
• The magnitude of an agenda-setting effect depends on the context. Agenda-setting effects are neither uniform nor universal.
• Journalistic outlets do not just influence ordinary citizens and politicians; they influence fellow journalistic actors. They can therefore create a feedback loop. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/02%3A_Media_Effects/2.03%3A_Agenda_Setting_Theory.txt |
Introduction
In order to more fully understand the underlying processes for key theories about the impacts of media coverage and depiction, it is helpful to learn about how human memory works. Priming theory is a particularly helpful tool in that regard.
It is worth noting that priming theory — and associated models theorizing about the workings of human memory — come from social psychology and cognition, and it is not the only explanation for how humans make sense of the world. However, such models of human memory have proven to be enduring and influential when it comes to understanding the processing of information disseminated by journalistic outlets.
Priming Theory
In a nutshell, priming theory contends that media depictions stimulate related thoughts in the minds of audience members. For example, talking about "climate change" with a person might activate their thinking about "extreme weather" because, for that person, those two concepts have become related. Media depictions can strengthen (or weaken) the association between those concepts.
In this associative network model of memory, the direction and strength of the ties between ideas and concepts matter. For example, thinking about "extreme weather" may trigger "bad" most of the time, but thinking about "bad" may not trigger "extreme weather" (or trigger it only some of the time). Additionally, stronger ties between two ideas or concepts will result in the faster recall of the association between them.
This model also differentiates between explicit and implicit memory. Explicit memory refers to things an individual actively tries to recall. This would include the answer to the question, "Who is the best professor you’ve ever had?" The key with this type of memory is that the individual can consciously recall the associations between "best" and "professor" and explain that information.
Implicit memory refers to things an individual does not try to purposely recall, such as how to ride a bicycle. The key with this type of memory is that it might take an individual a while to explain the related concepts (and they may not even be able to explain them well or at all), but they are able to subconsciously draw on all the requisite associations to not fall over when they start pedaling.
Priming theory contends that people do not make use of all of the associations they have developed. Instead, they take shortcuts to connect an information need — for example, how to make sense of a professor’s quality — to the previously stored associations that are most readily available. Thus, there is a strong emphasis on recent associations — such as recent journalistic coverage of the relevant issue(s).
Agenda Setting, Framing, and Priming
Agenda-setting theory connects to these understandings of how human memory works in two related ways. The first proposes that repeated journalistic coverage of an issue results in an individual associating that issue with more concepts. That, in turn, increases the likelihood that the issue will be triggered later (as there are more opportunities to trigger it). The second proposes that repeated journalistic coverage of an issue increases the availability of information related to that issue by bringing it to the top of an individual’s mind. That, in turn, increases the likelihood that the issue will be triggered later (as the issue, and its related concepts, are relatively easy to access). Both of these ways influence perceptions about how important an issue is because of how easily it is recalled.
While framing theory draws upon many of the same core propositions about the causal mechanisms in human memory, it differs from agenda-setting theory in that it takes an extra step. Framing theory is not simply about the availability of information. Instead, it argues that media can also influence attitudes toward those issues by rewiring the associations between that issue and different concepts, such as by relating "climate change" to "bad" and "anthropogenic."
Framing theory and priming theory have been connected to examine issues of stereotypes in journalistic depictions. For example, scholars have used those frameworks to assess journalistic outlets' role in promoting associations between the concepts of "people of color" and "poverty," "crime," and "urban blight." Those associations may result from the over-representation of crime involving people of color in local television news coverage. Conversely, primes may be used strategically to counter stereotypes, such as by depicting people of color as being successful, serving as community leaders, and inhabiting pleasant neighborhoods. In some cases, however, primes can result in the rejection of the message being primed. For example, a news story about a police officer acting in self-defense may be rejected as being false to someone who has had multiple negative encounters with police, as the depiction of the officer’s actions may appear off-base to that person.
Limitations of Priming Effects
The effects of priming are neither uniform nor universal, though. In isolation, priming effects are often short-lived. They can last as little as 90 seconds and weaken over time if they are not triggered. However, repetition strengthens associations, and that can lead to more lasting effects over time. Indeed, many of our strongest associations are those promoted during our youth and reinforced over the course of our lives as a result of the contexts within which we live.
For example, higher amounts of local television news viewing will often involve more exposure to stories about crime that feature people of color as perpetrators. That, in turn, can result in greater concerns about people of color — or, at minimum, the perception that crime by people of color is an important issue.
Such an effect is not predicated on the words and associations made by journalists themselves, though. Although journalists may use careful language and avoid stereotypes, they may choose to quote individuals who intentionally or unintentionally use language and frames that strengthen and weaken associations between concepts. Audiences often do not meaningfully differentiate between the journalists' words and those of their sources. This underscores the responsibility journalists have when selecting who and what to quote.
Additionally, media priming is most powerful when individuals have little existing knowledge about a target concept (e.g., "nuclear power") and are therefore more susceptible to media-driven associations. Put another way, media primes are especially impactful when they involve contexts, people, and ideas that are new or foreign to audiences — that is, when audiences are most dependent on journalistic outlets for their understanding of something.
Individuals do not develop associations between topics through journalistic media consumption alone, though. First, news is incredibly complex, and there are often many competing cues within a single journalistic message (e.g., an article), which in turn trigger multifaceted responses. Second, media environments are also complex, with journalistic outlets operating alongside entertainment, popular culture, politics, and so on. Third, individuals establish associations — and, often, the strongest associations — based on their personal experiences or those relayed by other trusted sources, like their family and friends.
Thus, in order to fully understand a priming effect, one must understand the environment and context around the prime.
Key Takeaways
• At its core, priming theory posits that media depictions develop relationships between concepts and stimulate related thoughts in the minds of audience members.
• Both agenda-setting theory and framing theory are premised on associative network models of human memory, which focus on the associations between concepts and the ease through which they may be recalled. However, they presume different pathways for the activation of concepts.
• Priming effects are often short-lived, but repetition strengthens associations and thereby allows effects to become more lasting.
• Priming effects are not uniform or universal. The magnitude of the effect of a prime depends on the context surrounding it. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/02%3A_Media_Effects/2.04%3A_Priming_Theory.txt |
Introduction
News avoidance refers to a phenomenon where audiences reduce their consumption of journalistic media over a continuous period of time due to either an active dislike for news or a preference for other kinds of media content.
Although many theories about the impacts of journalistic media implicitly assume that large portions of the public regularly consume those media, it is important to recognize that large segments of the population don’t actually do that. Indeed, although more journalism is produced today than ever before, the number of people who avoid journalism has also increased in recent decades.
Moreover, audiences' journalistic media use is usually characterized by a combination of genres, such as sports journalism, political journalism, and environmental journalism. News avoidance is typically linked to the exclusion of certain genres and issues (though it may be extended to all journalistic media use). Put another way, some people (in fact, many) may routinely take in sports journalism but intentionally seek to avoid political journalism.
This development can have profound impacts on democratic societies that presumably rely upon a well-informed citizenry to self-govern because higher levels of news exposure have historically been linked to greater amounts of political knowledge and engagement. Second, news avoidance has negative economic consequences for journalistic outlets as it reduces the potential size of its audience. That, in turn, can also have consequences for non-avoiders, as journalistic outlets have fewer resources with which to produce quality journalism.
Intentional and Unintentional Avoidance
There are many reasons why an audience member may engage in news avoidance, but they can usually be placed into one of two categories: intentional avoidance and unintentional avoidance.
Intentional avoidance is the consequence of individuals consciously tuning out news media. There are three main reasons why they engage in such behavior, all of which are linked to negative dispositions toward journalistic media.
The first reason is that they perceive news coverage to be too negative and pessimistic. While some audiences are drawn to particularly negative or pessimistic news (e.g., violent crime), such news has been linked to increases in negative emotions and decreases in an individual’s well-being over time. The desire to seek positive emotions can thus result in intentional avoidance of news that is presumed to be too negative.
The second reason is that some audiences do not trust journalistic outlets. This may be due to a perception that certain groups of journalistic outlets — if not "the media" as a whole — are pushing their own political and economic interests by being selective about the topics they cover and the information they include in their coverage. The perception that such coverage will be biased against a person’s viewpoints or perception of reality can thus encourage intentional avoidance.
The third reason is that there is always a massive amount of readily accessible journalistic products out there, which can create a feeling of information overload. Not only is there a seemingly endless pool of issues being covered at any given moment, but there is also a seemingly endless pool of stories about each issue — which is impossible for any single person to consume or process. That perceived overload can create stress, confusion, and anxiety, and thus result in intentional avoidance in order for a person to reclaim a positive emotional state.
There is also unintentional news avoidance, which is based on the audience member’s relative preference for non-journalistic media. Put another way, the avoidance isn’t because a person is actively seeking to avoid journalistic media but rather because their preference for another choice — perhaps a new movie featuring Ryan Gosling — is stronger. Indeed, scholars have argued that the large audiences drawn by television news broadcasts in the 1960s and 1970s were due in part to audiences watching the news while they waited for the evening entertainment programs to start (which followed the nightly newscasts).
News Fatigue
News avoidance does not have to reflect a permanent state wherein audience members always avoid certain kinds of journalistic products, or journalistic media altogether. Quite often, it is a temporary state, as when individuals feel overwhelmed and need to take a break from an issue.
For example, consider the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. After being exposed to several stories about the pandemic every day for months, a person may have felt the need to disconnect from their preferred news sources to keep their mental state from deteriorating. However, after taking a break, that person may have resumed taking in such stories — and perhaps needed another break later on.
We can call this phenomenon news fatigue, which connotes a temporary feeling of exhaustion that can be addressed through a period of disconnection (recharging). News fatigue can occur in relation to any kind of issue or genre, such as a royal wedding or political journalism. However, it is typically most pronounced when it comes to natural disasters, illnesses, poverty, and political issues that, by their very nature, already tend to engender negative emotional responses.
Compassion Fatigue
Similarly, there is a phenomenon called compassion fatigue, which refers to the gradual lessening of compassion over time as a result of repeated exposure to traumatic phenomena. For example, consider the refugee crisis resulting from the Syrian Civil War, wherein at least 13 million Syrians were estimated to have been displaced and in need of humanitarian assistance. As the war dragged on over years, audiences around the world moved from being shocked to becoming numbed in order to psychologically protect themselves from repeated exposure to the death and destruction featured in news reports about the war.
Compassion fatigue has been associated with increased feelings of hopelessness and negative attitudes. That, in turn, can lead to desensitization and even resistance to helping those suffering if the issue is perceived as being intractable, or impossible to manage or change. Consequently, individuals may seek to turn off certain emotions as best they can. Compassion fatigue can also impact political and economic support for initiatives to address that issue. For example, in the aforementioned example of the Syrian Civil War, well-informed but fatigued news consumers may be less likely to become involved in protests against the war than their less-informed but non-fatigued counterparts.
This phenomenon is not limited to news audiences or to journalism. It has been found to impact a range of professionals, including doctors, child welfare workers, and lawyers. However, it has been found to have profound impacts on journalists themselves — and especially foreign correspondents who are shuttled from one crisis to another. Those impacts involve not only their emotional and mental states but also the depictions (and tropes) they incorporate into their journalistic work.
Combating News Avoidance
Several strategies have been proposed to reduce the likelihood of news avoidance. The first is to engage in approaches to journalism like constructive journalism and solutions journalism.
Constructive journalism aims to rebalance journalism by accompanying a selection of predominantly negative news stories about an issue with more positive coverage that illustrates the bright spots — however few they may be — related to that issue. For example, this might involve stories about how some Syrian refugees were able to successfully relocate themselves and start new lives, or how a local non-profit helped provide needed aid to displaced refugees.
Solutions journalism aims to not only diagnose problems — like the reasons for the displacement of Syrians during the war — but also adopt a forward-looking perspective that identifies possible solutions. Solutions journalism also tends to offer concrete suggestions to audiences for how to become a part of possible solutions. This may include providing contact information for local nonprofits or identifying specific humanitarian aid legislation that is under consideration.
The second strategy is to look for ways to increase trust in news organizations, such as by being more transparent about how stories are reported and explaining the journalistic processes behind them. For example, this might entail appending an information box to a story that contains anonymous sources that explains the journalistic organization’s policy on granting anonymity. It may also include an explanation that a product reviewer was not paid for the review, but that the outlet may receive money if audiences purchase the product from an affiliated online store.
A third strategy that has received more attention in recent years is to provide slow journalism alternatives. This approach moves away from providing many short and episodic breaking news products (e.g., breaking news stories or tweets). Instead, it promotes providing fewer, longer, and more holistic news products (e.g., a well-reported and in-depth story published a couple of days after the news first broke). The approach is not intended to replace traditional journalism but simply to offer a complement for those who feel stressed by information overload.
Key Takeaways
• News avoidance refers to a phenomenon whereby audiences reduce their consumption of journalistic media over a continuous period of time.
• News avoidance may be the result of intentional and unintentional efforts, such as an active dislike for news or a simple preference for other media content.
• Intentional avoidance may be the byproduct of perceived over-negativity, lack of trust in news, and information overload.
• Individuals may develop either or both news fatigue and compassion fatigue as a result of over-exposure to a particular issue.
• There are different strategies that journalistic actors can employ to reduce the likelihood of avoidance, though some measure of avoidance is inevitable. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/02%3A_Media_Effects/2.05%3A_News_Avoidance_and_Fatigue.txt |
Introduction
The Hierarchy of Influences Model is a useful framework for describing many of the things that affect the news content that audiences see, hear, and read. The model was proposed by media scholars Pamela Shoemaker and Stephen Reese in their 1996 book, Mediating the Message. The crucial intervention of this model is that it helped formalize the idea that there are a number of different factors that influence news content, and that those factors operate across different levels, from the micro (individual) to the macro (society).
Put another way, individuals operate within larger social, economic, political, and technical systems and structures. Those systems and structures in turn influence how journalistic actors think and how they go about their work. That, in turn, influences the journalistic products that those actors produce.
The Hierarchy of Influences Model wasn’t designed to propose or explain causal relationships, such as if X happens then Y will happen. Instead, it is particularly useful in helping us appreciate that journalism isn’t shaped just by journalists or the organizations they work for. It is also shaped by a number of other factors.
Levels of Analysis
The Hierarchy of Influences Model identifies five levels of influence: the individual level, the routine level, the organizational level, the social-institutional level, and the social systems level. These levels are ordered from the micro (smallest in scope) to the macro (broadest in scope), and the model presents them as a series of concentric circles.
Individual Level
The individual level refers to the biographical, psychological, and sociological characteristics of an individual social actor. For example, a journalist’s age, gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, and class status can all impact the news that person produces because previous life experiences associated with those attributes may color that person’s interpretation of an issue or what they choose to prioritize when covering it. That journalist’s personal values and beliefs (e.g., their religious beliefs or political attitudes) may similarly impact how they think about things. Even their role orientations, or what they think the purpose of journalism is and how journalism should be done, will impact how a journalist will seek to cover an issue.
These factors, like many others in the model, are not always conscious influences. For example, a journalist may not knowingly decide that they have to adopt a particular story angle because they lean toward liberalism or conservatism. Instead, their political preference may subconsciously orient them toward a particular story angle precisely because they believe certain philosophies — like personal choice or the social good — are especially important (which is probably what led them to hold that political preference to begin with).
Routine Level
The routine level refers to the patterned, repeated practices, forms, and rules that journalistic actors use to do their jobs. For example, this may include news values, or the set of criteria journalists apply to determine the newsworthiness of information. If they deem controversy to be an important news value, then they are generally more likely to cover issues and events that are controversial. This is especially true when there is disagreement among institutional elites, such as political party leaders, regarding an issue.
Another such factor may be an institutional preference to appear balanced by offering "both sides" of an issue an equal voice. That often results in coverage that positions both voices as equally legitimate, even when that is not the case. For example, anthropogenic climate change has long been considered a real phenomenon by leading scientists. However, for many years, journalistic coverage of climate change often gave voice to skeptics (who implied a lack of scientific consensus) to appear balanced.
Yet another such factor is a preference for certain styles of presenting information to audiences. One such style of writing is the inverted pyramid, which organizes information from most recent and important to least recent and important. This style is perceived as being efficient at quickly conveying important information, but it often comes at the expense of developing a compelling narrative. These factors operate at a higher level because they reflect what is seen as appropriate or normal among fellow journalistic actors.
Organizational Level
The organizational level refers to the policies, unwritten rules, and economic imperatives within journalistic organizations (or whatever other entity a journalistic actor works for). Journalistic outlets must balance commercial concerns with professional ones. This balancing act is often most difficult for for-profit organizations, as they are expected to generate profits even as important journalism is often not cost-effective. However, even non-profit media have to work within a set budget to remain viable and promote their work in a way that can attract funding from different benefactors (e.g., foundations). As such, media ownership is often an important influence. While some owners (or ownership groups) are fairly hands-off (as long as economic objectives are met), others are more active in dictating coverage priorities and may even become directly involved in shaping the reporting of specific issues.
Additionally, the primary medium associated with a journalistic outlet (e.g., whether they see print as their primary media vehicle or if they focus on an online-first strategy) may also impact how they present information. After all, you wouldn’t expect an organization that focuses on print journalism to invest much in interactive data visualizations that only work online.
A third factor might be the geographic location where that organization is based, and whether they have news bureaus (satellite offices) elsewhere. For example, if a journalistic outlet is based in a major East Coast city, the social make-up of the journalists will be more likely to reflect the values and priorities of that place, even when they cover stories elsewhere in the country or abroad.
Social-Institutional Level
The social-institutional level refers to the norms, individuals, and organizations that operate outside a given journalistic organization. There is some overlap here with the aforementioned routines level, but this level includes information sources, other journalistic organizations, advertisers, and media policy, among other actors. For example, information sources (e.g., the witnesses a journalist may interview) can shape a news product by virtue of the words they choose to use and the information they choose to share — or, more simply, by being willing or unwilling to talk to the journalist in the first place. Some journalistic outlets can influence general news coverage themselves by serving as 'pack leaders' that other outlets seek to follow or imitate. They can also influence coverage by publishing stories that competing organizations may then choose to avoid (because those stories will be thought of as 'already having been done').
Advertisers can impact coverage by demanding that their ads only be shown alongside positive coverage. After all, they likely do not want their products to be associated with negative emotions or connotations. That, in turn, can result in important (but typically exhausting) stories receiving inadequate coverage, or having portions of a news product be reserved for more-positive feature stories. Conversely, advertisers can threaten to withdraw ads if they perceive that a journalistic outlet represents values that do not reflect their own.
Media policy can restrict what journalistic outlets can report on, or how they may report on those things. For example, some countries have strict state secrets laws that prevent journalistic outlets from publishing anything that the government deems to be threatening to national security. Similarly, some countries around the world have adopted "fake news" laws that enable government authorities to fine (or shut down) journalists and outlets that produce news the authorities do not agree with. In both of these examples, media policy can have a "chilling effect" on what journalists choose to write (or write about). Conversely, some countries can adopt media policies that protect journalists from frivolous lawsuits by implementing serious penalties for individuals who sue journalists in bad faith.
Social Systems Level
The social systems level refers to the symbolic frameworks of norms, values, and beliefs that reside at the societal level. This is the most macro level, and it simply reflects the sorts of ideas that are more generally accepted within a broad society. For example, in the United States, capitalism remains the dominant economic system. This results in different issues being more likely to be framed in terms of how they might affect private ownership, free markets, and the pursuit of profit. Similarly, democratic values remain dominant within U.S. politics. That, in turn, leads to beliefs that the role of journalistic media in the U.S. is to inform citizens so they may better participate in self-governance. In less-capitalistic social systems, those same issues may be more likely to be framed primarily in terms of the collective good. Similarly, in autocratic social systems, journalists will be more likely to believe that their job is to help the government maintain social order.
Importance of Levels and Factors
The Hierarchy of Influences Model does not presume that any of the levels discussed here is more important than another. It also makes no claims about the directionality of influences. (For example, the social systems level is not theorized to be the one that shapes individuals, nor the other way around.) Instead, it views those levels as frequently acting upon one another: Individuals collectively shape values and norms at the social systems level, even as those values and norms help enable and restrict the behaviors of individuals within that society.
Similarly, each factor can operate independently from the other factors or in conjunction with one or more. For example, the influence of advertisers on a particular organization may be entirely independent from the dominant presentation style of that organization. Regardless of who is advertising or how much advertising there is, the organization may continue to use the inverted pyramid style of writing. However, if an organization is for-profit and has aggressive profit targets, then the existing influence of advertisers may become even stronger.
We have only covered a few of the factors identified by the Hierarchy of Influences Model here. There are dozens more, and you can learn more about them in the most recent edition of Mediating the Message. While it is less important to know how to classify each potential influence into a particular level, it is very useful to simply recognize that a great many things can influence journalists and journalism, and that these influences can emanate from individuals to society as a whole.
It is important to note that journalism is rapidly changing as new social actors, technological actants, and journalistic activities emerge or become increasingly important. For example, companies like Facebook and Google have staked important positions within news production and distribution, even though they claim they are not media organizations themselves. Similarly, some new digital advertising technologies have made it harder for advertisers to know exactly where their ads will be placed online, and for online news organizations to know which ads will appear alongside their stories.
In short, as journalism (and the environments it operates within) changes, so do the factors that might influence it, as well as the nature and extent of the influence those factors exert. However, what remains unchanged is that journalism is regularly influenced in important ways by an array of different things.
Key Takeaways
• The Hierarchy of Influences Model describes the various factors that affect news content, organized on a continuum from a micro level to a macro level.
• The model identifies five levels: the individual level, the routine level, the organizational level, the social-institutional level, and the social systems level.
• The model does not presume that any one level is more important than another, or that influence runs in one direction. Instead, all of these forces are simultaneously acting upon the production of news content.
• Journalism is rapidly changing, and the nature and extent of each influence is changing with it. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/03%3A_Influences_on_Journalistic_Media/3.01%3A_Hierarchy_of_Influences_Model.txt |
Introduction
According to media scholar Mark Deuze, journalism — namely, journalism in Western societies in the Global North — is generally comprised of five central values, which together make up what he calls the occupational ideology of journalism.
The first value is that journalists should provide a public service to the citizens of a given country. The second is that journalists should be impartial, fair, and objective. The third is that journalists must be independent in their work. The fourth is that journalists must have a sense of immediacy and the ability to quickly report emerging developments. The fifth is that journalists must have a strong sense of ethics that is consistent with a broader professional code of ethics.
Just because such a value system exists does not mean that the way journalism is practiced in those places actually reflects those values. Put another way, in some places, journalism is hardly impartial or independent in practice. However, those cultural values are important to how the majority journalists in those places develop their sense of identity, how they think about their work, and how they collectively try to legitimize themselves to society. Such values also often come up in popular media about journalism, such as American movies that portray journalists as independent truth-tellers.
Breaking Down Journalistic Cultures
What Deuze is effectively suggesting is that although journalism may be practiced differently in different places, there is a general journalism culture that spans many of those places. However, although useful as a starting point, Deuze’s theorizing is a reflection of Western ideology. For example, those values implicitly assume a separation of powers accomplished through systems of checks and balances, with journalistic media informally serving as one such check. Additionally, they also assume that journalistic outlets have the ability to remain independent from government. This is obviously not the case in many places.
Scholars have thus sought to move away from trying to find some universal journalistic culture and instead toward demarcating different aspects of journalistic cultures that allow for comparison across contexts (e.g., countries or regions). One such model comes from the Worlds of Journalism project, which has examined dozens of countries across five dimensions: journalists' sense of editorial autonomy, their perceived influences, their role orientations, their ethical considerations, and their trust in institutions.
U.S. Journalistic Culture
Based on interviews conducted in 2013 by the Worlds of Journalism team, journalists in the U.S. tend to report a consistently high degree of editorial autonomy (independence), particularly in how they report news. For example, more than 90% of the U.S. journalists they interviewed said they had "complete" or a "great deal" of freedom in deciding what aspects of a story to emphasize, and almost 90% said they had freedom in selecting which news stories to report. This puts the U.S. on the high end of editorial autonomy globally, as journalists in other countries typically report having less independence in choosing what to cover and how to cover it.
Although journalists in the U.S. report high levels of autonomy, they also recognize a range of different things that influence their ability to do their work. For example, almost 70% of U.S. journalists said that time limits were "extremely" or "very influential" to their journalistic work, suggesting a pressure to publish quickly. Similarly, almost 70% reported that their editorial supervisors and the organization’s editorial policy were highly influential to their work — although far fewer reported feeling very influenced by the managers or owners of their news organizations. Moreover, U.S. journalists generally do not perceive government censorship, advertising pressures, or pressure groups (such as industry trade associations and lobbyists) to have great influence on their work.
With regard to their role orientations, nearly all journalists in the U.S. said that it was "extremely" or "very important" to report things as they are — that is, to never fabricate information even if such fabrications would supposedly tell a 'broader truth.' The vast majority also believed it was important for them to educate their audiences and provide the information people need to make political decisions. Put another way, journalists in the U.S. generally believe that producing information that allows citizens to participate in civic and political processes is an important part of their (or their industry’s) job. In fact, U.S. journalists perceive acts of monitoring and scrutinizing political leaders to be among the most important functions of their job.
Notably, journalists in the U.S. generally believe they should be detached observers of events and should focus on allowing people to express their views in stories. (In contrast, few report believing in advocating for social change or striving to influence public opinion.) Relative to journalists around the world, this makes U.S. journalists more likely to value (and prioritize) the values of neutrality and offering balanced reporting. Additionally, U.S. journalists almost never see supporting national development or supporting government policies as important roles — a stark contrast to countries like China, Ethiopia, and Thailand, where journalists are far more likely to show support for government officials and their policies in their reporting.
The idea that journalists should always adhere to professional codes of ethics, such as the one from the Society of Professional Journalists, received almost unanimous agreement among journalists in the U.S. (In contrast, the notion that ethics are a matter of personal judgment received support from only one in ten journalists.) Additionally, a situational approach to ethics was rejected by nearly two-thirds of the journalists, and an even larger majority said that even extraordinary circumstances were not enough to warrant setting moral standards aside. Put another way, journalists in the U.S. believe a strong professional sense of ethics is paramount to doing journalism, and they believe they should defer to the dominant set of ethical values promoted within the profession (rather than relying on their own personal ethics). Moreover, there are some practices that journalists widely reject. For example, most journalists in the U.S. considered publishing unverified content, altering photographs, claiming to be someone else, and paying people for confidential information to be unacceptable practices.
Finally, journalists in the U.S. have little trust in political and societal institutions. While they trust news media (their fellow journalists) more than any other institution measured, fewer than 40% of journalists said they had "complete" or "a great deal" of trust in news media. Other institutions that received relatively high levels of trust were the military, the judiciary, and police. However, just over 1% of U.S. journalists had a great deal of trust in politicians and political parties in general, with 4% trusting the institution of the U.S. Congress and 11% trusting the Executive Branch. In general, this makes journalists in the U.S. far more skeptical of political and societal institutions than journalists in other countries. (Skepticism is, after all, a cherished value among U.S. journalists.)
Why Journalistic Cultures Matter
Journalistic cultures shape (and are shaped by) how journalists think and, consequently, impact how they act. There is, again, often a disconnect between what journalists think and what they do. Nevertheless, what they do is often influenced — at least initially — by what they think. For example, a journalist may choose to not go undercover or lie about their identity because they believe that violates a professional code of ethics — and they may thus try to get the story another way.
Additionally, journalistic cultures impact what is seen as legitimate work among fellow journalistic actors. That, in turn, impacts who and what are symbolically celebrated — that is, who gets treated as a "good" journalist by their peers or what gets treated as "good" journalism. Those symbolic rewards have material implications, such as increased job offers, job security, promotions, awards, and so on for those individuals who are seen as "good" journalists by their fellow journalists, and for the journalistic products that journalistic actors perceive as being "good."
Finally, journalistic cultures impact how journalistic actors legitimize their work to society. This, in turn, affects how societies think about journalism and the kinds of access and protections that other institutional actors (e.g., governments or sports teams) are willing to grant those journalists. For example, in a society where journalists are believed to provide important checks and balances to governmental authorities — as is the case in the United States — then that society is likely to support limited government intervention in news production and distribution.
It is important to note that journalistic cultures are not static, however. They can and do change over time. For example, the journalistic culture in the United States only adopted the journalistic value of neutrality as a central tenet in the 20th century. More recently, there have been rumblings within that culture to shift away from the value of "balance" and toward a "weight-of-evidence" approach, especially when it comes to covering scientific issues like climate change.
Key Takeaways
• Different countries have distinct journalistic cultures. There is no single, universal way of doing journalism, though some values and norms are more common than others across contexts (e.g., countries and regions).
• Journalists in the U.S. express having a great deal of editorial autonomy, and say they can generally select what to cover and how to cover it.
• Journalists in the U.S. believe their primary role is to educate the public about civic affairs, and they believe professional codes of ethics should be closely adhered to.
• Journalists in the U.S. are very skeptical of the political and social institutions they cover.
• Journalistic cultures matter because they shape (and are shaped by) how journalists think, act, and legitimize themselves to their peers and to society. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/03%3A_Influences_on_Journalistic_Media/3.02%3A_U.S._Journalistic_Culture.txt |
Introduction
News values are the benchmarks of newsworthiness against which journalists measure potential stories.
News is not a 'natural' thing that just 'exists.' In the context of journalism, news is something that is constructed by editorial actors (e.g., journalists) and even by some technological actants (e.g., newswriting algorithms). The use of the term "constructed" here is not intended to imply that news is arbitrarily invented or that it is "fake" information. Instead, it simply recognizes that news is the product of human and technological interventions, and it is shaped by the contexts within which it is identified, gathered, verified, structured, and presented as a product that is recognizable as "news" by audiences.
After all, only a tiny fraction of the developments and events happening in the world at any given moment ever get covered as news by editorial actors and actants. First, journalists are unlikely to be aware of most of those developments. Second, only a small portion of the things they are aware of are deemed to be worthy of being constructed as news stories. To help them decide which developments are worthy of their time and their audiences' attention, editorial actors apply the set of criteria we can call news values.
News Values
According to media scholars Tony Harcup and Deirdre O’Neill, most published news stories tend to include at least one of the following 15 elements:
• Exclusivity: The development is available first (or only) to a particular news organization (e.g., an exclusive interview with Mark Zuckerberg).
• Power elite: The development involves powerful individuals and organizations (e.g., the president of the United States).
• Magnitude: The development potentially impacts a large number of people, or impacts a few people significantly (e.g., a court ruling affecting thousands of immigrants' citizenship rights).
• Relevance: The development involves issues or groups that are perceived to be relevant to the organization’s audience (e.g., a major local employer relocating to another state).
• Surprise: The development deviates from the norm or shows stark contrasts (e.g., a man who bites dogs).
• Conflict: The development involves controversies, arguments, fights, or insurrections (e.g., a politician breaking away from their party).
• Drama: The development concerns an unfolding drama, such as battles or court cases (e.g., a major criminal trial).
• Bad news: The development has especially negative overtones, such as a death or tragedy (e.g., a plane crash).
• Good news: The development has especially positive overtones, including rescues or cures (e.g., development of a new vaccine).
• Entertainment: The development highlights human interest, unfolding drama, opportunities for humor (e.g., how to spend 36 hours in Bucharest).
• Celebrity: The development concerns people who are already famous (e.g., Ryan Gosling).
• Audio-visuals: The development has compelling photographs, video, audio, or can be illustrated with data visualizations (e.g., large protests).
• Shareability: The development is likely to generate sharing and comments on social media, e-mail, and messaging apps (e.g., content that is likely to 'go viral').
• Follow-up: The development advances a story already being covered by that journalistic outlet or other news organization (e.g., the result of a vote on legislation previously covered).
• Journalistic outlet’s agenda: The development fits the organization’s agenda and/or journalistic identity (e.g., it focuses on a particular issue, like foreign policy).
In addition to these values, timeliness is a crucial factor. After all, news is typically presumed to be new, and journalists are thus sensitive to how recent the information is. However, news may also be evergreen, or not connected to breaking developments but part of an ongoing issue or event. For example, a timely story about homelessness may be produced when the city council approves additional funding for homeless shelters. However, a general story about homelessness can also be evergreen because homelessness is a persistent issue in many places. In practice, evergreen stories are also useful because they provide content for slower news days.
The more news values a potential story contains, the more likely it is to be seen as newsworthy and therefore receive coverage. News can therefore be understood as a highly selective version of events (and, arguably, nonevents) that have been chosen and packaged to match a news organization’s objectives, its output requirements, and the information needs or entertainment wants that its target audiences are believed to have. This, in turn, highlights that the material attributes of a development or event — that is, what actually happened — only has some bearing on whether it is covered, how it gets covered, what information is emphasized, and who receives a voice in that coverage. For example, an online rant about immigrants may be seen as newsworthy solely because it was tweeted by a sitting U.S. president, and the coverage may focus on the controversy around that rant (rather than the substance of its claims) because opposing party leaders subsequently traded barbs over it.
These news values also help us to appreciate why certain developments do not receive coverage. For example, an evening TV news broadcast may decide not to cover an event simply because it is unlikely to produce good visuals (e.g., a corruption investigation) or if the organization does not have access to those visuals (e.g., a governmental detention camp in a remote area of a foreign country). Instead, it may allot the limited time in its broadcast to an arguably less-important event that can produce more visually captivating images (e.g., an accidental house fire).
News Values as Ideology
News values are a reflection of the dominant ideologies within a journalistic culture. However, they have also been critiqued as examples of journalistic media straying from their stated missions. For example, in their influential Propaganda Model of news media, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky argue that mainstream journalism tends to support the status quo in large part because, they argue, the selection of topics for news coverage ultimately privileges the perspectives of the most powerful while marginalizing the voices of less powerful sections of the population.
Crucially, Herman and Chomsky are not arguing that mainstream journalists do this intentionally or as part of a deliberate conspiracy to manipulate audiences. Instead, they argue that there are structural filters that impact what is selected as newsworthy, which in turn creates distortions that favor existing power brokers and marginalizes points of view regarded as being outside the mainstream. This is an example of critical theory, which seeks to interrogate power structures in media industries.
It is important to note that news values are relative. The aforementioned values identified by Harcup and O’Neill are most reflective of journalistic cultures in democratic Western societies in the Global North, since those are the cultures that scholars have most studied. News values in autocratic regimes are likely to be different, as there may be less emphasis on values like conflict or exclusivity. We still have much to learn about news values in other parts of the world.
Key Takeaways
• News values are the benchmarks of newsworthiness against which journalists measure potential stories.
• The more news values that a potential story is deemed to fulfill, the higher the likelihood that it will be seen as newsworthy and receive coverage by journalistic media. Conversely, stories are sometimes ignored precisely because they do not clearly adhere to these values.
• News values are, and serve as reflections of, ideologies within a journalistic culture.
• News values are relative. The values identified by Harcup and O’Neill are most representative of Western journalistic cultures in the Global North. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/03%3A_Influences_on_Journalistic_Media/3.03%3A_News_Values.txt |
Introduction
The concept of "truth" is central to journalism, and audiences expect journalists to provide truthful accounts and analyses of recent developments. And, yet, truth can be a very messy thing that is difficult to grasp.
According to the realism perspective, truth is a judgment that accurately describes, or corresponds with, the way the world actually is. That is, under this perspective, truth is a universal reality that is separate from subjective human perspectives. Most journalists in the United States subscribe to the realism perspective. They typically argue that "facts" exist, and that conveying these facts is an important aspect of doing journalism and of getting at the "truth."
However, "facts" can be tricky things themselves. For example, consider the unemployment rate in the United States right now. One might think that to be a pretty simple, measurable "fact." And, yet, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the primary body charged with measuring the unemployment rate in the United States, offers six different calculations of it. Its primary calculation refers to the percentage of the labor force that is without a job and has actively looked for work within the past four weeks. However, it also considers the percentage of the labor force that has been unemployed for 15 weeks or longer to be a valid measure, as well as a the percentage of the labor force that is unemployed and is not actively looking for work because of discouragement due to economic conditions.
In short, when audiences say they "just want the facts," the question becomes: Which facts?
Subscribing to this more critical view does not require a person to reject the idea of "facts," or to suggest that they are meaningless or entirely relative. But it does call attention to two things. First, there are often multiple ways to measure complex facts. (In contrast, it is typically easier to measure something simple like the number of students enrolled in a journalism course.) Second, journalists have to work within the confines of time and space — a story can only be so long — and this limitation naturally requires them to select some facts at the expense of others. Put another way, they rarely have the ability to list all the different permutations of the unemployment rate; they focus on the 'best' one.
Moreover, journalism involves more than just listing facts. It typically requires journalists to make sense of those facts, in order to help their audiences understand how certain information fits into a broader context and what the implications of those facts might be. Indeed, this is the very basis of framing theory and the sense-making function of journalism.
It is important to be cautious of arguments that "facts" do not exist, that "truth isn’t truth," or that we should embrace "alternative facts," though. While the critical view described above promotes inquisition, simplistic rejections of factual knowledge are often made in bad faith, in order to make competing measures of truth (or interpretations of it) seem equal when they are not actually equally supported by the evidence. This is especially true when people in positions of power (or grifters looking to develop a following) urge people to dismiss unfavorable or inconvenient information. Instead, it is important that audiences (and journalists) think critically about how "facts" were arrived at, and to avoid reflexively accepting or rejecting them.
Bias
Journalists' inherent need to be selective often leads to allegations of journalistic bias, especially when audiences perceive news products to deviate from their worldviews and preconceptions. For example, in the United States, there is a widely held belief in public circles that journalistic media have a liberal bias. (To be clear, non-partisan studies of media bias have historically found little evidence of this. While journalists in the U.S. generally hold more liberal values, the professional emphasis on neutrality, balance, and a systematic approach to newsgathering limits one-sided coverage.)
Journalistic bias can be defined as prejudice toward certain ideas, issues, perspectives, or groups or individuals in the production and distribution of journalistic content. Allegations of journalistic bias often fall into one or more of the following three categories. The first, issue bias, pertains to a proclivity toward certain kinds of issues, such as an overemphasis on crime or immigration. The second, framing bias, refers to the propensity to frame issues through particular prisms, such as the threat immigrants might pose (as opposed to the benefits they might offer), or to routinely use certain language, such as "illegal immigrants" instead of "undocumented immigrants." The third, source bias, refers to the differential treatment of a story depending on who the main actors are — as with offering more positive coverage to members of a certain political party. Source bias can also refer to a proclivity toward giving certain kinds of sources a larger (or any) voice within a news product, such as a journalist being more likely to quote government officials than activists or demonstrators.
Connecting all three of those categories is visibility bias, which involves the amount of attention or prominence given to certain kinds of issues, frames, or sources. For example, although a journalist may quote an equal number of sources from two opposing parties, they may routinely offer longer quotes in more prominent parts of a news story (e.g., near the top, which more people are likely to read) to one of the two parties. Similarly, visibility bias may become apparent when prime-time shows on cable news networks focus on stories about immigrant misdeeds, with more positive coverage of immigrants relegated to less-watched daytime shows.
Neutrality and Balance
In order to combat allegations of bias, journalists often claim to be neutral and to offer "a view from nowhere" — that is, to offer a perspective without a position or that takes no side. A common way to enact that claim is to try to occupy a middle ground by simply capturing and broadcasting opposing viewpoints, and trying to give equal weight to competing sides of an issue. Crucially, such attempts take care to not convey the journalist’s own opinion on a matter.
This proclivity toward neutrality and balance is, itself, a form of bias, and it is especially prevalent among journalists in places like the United States. This is not to say that such an approach to doing journalism is bad but rather that it represents a predisposition toward a particular way of presenting news.
There are downsides to that approach, though. In trying to be neutral and balanced, a journalist may promote false balance by assigning equal blame or acclaim when one side is more culpable or deserving of it. For example, by taking the position that "all politicians lie" or that "both sides share blame" in order to appear neutral, a journalist may obfuscate the fact that some politicians make more verifiably false claims than others, or that one side is more responsible for an outcome (e.g., by being less willing to negotiate a compromise). Put another way, journalists distort reality when promoting a false balance and they thus do a disservice to truth — and to news audiences.
Bad-faith institutional actors, including some political candidates and public officials, have taken advantage of this "view from nowhere" approach through concerted efforts to "work the refs," especially in recent decades. If journalists are seen to be arbiters of truth — much as referees are the arbiters of rules within a game — then subjects of news coverage (e.g., a politician) can allege news media to be biased against them in order to intimidate journalists from scrutinizing their claims. (After all, critical evaluations by journalists can be pointed to as 'further evidence' of the alleged bias.) This is important because false or inaccurate claims carried by trusted journalistic outlets are granted legitimacy — that is, they may be seen as true (or be evaluated less skeptically) by audiences who presume journalists to have filtered out untruthful information.
Accuracy and Truth-Seeking
One element found in most definitions of "truth" is accuracy, or a focus on precision and the avoidance of errors. Accuracy is indeed central to journalism, and many aspiring journalists have failed a college assignment because they submitted a news story with a factual error in it.
However, accuracy is not, on its own, enough for satisfying truth. For example, it may be accurate to report that one person said that 75% of peer-reviewed studies about climate change say it is not a real phenomenon. After all, they may have said such a thing. However, it is not true that such a proportion of peer-reviewed studies say that. Similarly, it may be accurate to point a camera at a small crowd of people and zoom in so as to have them fill the frame, or to zoom out so as to make it look sparse. After all, neither picture was doctored or manipulated after the fact in any way. However, the resulting image’s connotation that there was a large or small crowd may be an 'untrue' depiction of the event. Finally, it would be equally accurate to show a mug shot of a dejected person in a crime story or their happy, upstanding family photo. However, it can be difficult to ascertain which photo best represents the truth about what that individual is like.
In short, accuracy must be supplemented by commitment to truth. We can call that commitment "truth-seeking." This approach views truth as more of a process wherein the journalist aims to approximate truth as best as they can. Truth-seeking typically involves an objective approach to journalism, where journalists seek to systematically observe and record developments; interview sources with intimate knowledge about that development (like eye-witnesses); verify claims by seeking out generally accepted facts and official documents; and ultimately produce a story with the most truthful (plausible) representation of that development.
The process of truth-seeking recognizes that journalists are inherently biased. Put another way, it accepts the proposition that it is impossible for journalists to be unbiased because of their backgrounds and the structural constraints they work within. However, it recognizes that by systematically adopting what are regarded as best practices in journalism, journalists can mitigate some of those biases and not fall into traps like false balance, all the while striving toward the ambitious goal of reproducing truth.
It is important to note, however, that in some countries, journalistic outlets are openly biased and explicitly reject the values of neutrality and balance. For example, in countries like Pakistan and Indonesia, journalists typically believe that openly advocating for social change and staking clear positions regarding which side in a dispute has the superior argument — and sometimes substantiating those positions primarily through intuition or their agreement with ethical or religious principles — is a better way of serving truth. Put another way, different journalistic cultures approach truth-seeking in different ways.
Key Takeaways
• Facts are not 'natural' things that just 'exist.' Journalistic actors (and audiences) should therefore critically evaluate facts and approach them with a healthy dose of skepticism.
• There are multiple forms of journalistic bias, such as issue bias, framing bias, and source bias.
• In the United States, journalists typically strive to appear neutral and to offer balanced accounts. However, bad-faith actors have taken advantage of this approach in various ways. This has forced journalists to reconsider whether that approach still serves citizens well.
• Accuracy is, by itself, insufficient for getting at the truth. However, it is an essential component of truth.
• Journalists will typically strive for truth-seeking by systematically adopting best practices in journalism, such as interviewing multiple people, verifying their accounts, and offering the best approximation of truth. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/03%3A_Influences_on_Journalistic_Media/3.04%3A_Truth_Bias_and_Neutrality.txt |
Introduction
For much of journalism’s history in the U.S., women were seen largely as a market for news, rather than as a community that should be reflected in the news. Put another way, they were generally seen as consumers of news and not worthwhile subjects of it. Moreover, women’s pathways into journalism were generally limited, with journalism being a primarily male profession for much of its history in the U.S. (and much of the world).
One of the ways in which women gained greater entrance and influence in U.S. journalism was through cultural journalism (coverage of lifestyle topics such as food, art, style, music, and other forms of entertainment) in the second half of the 20th century. In fact, what we currently understand to be cultural journalism can be traced directly back to the so-called "women’s pages," which originally focused on the four Fs: family, fashion, food, and furnishings.
Those women’s pages covered women’s issues, which were seen as less important and were physically separated in publications from more 'serious' news topics. Moreover, the type of writing — which was less newsy and more personal — also distinguished such content from the 'serious' news. Consequently, the women’s pages largely featured coverage of trends (e.g., the latest fashion) and profiles of people (e.g., celebrities). Over time, though, the women’s pages influenced the creation of less gendered and more inclusive beats of coverage, such as The Washington Post's style section.
However, this gendered gap between news and culture still appears in American newsrooms today. In the U.S., women journalists remain more likely to write about health and lifestyle topics. In contrast, they are less likely to write about economics, politics, or sports. They are also less likely to write for the opinion section.
More broadly, women are still less likely than men to be either journalists or subjects of journalism. According to a 2019 report from the American Society of News Editors, women make up roughly 42 percent of newsroom employees in the U.S., despite making up more than half of the U.S. population. According to a 2019 report by the Women’s Media Center, women journalists also only produce 37 percent of news stories. It is only in categories like entertainment (49% women), lifestyle and leisure (52% women), and health (58% women) that women have an equal (or greater) number of bylines than men. Men also dramatically outnumber women in news coverage in both text and images. That same report by the Women’s Media Center found that 77% of people mentioned in articles, and 70% of faces pictured in news articles, were male. These discrepancies suggest that male perspectives continue to dominate American news coverage, with female voices being peripheral.
These findings are particularly problematic because women greatly outnumber men in journalism education programs. According to the Columbia Journalism Review, two-thirds of people who graduate with a degree in Journalism or Mass Communication in the United States are women. As such, there are a variety of systemic factors within journalism — from broader social expectations to professional cultural values — that make it harder for women to enter (and succeed in) the professional practice.
One example of this is that there are distinct gender-based gaps in pay and hierarchy in American journalism. (This is also true in many other professions.) Those gaps further intersect with other factors, such as race and ethnicity. For example, white male journalists at The Associated Press earn an average of \$15,000 more than Black female journalists. Similarly, female employees of The Washington Post earn 86 cents for every dollar white male employees earn. In light of the already relatively low average salary in U.S. journalism, these obstacles can make it impossible for many women to enter or remain in journalism — especially if they come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.
Race and Ethnicity in American Newsrooms
Racial and ethnic disparity remains the largest and slowest-changing gap in American journalism, with white journalists greatly outnumbering journalists of color. According to a 2019 survey by the American Society of News Editors (ASNE), people of color make up just 21% of newsroom employees in print journalistic outlets in the U.S. (This includes newspapers with an online presence, like The Boston Globe.) That number is only slightly improved when it comes to online-only outlets (e.g., Quartz or The Huffington Post), where journalists of color comprise almost 31% of employees. Furthermore, according to a 2020 survey by the Radio Television Digital News Association, about one-fourth of employees in local TV news are people of color, and just 15% of local radio journalism jobs in the U.S. are held by people of color. These gaps are particularly striking when you consider that 39% of the U.S. population is not white.
This is also true at major, national news outlets. For example, the ASNE survey found that the staffs of The Boston Globe (85% white), The Los Angeles Times (64% white), The Wall Street Journal (79% white), and The Washington Post (71% white) were largely white. These figures are particularly discouraging when you consider that the large coastal cities where U.S. journalistic outlets are disproportionately located (including the aforementioned outlets) tend to have more diverse racial and ethnic populations than the average American city.
Notably, journalists of color are also less likely to hold management positions in newsrooms, with the ASNE survey finding that roughly 19% of managers at print and online-only outlets were people of color. Unsurprisingly, even within racial and ethnic categories, men are more likely to be either an employee or a manager. (The lone exception to this was among Asians, where women were more likely to hold both of those positions.)
These gaps are further exacerbated by a number of norms inherent to American journalism, such as the tendency for early-career journalists to take unpaid internships and the use of closed networks in hiring practices. Put another way, industry norms stack the deck against journalists from less-affluent backgrounds and those who are not well-connected. Researchers have also found a lack of diversity to exist in the faculties of journalism programs in higher education.
This demographic discrepancy is not new, and it is also not secret. American journalism organizations have called for change for a number of years, and individual journalistic outlets have begun in recent years to take accounting of their own gaps in representation (both within their newsrooms and within their coverage). For example, several journalistic outlets, such as NPR, document both their employment and coverage of women and people of color. And, in recent years, problematic issues in representation at some news outlets have led to public changes of leadership and pledges to shift hiring and coverage practices. This has been driven in part by an emerging culture of peer critique under which journalistic outlets identify and critique cultural violations in each other’s coverage.
However, increased attention doesn’t guarantee increased representation. Indeed, it is unclear if the recent changes are emblematic of a moment in time or a sustained trend toward greater inclusivity within journalism. Additionally, although younger U.S. newsroom employees are equally likely to be male and female — and they’re less likely to be white than their older counterparts — they are still much more likely to identify as white than with a minority racial or ethnic group.
The American public also recognizes these issues. According to a 2020 Gallup study, more Americans say that news media are doing poorly in reflecting U.S. diversity than say they are doing well. Additionally, approximately 69% of Americans believe that reflecting this diversity is either a "critical" or "very important" role of the media. However, the respondents to that survey were far more divided when it came to identifying how journalistic outlets could better fulfill that role.
Impact of Gender and Racial Gaps
These demographic gaps limit the stories that are covered by American journalists by reducing the richness of the lived experiences found in the newsroom. As journalist Gabriel Arana wrote in a critique of journalism’s failure to look like the communities it covers: "Ultimately, the value of diversity to journalism is not about skin color, gender, sexual orientation, or social class. It’s about the stories people can tell." American journalism misses many important stories when it doesn’t represent the population it serves.
In addition to creating gaps in coverage, this lack of representation can also lead to flawed or biased reporting practices, such as coverage that stereotypes specific communities and groups. According to schema theory, people organize knowledge into categories, or schemas, in their minds. People then retrieve these schemas when they are confronted with media messages that depict these categories. These schemas can become entangled with loaded cultural meanings that lend themselves to stereotypes. By creating and disseminating content, journalistic outlets also rely on pre-existing schemas, or mental shortcuts, to help quickly call up information within the minds of their audiences and to help them synthesize new information. (This psychological framework is similar to that of priming theory and associative network models of human memory.)
For example, crime coverage that features racial stereotypes can connect those stereotypes to particular groups. When presented with a news story about crime that features an unknown perpetrator, people are likely to draw upon existing stereotypes and assume things about that unknown (e.g., that it was a Black male). Indeed, according to The Marshall Project, mainstream American journalists are less likely to cover Black victims of homicide, and when they do, that coverage results in less complex, less humane portrayals. That results in lower levels of empathy for Black victims (and Black people as a whole).
The same system of stereotype reinforcement comes into play with coverage of other groups and identities, too. One recurring paradox that persists in news coverage of gender is that of "double binds." Double binds over-simplify complex and dynamic people, organizations, or groups into a one-dimensional, either-or narrative. For example, one common double bind used to depict powerful women is that of femininity vs. competence — essentially, the idea that competent women can’t be feminine and feminine women can’t be competent. This also appears in American journalistic coverage of female political candidates, which often plays up stereotypically feminine attributes (e.g., motherhood and attractiveness) while de-emphasizing stereotypically masculine attributes (e.g., leadership).
Journalists generally don’t intend to stereotype populations, oversimplify their experiences, or miss out on highly relevant story angles. Instead, journalists (like the general population) are simply ignorant about important issues and ideas that are more salient to members of communities and groups outside their own. Thus, more representative newsrooms can be an asset precisely because they allow journalists to more readily and proactively identify and address problems with coverage — or the lack thereof. This can generate not only better journalism but also increase public trust in that journalism.
Key Takeaways
• Although women greatly outnumber men in American journalism higher education, men outnumber women in the profession itself. A variety of systemic factors within journalism — from broader social expectations to professional cultural values — make it harder for women to enter (and succeed in) the industry.
• The newsrooms at online-only journalistic outlets are more representative of the U.S. population than their traditional media counterparts when it comes to both gender and race, though such spaces are still far from being representative.
• Gaps in newsroom diversity are influenced by a variety of factors, including some American journalistic norms. These include the tendency for early-career journalists to take unpaid internships and the use of closed networks in hiring practices.
• American journalism misses many important stories when newsrooms don’t represent the communities they serve. In addition to creating gaps in coverage, this lack of representation can also lead to flawed or biased reporting practices, such as coverage that stereotypes specific communities and groups. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/03%3A_Influences_on_Journalistic_Media/3.05%3A_Gender_and_Racial_Gaps.txt |
Introduction
It is not uncommon to see politicians, public intellectuals, and regular citizens blame journalistic outlets for contributing to increasing political polarization and partisanship. Indeed, journalistic media are often accused of "twisting the facts" and "taking things out of context" to either fit a political agenda or to "get more clicks" for their stories.
In fact, a 2020 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 79% of Americans believed "news organizations" tend to favor one side when presenting the news on political and social issues. That belief was particularly salient among self-identified Republicans (91%), but it was also high among self-identified Democrats (69%). The 2020 survey data showed an increase in that perceived partisanship relative to Pew’s earlier surveys, suggesting that those concerns about journalistic media are only getting worse.
Moreover, increased concerns about people living in partisan media bubbles are being borne out, at least in part, according to recent research. A separate survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2020 found that the attitudes and news consumption habits of Democrats and Republicans varied significantly along political lines. Self-identified Republicans distrusted two-thirds of the 30 news sources Pew asked about. Of the 10 remaining news sources, Republicans were more trusting of outlets that media analysts find to be politically slanted to the right, such as Fox News and conservative talk radio programs. Democrats, on the other hand, trusted 22 of the 30 (and distrusted eight of them). Notably, the eight sources Democrats distrusted overlapped with the 10 sources Republicans trusted. This is part of a seemingly growing gap in the news media use habits.
That same Pew survey found that Republicans also consume political news from mainstream outlets less frequently than Democrats. Of the 30 outlets examined, Fox News was the only news source that at least one-third of Republicans had consumed political news from in the week preceding the study. In contrast, Democrats reported consuming political news from CNN, NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, and/or MSNBC in the same week. CNN was the most frequently consumed and most trusted source of political news for Democratic news consumers, while Fox News was the most trusted and most frequently consumed outlet for Republicans.
What is perhaps even more alarming is that none of the 30 sources Pew Research studied in early 2020 was trusted by more than half of Americans. Sadly, this partisan gap in media use and perception is unlikely to disappear anytime soon. In fact, the gap has only deepened between 2014 and 2020. Research from Pew conducted over that time suggests that Democrats' trust in established media outlets has stood firm while Republicans have become more distanced from — and distrusting of — those news outlets. For example, at least 15 of the news outlets Pew studied were trusted less by Republicans in 2020 than they were in 2014. And their distrust of The Washington Post, The New York Times, and CNN — outlets trusted by Democrats and generally well-regarded by media analysts — grew the most during that time.
Impact of Partisan Bias
These clear partisan divides in American news media consumption and trust are reflected — and influenced — by a variety of factors at national and local levels. It is important to note that politicians and powerful political actors have labeled U.S. journalists 'liberal elites' for decades, and talk radio has decried liberal bias in the 'mainstream media' since at least the 1980s. Put another way, the discrediting of journalistic actors as partisan agents is a phenomenon that goes back many years.
However, more recently, those attacks have become more common, targeted, and intense. Additionally, they have originated with actors at the highest levels of government. Most notable among these is former U.S. President Donald Trump, who frequently verbally attacked journalistic actors since he was elected. Three months after taking office, Trump called the news media "the enemy of the American People" and "fake news" in a tweet that derided the New York Times, NBC, ABC, CBS, and CNN by name. Throughout his time in the Oval Office, Trump and his administration also prevented some journalists who regularly covered the White House for many years from attending its press briefings, and instead granted press passes to self-described journalists working at highly partisan media who offered favorable coverage. Members of the Trump administration also called journalists "sick people" who didn’t like the United States and wanted "to take away our history and our heritage."
These partisan attacks on journalistic outlets encourage Americans to question, doubt, and in the most extreme cases, attack news and information that don’t align with a particular political viewpoint. When espoused by powerful political actors, these kinds of sentiments have proven to be contagious. Research shows that people who are exposed to allegations of "fake news" by elite actors (e.g., powerful politicians) both display less trust in journalistic media and are less likely to correctly identify what news is real.
Perceptions of political bias in journalism are also tied to perceptions of general bias. According to a 2018 Knight Foundation study, Americans consider 62% of news they consume on TV, in newspapers, and on the radio to be "biased," and 44% of it to be inaccurate. The same study revealed that Americans also do not distinguish between bias and inaccuracy, generally finding that the journalistic outlets they believe to be biased are also promulgators of inaccurate information, and vice versa. This lack of trust has negative implications for media literacy. For example, people with more trust in news media are more likely to be able to distinguish real news from opinion.
Over time, audiences have also become conditioned to seek out news from the outlets that align most with their own political views while avoiding those that challenge their beliefs. This behavior is called partisan selective exposure. It creates a pattern in which people consume media content that reinforces their opinions and choose to opt out of divergent perspectives (that could alter their political beliefs). Put another way, they increasingly seek out echo chambers. Additionally, technological actants increasingly make it easier for people to unintentionally find themselves in a filter bubble, with search and recommendation algorithms prodding them toward content that reinforces their existing beliefs. (Consider the YouTube algorithms that automatically queue up a 'suggested' video when you finish watching the one you initially searched for. Such recommendations are often toward like-minded content.)
Over time, the exposure to partisan news influences audiences' voting decisions and their political participation. For example, when audiences read only news that agrees with their political beliefs, they are more likely to simultaneously become radicalized and want to participate further in politics. This, in turn, can create problems for democratic decision-making as highly motivated individuals become convinced that they are right — based on information (i.e., an understanding of the reality) that diverges widely those who do not share their perspective. Such exposure also impacts support for particular policies. For example, a 2021 Pew Research Center study found that Republicans who selected only sources with right-leaning audiences (e.g., Fox News or talk radio) as their major sources of political news tended to be less open to international cooperation and had different foreign policy priorities than other Republicans. On the other hand, Democrats who selected only sources with left-leaning audiences (e.g., MSNBC or The Washington Post) tended to place a higher priority on multilateralism and addressing climate change, relative to other Democrats.
People who consume political news online or from non-mainstream sources are also more likely to believe that news information that reflects their own partisan beliefs is more credible than news that disagrees with their beliefs. Put another way, audiences who prefer online news media are particularly predisposed to seeking out news from confirmatory sources — that is, outlets that reinforce their worldviews. (This is not a function of technology but rather that online spaces offer easier access to a larger number of news sources, including highly partisan and pseudo-journalistic outlets.)
Moreover, through the psychological process of motivated reasoning, highly partisan news consumers are also likely to treat counter-factual information (e.g., news that goes against their preconceptions) as false information. After rejecting that news, those reasoning processes may actually result in the false information becoming more entrenched in their original preconceptions. This presents a significant challenge to correcting inaccurate information, not least by journalistic fact-checking outlets (e.g., Politifact) that have found themselves under increased attack in recent years.
Motivated reasoning has been used to help explain the rapid growth of increasingly partisan news outlets. For example, as people’s worldviews become more radicalized, motivated reasoning pushes them to move toward even more partisan outlets. Indeed, a 2021 Pew Research Center study found that although Fox News remained a primary news source for self-identified Republicans and Moderates, the more conservative Newsmax and One America News continued to grow — and were especially appealing to more conservative Republicans and older, White Americans. (Newsmax and One America News have generally been regarded by media scholars as poor sources of information.)
Coastal Influence
Of direct relevance to this public perception that U.S. journalistic outlets are politically biased is yet another demographic reality separating U.S. journalists from average Americans: those journalists' geographical tie to large cities the East and West coasts. According to a 2019 Pew Research Center study, approximately 22% of newsroom employees in the U.S. live in Los Angeles or New York City. New York City alone is home to 12% of all U.S. newsroom staffers. Additionally, scholars have pointed toward an increased focus on national politics among political journalism in recent years (which is emblematic of similar changes in journalism writ large), resulting in much of that journalism originating from Washington D.C.
This coastal concentration is even stronger among online outlets. Forty percent of U.S. journalists working for online-only outlets live in the Northeast. Unsurprisingly, many of the most popular or established digital news sites are headquartered in major cities in that region of the country, such as New York City.
American journalism’s strong ties to the coasts makes sense when you consider cluster theory, which points out the advantages industries gain and make use of when they establish themselves in specific regions. When businesses are clustered together in a specific geographic area, so are their actors, resources, and skills, which combined can promote innovation and give these clusters competitive advantages that make them more productive. However, such clustering also results in problems with representation. Indeed, the U.S. South is very much under-represented in terms of the number of journalists working there.
Coastal Impact
This tie to the coasts influences U.S. journalists and the work they publish. First, it undoubtedly contributes to the fact that journalists are indeed more politically liberal than the average American. While U.S. journalistic culture promotes the use of procedural tactics to mitigate the impact of that characteristic — such as by interviewing stakeholders on opposing sides and promoting balance — journalists themselves do tend to self-identify with traditionally liberal values.
Second, the realities of life in major cities and industrial hubs is undoubtedly different than the realities of life in smaller and more rural areas. Because of their concentration in the East and West Coasts of the country, journalists may be more likely to reflect a particular cultural experience. This can result in the stereotyping of those non-hub areas (and those within them) and the misrepresentation of their interests, attitudes, and beliefs.
Third, those areas are more expensive to live in than most of the country. Many would-be journalists thus cannot afford to live there — especially when they are starting off their careers and may be applying for unpaid internships. (They may also not want to live in such places.) This artificially limits the potential talent pool for journalists, and tends to systematically disadvantage journalists who do not come from wealthy and/or urban backgrounds.
Finally, this concentration of journalists and outlets on the edges of the country can be a disservice to local journalism. Not only can it result in important local and regional issues being under-covered (or poorly covered) but the perception that journalists in the United States do not reflect their communities can have downstream impacts on trust in local journalism, too, if it is attached to a generalized 'the media' umbrella (and it often is). This makes it harder yet for local outlets to attain resources and audiences in today’s media attention economy.
Key Takeaways
• Republicans are less likely to trust (and more likely to actively distrust) U.S. journalistic outlets. In contrast, Democrats are more likely to trust those outlets. This gap has deepened over the past decade.
• Partisan selective exposure creates a pattern in which people consume media content that reinforces their opinions and opt out of divergent perspectives. Today, Americans' news diets differ considerably and are often associated with their political alignment.
• U.S. journalistic actors are more likely to live on the East and West Coasts than the average American, and less likely to live in the South. This has raised concerns about the representativeness of U.S. journalism. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/03%3A_Influences_on_Journalistic_Media/3.06%3A_Partisan_and_Geographic_Biases.txt |
Introduction
The phrase "commodification of news" refers to the process through which news is translated into a commodity, or a good or service designed to earn its producer a profit when it is sold in a market.
News has been treated as a commodity in much of the world in recent decades. However, it is different from most other commodities. Since the invention of the telegraph, news has been a weightless product that can be transported over vast distances nearly instantaneously. It also has limited exclusivity and a short individual lifespan, as news quickly loses value as it ages and can be quickly repackaged by competitors. Additionally, one person’s consumption of news does not diminish its supply to the next person (unlike a pint of ice cream from Trader Joe’s). As such, the economics of news is unique in many ways, especially in a digital environment.
Commodities are responsible only to the marketplace. They are indifferent to the quality of democracy or the values of a society so long as buying, selling, and private profit-making are permitted. Put another way, the more news is treated as a market commodity, the less certain it is to supply the kind of information a democratic society requires.
Audiences and Advertising
Within the context of commodities, commercial journalistic organizations typically operate in a dual-product market. They produce and market one product (news) so they can produce another product (audience attention) that can then be sold to advertisers, who covet audiences for their products.
This relationship is particularly important because the majority of revenue for most commercial journalistic organizations today comes from advertising, and not directly from audiences via things like subscriptions. Indeed, since the invention of mass advertising, news has generally been subsidized (e.g., newspapers) or outright paid for (e.g., broadcast TV newscasts) by someone other than the audience. This has allowed news content to be more affordable for — and thus accessed by — mass audiences, who receive the content for far less than it costs to produce it.
This dual-product market is further characterized by mutual interdependence: Journalistic organizations need advertising revenue to subsidize their journalistic activities, but the amount of advertising revenue is often related to the amount of audience attention that the organization can deliver. Put another way, in order to increase the revenue necessary to produce quality journalism, journalistic outlets must deliver larger numbers of readers, viewers, or listeners — even as, one would hope, quality journalism is what helps to bring in larger audiences.
The Newsroom 'Wall'
To combat the potentially negative influences of this interdependence on journalists' ability to serve as truth-seekers, professional journalistic organizations tended to implement throughout the 20th and 21st century a metaphorical 'wall' separating the business side of the organization from its newsroom operations. On one side of the wall, journalists and editors developed content for citizens, with limited regard for the business implications of their reporting. On the other side, managers and sales staff worked with advertisers to sell the audience attention.
The purpose of the 'wall' was to grant journalists greater autonomy, or independence from business concerns, which would allow the organization to produce journalism. The 'wall' itself was often implemented through different social rules (and even physical obstacles) that reduced interactions between members of each side. This might include placing business personnel on one floor of a building and newsroom personnel on another, and having them report to different sets of supervisors. This was possible in large part because journalism was already a very profitable enterprise for much of the past century. (Although it may seem comical now, major newspapers were regarded as cash cows three decades ago.)
Such a separation was reasonably effective for much of the past century. However, it was not always impervious. For example, the news hole (the amount of space available for news in a product like a newspaper) was often dependent on the amount of advertisements that were sold for that edition. If there were more advertisements, there would be more newspaper pages, and thus more space for news content. Additionally, workers on the business side would sometimes pressure editors, with varying success, to push for content that was advertising-friendly. This did not necessarily mean producing stories that were favorable to specific advertisers, like a happy story about Trader Joe’s. Instead, it meant ensuring the news product had some happy stories in it. That’s because Trader Joe’s would be happier if its advertisement appeared next to a story that already left the audience member in a positive emotional state, which in turn would make them more likely to transfer that feeling of happiness to the product being sold by Trader Joe’s.
The industry’s economic challenges have resulted in that line becoming even more blurred in recent years, though. For example, one source of revenue newsrooms now tap into is called native advertising. This involves a newsroom having a team of 'content creators' (sometimes comprised of former journalists) who work directly with potential advertisers to create semi-advertisements that look and feel like a typical journalistic story. Such stories are often distinguished by being labeled as 'sponsored content' or with some other aesthetic signifier to show that they are not journalistic stories produced by the journalists at that organization. However, readers and viewers do not often make that distinction — indeed, the very appeal to advertisers is that those distinctions will not be made and that audiences will mistake native ads for editorial content. Although profitable, the downside to such efforts is that they may erode audiences' trust in a journalistic organization.
Market Failure
The tension between treating news as a market commodity and practicing journalism as a public service has been a central dilemma in journalism for over a century. Notably, advertising was first welcomed rather than criticized because it promised to end, or at least ease, the dependency of journalism on the political parties that used to finance newspapers. In the Utopian vision of ad-supported journalism, advertising would enable market forces to empower audiences, resulting in the production of news information that was even more useful to them. Conversely, others worried that market sensitivities would seed market-driven journalism characterized not by "all the news that’s fit to print" but rather "all the news that’s fit to sell."
Scholars have argued that quality journalism provides multiple fundamental benefits to a democratic society that the market fails to adequately compensate. For example, all members of a society benefit when voters are well-informed and thus able to choose wise leaders and reward good governance. Similarly, all members of a society benefit from the deterrence of corruption and abuse that results from an actively monitorial journalistic environment, as bad-faith actors weigh the costs of getting caught against the benefit of doing a bad thing. Yet, in a market-oriented system, not everyone pays for news. In fact, only a very small proportion of people do. This creates a free rider problem, where people can experience many of the benefits of a product without having to pay for it. Consequently, what is civically valuable but goes unrewarded in the marketplace — such as expensive public-service journalistic investigations — ends up being under-produced, since there’s no economic incentive for it.
Scholars have also found that the more responsive a newsroom is to market forces, the less it tends to serve the public interest through civic-minded efforts like 'watchdog' journalism. Again, this makes sense on multiple levels under rational-choice theories of economics. Rational managers and owners who seek to maximize their (or their investors') economic return should produce the least expensive content that can generate the largest audience of subscribers and/or consumers that are attractive to advertisers. Rational advertisers should seek the largest audience of potential customers at the lowest cost while favoring outlets that produce softer, simpler stories that leave potential consumers in a positive emotional state. And, audiences are not themselves paragons of rational self-interest. They do not always financially reward the content that benefits them the most in the long run.
The confluence of these factors results in what economists call market failure, where there is inefficient production and distribution of goods and services within a free market resulting from the fact that the individual incentives for rational behavior do not lead to the best outcomes for a group (or society). This has become especially apparent as the economic underpinnings for commercial journalism in many parts of the world, including the United States, have been significantly challenged by sociotechnical disruptions.
For example, the newspaper advertising market enjoyed robust growth from 1950 to 2000, and then declined to the 1950 levels in the next 12 years alone. Consequently, newsroom employment in the United States declined by 51% between 2008 and 2019. Additionally, hundreds of small community newspapers in the United States have been forced to close, creating a situation where in 2019, almost half of U.S. counties had a single local newspaper (that was often only published weekly). The coronavirus pandemic of 2020 only increased those economic pressures: A third of U.S. newspapers experienced layoffs that year, with large-circulation newspapers being most affected.
This has required commercial newsrooms to significantly rethink how to serve their civic objectives while remaining economically viable — efforts that have, at least recently, guided them toward further diversifying their revenue models in order to make up for drastic losses in advertising. Even among local and national television journalism outlets, which have been less affected by those trends, there are more intense economic (and political) pressures to move away from expensive public-service journalism. There have been many calls to address the market failures within journalism, but the challenge has persisted.
Key Takeaways
• News is a unique commodity in that it often has a short lifespan, it is easily copied, and its supply does not diminish as it is consumed.
• Commercial journalistic organizations often serve two markets at the same time: audiences and advertisers. Advertisers subsidize the content that audiences need and audiences give advertisers the attention they seek.
• Historically, professional, commercial journalistic organizations separated journalists from business-people by creating a metaphorical 'wall' in the newsroom that promoted newsroom independence and autonomy.
• In many countries, including the United States, commercial journalism operates within a context of market failure in terms of serving of the public good. A number of happy coincidences allowed that system to work reasonably well for many decades. However, those coincidences no longer hold true. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/04%3A_Journalism_Economics/4.01%3A_Commodification_of_News.txt |
Introduction
The term "audience measurement" refers to the goal-oriented process of collecting, analyzing, reporting, and interpreting data about the size, composition, behavior, characteristics, and preferences of individuals interacting with particular media brands or products.
Historically, journalists and journalistic organizations had only very crude measures of what news audiences were interested in — and how (and to what extent) they were engaging with that content. For example, journalists would often turn to their friends and family, or perhaps to letters to the editor, for cues about what people were interested in and how their work was resonating with audiences. Journalistic organizations, in turn, would hire consultants to conduct focus groups, survey their readers, or ask broadcast audiences to keep a diary of the programs they watched.
Those methods came with significant limitations. First, they only provided partial data because they drew on small samples of people, who were often sampled in ways that made it hard to generalize findings to an entire audience. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the information was self-reported. This meant that people might say they wanted more information about international affairs because they thought that’s what they should say — after all, most of us want to seem cultured, even to strangers — when in fact the news they craved was information about Ryan Gosling’s latest film.
Audience Analytics and Metrics
The digitization of news has significantly changed how audience interests and consumption are measured. Specifically, digital systems enable passive, mass tracking. This means that when a person accesses a story, the infrastructure helping to serve that content — that is, the computer systems belonging to the journalistic organization and, often, other companies as well — will automatically record the fact that the content was accessed. These systems also often record additional information, including when that person accessed the content, where (roughly) they accessed it from, on what device, and how much time they spent with that content.
Those systems and information aggregation efforts are often called audience analytics, which is effectively a form of audience measurement that was not possible before the internet age. While it comes with its own limitations — for example, this system alone cannot give journalists a clear picture of how people feel about the content they access — it differs from past approaches in that it can gather information about all members of the audience, and that information is not limited to what audiences want to report. It is a more complete record, quantitatively speaking.
These systems can be used to automatically personalize content by linking it to past records of a news consumer’s behavior. For example, if the journalistic organization’s tracking systems know a specific audience member frequently accesses content about Ryan Gosling, it may choose to put that content in more prominent positions on its website (or suggest it as the next article for this user to read) because the system infers from past data that this individual wants to stay on top of news about Ryan Gosling.
Additionally, those systems produce what are often called audience metrics, or aggregate measures about the audience. These include the number of unique people who were exposed to a particular piece of content, where those individuals came from (not just geographically but also the website or platform that led them to that content), and how much time the average person spent with that content, or perhaps even how far the average person scrolled down the page. Thus, a journalist or journalistic organization can have a more quantified sense of how many people read their story and how they interacted with it, instead of just assuming a lot of people did because their group of friends, who likely share the same interests, found it interesting.
Journalists and newsrooms historically marginalized audience measurement data because they often viewed it as an intrusion on their journalistic autonomy and independence. Put another way, drawing on their role orientations and occupational ideology, they would often believe they had to give audiences certain kinds of news — regardless of how popular it might turn out to be — because it was a civic necessity to do so.
While there was always some tension over this, the high profitability of journalism made it easier for journalists to resist perceived intrusions in the past. The combination of these new technologies and the economic challenges faced by commercial media in recent years have resulted in even greater pressure to use audience analytics and metrics to more efficiently cater to audience desires — and made it riskier for journalists to resist such pressures.
Such systems and information do not exist to solely further economic objectives, though. Audience analytics and metrics can and arguably should be used to find ways to better understand what audiences want in order to make civically important content more appealing to them — whether in terms of its substance or simply how and where it is presented, as well as to encourage greater audience engagement and loyalty. Additionally, researchers have found little evidence that highly professionalized newsrooms like The New York Times and The Guardian are blindly making news decisions based on audience metrics alone. Nevertheless, it has become apparent that these technologies and cultural artifacts have changed how journalists think about their work and the ways in which they perform it.
Bundling and Journalism
For much of its history, commercial news media has been a bundled product. What this means is that a person rarely bought a single piece of news, or even just news. Instead, they bought a single product that included local news, national news, sports news, and arts news — as well as comics, classifieds, and advertisements. This allowed journalism to be produced in an efficient way insofar as it allowed journalistic outlets to make money from two mutually dependent sources — audiences and advertisers — with a single media vehicle (e.g., a newspaper). Classifieds are emblematic of this: A local business would pay the journalistic outlet a fee to list a job opening in the newspaper while local citizens would pay the outlet for the cost of the newspaper to find a new job openings. A similar arrangement existed for engagement announcements and obituaries, which were also bundled in.
Content that was cheaper to produce (e.g., post-game reports from local high school football games) also helped subsidize more expensive content (e.g., an investigative series on local corruption). Put another way, citizens often bought the newspaper because they cared about their local sports teams and would perhaps stick around for, and benefit from, the investigative series. The journalistic organization, for its part, tended to see the investigative series as more central to its mission and as a potential status marker — such stories are usually the ones that receive major journalism awards — and viewed its cheaper and more popular content as a way to pay for it.
This dynamic has changed considerably in recent years. Audiences are now less likely to go directly to a journalistic outlet’s homepage or app, and they are far less likely to seek out a single source to satisfy all of their information needs. Put differently, an individual may go to The Boston Globe for coverage of regional politics and policy, to BuzzFeed for entertainment news, to a local sports enthusiast’s blog for analysis of high school football, and to the British Broadcasting Corporation, or BBC, for coverage of international affairs. As such, news has become unbundled in many ways as journalistic outlets place all of their news online for free or under a 'soft' paywall knowing that individuals will only access some of the content. That, in turn, results in advertising revenue only being generated for those things that are accessed, putting pressure on commercial outlets to focus on narrower sets of content that can pay for itself.
Moreover, journalistic outlets have lost their monopolies on some of those key dual-channel revenue sources. For example, people now go to websites like Craigslist and Indeed for classifieds, and to Facebook to discover who is getting engaged (and perhaps who has died). There is also a plethora of free and paid entertainment alternatives that far exceed what journalistic outlets have ever been able to offer.
Because of this evolution in the news industry, the structural advantages and subsidies that enabled commercial journalism to operate as it did in the past no longer exist in such advantageous ways.
Key Takeaways
• Journalistic outlets have always tried to measure different aspects of their audiences and their audiences' wants, but audience analytics and metrics have enabled more quantifiable measurements of individual audience members and of audiences as a whole.
• There is now great economic pressure on journalistic outlets to make use of audience metrics in guiding editorial decisions. However, professionalized newsrooms still draw heavily upon their conceptions of newsworthiness when making those decisions.
• Journalistic products are no longer bundled in the ways they were before. This has both reduced their ability to subsidize expensive, civic-minded news through cheaper, more popular content and reduced the opportunities to generate revenue from non-news content. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/04%3A_Journalism_Economics/4.02%3A_Audience_Measurement_and_Bundling.txt |
Introduction
Today’s journalism environment is deeply influenced by third-party platforms, or technical systems that mediate exchanges between content producers and consumers. Those platforms have significantly altered how news is monetized, distributed, and engaged with, and have consequently disrupted key financial support mechanisms for journalism in market-oriented media systems around the world.
Many journalistic organizations have experienced what may appear to be a paradox at first sight: They now have access to a far larger potential audience than ever before through their digital distribution channels — and, in fact, often have more readers, viewers, and listeners than ever before — yet they have seen a drastic reduction in advertising revenue.
The reason for this is two-fold. The first reason is that the cost for placing an advertisement on an organization’s digital offerings is exponentially lower than the cost for placing an advertisement on that same organization’s analogue offerings. Put another way, it is a lot cheaper to place an ad on the Daily Hampshire Gazette's website than it is to place that same ad on its newspaper. This is due in part to the fact that online audiences have historically been seen as less valuable by producers and advertisers alike. However, it is also due to the increased supply of content online. If an advertiser wants to reach a particular kind of audience offline, they have a far more limited set of media vehicles — such as the lone newspaper for an entire county and the few broadcast channels that cover that area. Conversely, there is a seemingly limitless supply of media vehicles online, such as the billions of websites that exist.
The second reason is that much of today’s advertising is managed through third-party platforms that not only govern pricing but also take a hefty cut. For example, if UMass wanted to promote its excellent Journalism Department to an international audience, it might work directly with The Japan Times to publish an advertisement in its newspaper. However, if UMass wanted to advertise on The Japan Times' website, it may need to work with an intermediary like Google’s AdSense, which might handle all of the online advertising for The Japan Times (as well as for millions of other websites).
This is the case for many journalistic organizations today, and it comes with many implications. The most important of these is that there is downward pressure to keep ad rates low online. Specifically, UMass may reason that its goal is to reach people outside the U.S. who are interested in journalism — and it may not care if those people are found on The Japan Times's website or elsewhere on the web. Thus, they will use an ad-tech intermediary (like Google’s AdSense) to target their ad to a certain demographic and set a maximum price. Google’s AdSense may then allow any website visited by any user matching that demographic — based on a profile that the ad-tech company has created from different data points — to show UMass' ad so long as a website accepts UMass' pricing limits. (Ad-tech systems do allow for black-listing, too. This means that some websites are not eligible to show an ad if they contain certain keywords. While this is usually restricted to offensive language, it can be extended to sensitive topics, like human rights abuses. That, in turn, may discourage the production of news stories about those topics.)
All of those decisions are made by automated systems in microseconds through what is called programmatic advertising, and it often results in lower ad prices because a rational advertiser will seek to advertise on the websites that require the least amount of money while delivering the desired audience. This pushes websites to accept lower rates in order to ensure they have advertisements to serve. On top of this, those intermediaries charge the websites a service fee for each ad shown. Thus, not only are journalistic outlets receiving less money for each ad but they also receive just a portion of that amount.
It is therefore unsurprising that while digital ad spending has grown immensely, much of those gains have been highly concentrated among a few companies. Specifically, Google and Facebook alone are estimated to receive more than half of global digital ad spending, with China-based Alibaba coming in a distant third.
In short, many of the gains in digital advertising are not being realized by journalistic outlets; the uptick in online ad revenue has not come close to replacing the losses in offline ad revenue for many journalistic outlets; and many journalistic outlets still rely on their offline products for the majority of their advertising revenue, even as they have much larger audiences online. This helps us understand why some traditional media companies still orient themselves, at least in part, around media vehicles that are widely seen as being phased out along generational lines (e.g., a newspaper): Such outlets generally have more control over, and can extract more value from, their legacy products.
Distributional Intermediaries
Third-party platforms are not limited to advertising, though. In the United States, much of Europe, and elsewhere in the world, a small group of Silicon Valley-based companies — namely Google, Facebook, Apple, and Twitter — largely control the social media, web search, and mobile application platforms that audiences use to find and access news.
Because of their positions as intermediaries, those companies generally realize many of the economic benefits from news production while not suffering its costs. For example, a platform like Facebook benefits from user-generated content like its users' posts (including any news they may break); from the fact that many people rely on Facebook to be their primary news source, via the links that are shared by their friends; and from the many journalistic outlets that use Facebook themselves in order to promote their content (often by offering portions of it for free on the platform). All of this participation comes at relatively negligible cost to Facebook, because it does not pay any of these people for the very content that makes its platform worthwhile.
At the same time, platform owners seek to avoid expensive legal and gatekeeping responsibilities by claiming to be distinct from media organizations. Put another way, they often claim to only offer neutral, technical infrastructures in order to avoid the public interest obligations that governments have historically placed on broadcasters and that society expects from traditional journalistic outlets. After all, such platforms tend to claim, they do not produce journalistic content of their own, and their platforms are governed by supposedly impartial algorithms, rather than humans, to determine what to show audiences and how to show it. Therefore, the argument is that such neutrality should shield platforms from journalistic responsibilities, or from legal risks like accusations of libel. (This is, of course, a weak argument. Their algorithms reflect the values and/or economic interests of platform owners, and the algorithms exercise a form of judgment when they promote content that is expected to elicit further engagement on the platform.)
Third-party platforms also create loyalty challenges for journalistic outlets. In the past, audiences tended to go directly to trusted outlets to find information. Put another way, they actively sought it out. Today, audiences increasingly go to news aggregators like Apple News, or they wait for news to find them on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. As users are shown an array of news from a lot of different news brands, they begin to disassociate the content from the brand itself. Put differently, researchers have found that, after reading a news story, less than half of people would remember the journalistic organization that published the story if the individual found the story on social media. (However, most people could remember which social media platform they used to find it.) In contrast, 80% of people who found that same story on a journalistic organization’s website were able to remember who published it. In short, social media platforms end up receiving more of the credit for the content published by journalistic outlets than the journalistic outlets themselves. That, in turn, reduces the worth of the organization’s brand and the incentive to produce high-quality content in order to help the brand stand out in a crowded marketplace.
The massive size of these third-party platforms — Facebook alone counts billions of users worldwide — and their structural positions as intermediaries make it difficult for journalistic outlets to ignore them. Moreover, they are difficult to displace. Such platforms are subject to network effects in which a product or service becomes more useful as more people use it, creating conditions for monopolies or outsize power. Consequently, many journalistic outlets believe they must not only have a presence on those platforms but that they must engage with audiences there, too, even as such participation further tethers them to these platforms. Put another way, journalistic outlets are forced to weigh the short-term benefits of tapping into new audiences and remaining relevant on popular platforms against long-term concerns about ceding further control over their content and processes. While more journalistic outlets have begun to distance themselves from some third-party platforms in recent years, such efforts often come at great risk.
Key Takeaways
• Third-party platforms refer to technical systems that mediate exchanges between content producers and consumers. This includes social media platforms like Facebook, search platforms like Google search, and ad-tech platforms like Google AdSense.
• Although digital advertising has grown immensely over the past decade, it has not come close to replacing the revenue lost from non-digital advertising for most journalistic outlets. This is due in part to different pricing regimes and the ad-tech intermediary platforms that pervade online spaces.
• Distributional intermediaries like Facebook and Apple News have benefited greatly from the economic benefits of news production yet bear little of its costs. They have also sought to reduce their media-related responsibilities by claiming to be neutral platforms rather than media companies.
• Although these platforms have introduced many challenges to a range of journalistic outlets — especially traditional organizations — those outlets have often found the cost of non-participation on platforms to exceed those of participation. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/04%3A_Journalism_Economics/4.03%3A_Third-Party_Platforms.txt |
Introduction
Non-profit journalistic outlets are not driven by commercial concerns but are instead dedicated to furthering a public-service mission, filling gaps resulting from market failures, or advancing a particular social cause.
Non-profit outlets have long been a part of many media systems. For example, in the U.S., The Associated Press was founded as a non-profit cooperative in 1846 in order to lower newsgathering costs among its commercial and non-commercial members. Over time, it has helped ensure that audiences in different parts of the country have access to high-quality information from around the U.S. and abroad. Globally, journalism outlets like The Guardian in the United Kingdom and Malaysiakini in Malaysia operate in the spirit of promoting high-quality journalism and providing alternative voices, especially in tightly controlled media environments where commercial and state-sponsored media are afraid of challenging those in power.
Non-profit media have seen considerable growth over the past two decades as the economics of commercial journalism have been disrupted. Put another way, for much of the 20th and 21st centuries, a happy coincidence enabled the market, via advertising and subscription revenue, to support the existence of a robust, ad-supported journalistic sector. There is, however, no reason why that model has to work to adequately support journalism’s public-service responsibilities. Indeed, the drastic drop of advertising revenues and the reluctance audiences have shown for paying for online content in high-choice environments has illustrated how vulnerable that model is.
Objectives, Norms, and Funding
Many of the non-profits established over the past two decades have been founded by journalists who used to work for commercial outlets and became concerned about the ability of commercial media to provide public-service journalism. This is especially the case in democratic societies that lack a strong, state-supported, public-service broadcasting system. Non-profit journalistic outlets often seek to produce the types of content that their founders are concerned is in short supply elsewhere — often because such content is perceived to go unrewarded by market forces. This includes expensive genres like investigative journalism and international journalism, as well as topics that are deemed to be intractable or less-captivating to mass audiences, such as homelessness and mass incarceration.
Many non-profit journalistic outlets share some of the dominant role orientations, norms, and news values associated with journalism in a particular context. For example, conceptions of newsworthiness at non-profits are not wholly different from those at their commercial counterparts. Instead, they are tweaked and, most importantly, less encumbered by economic concerns. Moreover, for these outlets' content to be considered journalism by audiences, it must still resemble to some extent the forms and formats recognized as journalism within that context — which the dominant, typically commercial or state-supported, outlets play a large role in shaping.
Non-profit outlets often raise funds from an array of sources. The two primary sources tend to be audience-derived contributions and philanthropic grants. Audience-derived contributions may include the subscription fees often found in commercial media, but it typically also includes voluntary donations and crowdfunding campaigns. Philanthropic grants often come from other non-profit organizations and foundations that are devoted to promoting the civic good. For example, the Knight Foundation is a major philanthropic organization in the United States, and it will sometimes provide upwards of \$100 million in grants each year to help advance journalism in the U.S. For most other foundations, journalism constitutes a portion of their giving, which is often related to a focus on democracy, community, or education. Researchers have estimated that between 2009 and 2017, foundations provided more than \$9 billion worldwide in order to advance journalism — though a significant portion of that was in the United States.
However, those two sources alone are rarely sufficient for non-profit journalistic organizations. Many also draw upon advertising and sponsorships as supplemental revenue sources, though their dependence on advertising is generally lower than that of their commercial counterparts. They also engage in a range of additional revenue-generating activities, like hosting conferences, social events, workshops, and webinars — though these activities usually only account for a small proportion of overall revenue. Additionally, non-profit journalistic outlets benefit from favorable tax status in some countries (including the United States), meaning that contributions to them are tax-deductible and they themselves have to pay fewer taxes.
Impact and Sustainability
The dependence on philanthropic funding does not come without entanglements. Such funders typically receive more requests for funding than they can fund, and they thus tend to require organizations to justify the merit of their requests by demonstrating their impact and sustainability.
Impact is immensely difficult to measure and demonstrate. Funders will often develop different ways of understanding impact, which may include measures of the reach of a project (i.e., how many readers, viewers, or listeners it attracted), the impact(s) it had on policy and governance (e.g., if it resulted in the passing of new legislation or ousting of a corrupt figure), and the coverage it helped generate from other news organizations (e.g., local investigations resulting from a national dataset compiled by the non-profit). However, such developments can be difficult to track and to tie directly to the non-profit’s work, and they may not become apparent for a long time. Moreover, the measures of impact imposed by a funder can significantly shape the journalism produced by a non-profit journalistic outlet — in both positive and negative ways.
Many (though not all) funders also ask non-profit organizations to demonstrate a path toward self-sustainability. A substantial amount of the funding comes as so-called 'seed grants' that are intended to help an organization get off the ground, with the expectation that the organization will find sufficient revenue sources over time to no longer require assistance from that particular funder. Indeed, many non-profit journalistic outlets tend to face an inflection point around their fourth or fifth year of operation, and many that fail to establish themselves financially by then are forced to close. Philanthropic funding can thus be an unstable and temporary source of revenue.
Impact and sustainability often become linked in practice within the context of non-profit journalism. One way to demonstrate impact is to point to a growing, loyal audience, which can then be monetized through donations and subscriptions. Additionally, in order to reach a larger audience and increase the impact of a story, non-profit journalistic organizations will often partner with larger, commercial journalistic outlets to distribute the work. For example, the non-profit ProPublica launched its first investigation in 2008 in partnership with the popular CBS television program 60 Minutes, and it has since worked with The New York Times, BuzzFeed, and NPR to increase its reach. In some instances, the works are collaborations — both the non-profit outlet and the commercial outlet devote some resources to producing a story — but oftentimes, the non-profit provides the content for free simply to reach more people. This is because some non-profits tend to publish infrequently, and their own websites and distribution channels tend to have smaller audiences. Thus, even when funders are directly supporting a non-profit like ProPublica, they are also offering indirect subsidies to the commercial organizations that use the non-profit’s work.
Finally, it should be noted that although we have focused on funding for organizations, there is also a robust sector of philanthropic funding for freelance journalists (journalists who work independently and are not attached to any one organization). Such journalists may then work with an established journalistic outlet, such as PBS, or even a non-traditional partner (e.g., Netflix) to ensure wider distribution of their work.
Key Takeaways
• Non-profit journalistic outlets are not driven by commercial concerns but are instead dedicated to furthering a public-service mission, filling gaps resulting from market failures, or advancing a particular social cause.
• Non-profit journalistic outlets typically get the majority of their funding from subscribers or donors and from philanthropic foundations that support issues and perspectives they believe are not adequately covered by other media.
• Non-profit journalistic outlets must often demonstrate their impact and pathway to sustainability in order to receive financial support from philanthropic foundations. They will also sometimes work in partnership with commercial outlets to increase their reach. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/04%3A_Journalism_Economics/4.04%3A_Non-Profit_Journalism.txt |
Introduction
State-supported journalism refers to journalism that is directly supported by state governments. This includes both public funding for independent, self-governed journalistic outlets and ventures as well as direct management of state-owned and state-supervised media apparatuses.
State-supported journalism is often promoted by governments that feel responsible for safeguarding and fostering sustainable, critical, and high-quality journalism options that serve the public instead of commercial media owners, shareholders, and advertisers. In these cases, state-supported journalism is argued to be a necessary response to the market failure paradigm wherein self-regulated markets prove to be inefficient or incapable of producing news that serves the public interest. Therefore, state support is needed as a correction, in order to support journalism that can monitor and hold accountable the institutions of government, commerce, and civic life.
However, state-supported journalism can also encompass what are commonly called state-controlled media, wherein the government funds media organizations to more efficiently reach large audiences with the government’s messaging. Under that information regime, the media organization often works to advance the political interests of the state by serving as the state’s mouthpiece. Those interests may be advanced both domestically and internationally.
Independent State-Supported Journalism
Many countries around the world, from Argentina to Afghanistan to Albania to Australia, have some kind of state-supported journalistic outlet. These outlets are typically rooted in radio and television broadcasting, though there are some instances of state-supported print media and digitally native media. This is due in large part to the natural scarcity of broadcasting frequencies: There are only so many airwaves that broadcasting devices can use, and those frequencies have historically been treated as public goods.
However, any form of government support for journalistic media raises questions about the independence of the media producers. Put another way, how can a government foot the bill for journalists without unduly influencing (if not outright intervening in) the editorial process?
One way to do this is to establish an independent governance model, as is the norm in many European countries. For example, the British Broadcasting Corporation, or the BBC, operates as a public service broadcaster that is funded directly by citizens through an annual license fee that is set and collected by the government. Those funds are then transferred to an independent company with a board of directors that oversees the general direction of the BBC and an executive committee charged with overseeing its day-to-day operations. By creating a managerial structure that is largely separate from the British government, the BBC is generally able to remain independent from it. Additionally, it operates under a royal charter that charges it to produce public-interest journalism that advances the interests of the citizens of the entirety of the United Kingdom. While it is not free from criticism (especially from public officials who feel scorned), its journalistic arm (BBC News) is not only well regarded internationally but is the largest broadcast newsgathering operation in the world.
Europe has been particularly successful in developing a public policy framework that grants state subsidies to journalists and journalistic outlets that serve the public interest, advance accountability and transparency, and contribute to critical thinking and well-informed debate among citizens. Such efforts may include direct cash payments to selected projects or general incentives (e.g., reduced rates for mailing news media) that play a vital role in creating favorable economic conditions for a public-interest culture in journalism.
Moreover, those frameworks often help support public-service broadcasters — organizations like the BBC in the United Kingdom, France24 in France, and NRK in Norway — that are designed to produce public-service journalism and are often among the biggest news producers in their countries. Researchers have found that countries with well-regarded public-service broadcasters tend to have better-informed citizens.
While the United States does offer some level of government support for journalism, its efforts pale in comparison to its European counterparts. For example, less than 1% of National Public Radio’s (NPR) funding comes from the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) or from federal agencies and departments. Most of NPR’s funding comes from corporate sponsorships and dues paid by member stations across the country. Those member stations, in turn, receive just 12% of their funding from the CPB and other federal, state, and local government sources. In short, public media in the U.S. receives a relatively small amount of state support. Instead, most public and non-profit journalistic outlets in the U.S. rely on charitable contributions from individuals, corporations, and foundations (e.g., crowdfunded journalism and philanthropic funding).
State-Controlled Media
In the absence of structures to protect the independence of journalists, state-supported media can become state-controlled media. Under this environment, organizations will seek to appear journalistic but functionally serve as propagandist organs of a government. This does not need to involve fabrication on the part of the organization, or the production of disinformation. Instead, it may simply involve the systematic exclusion of stories and perspectives that are critical of the state, and the systematic over-inclusion of stories and perspectives that are favorable to the state. (However, such outlets may, and some often do, produce false information that reflects positively on the government.)
For example, the Xinhua News Agency serves as the official state-run press agency of the People’s Republic of China. It is by far the biggest and most influential media organization in China, and it is arguably the world’s largest news organization in terms of personnel. In addition to operating within China, it also has more than 170 news bureaus — or satellite offices — worldwide, making it one of the most international news organizations in the world.
Xinhua has been routinely criticized for its deep connection to the Communist Party of China, and its governance structure places it under the direct supervision of party officials. As such, Reporters Without Borders has called it "the world’s biggest propaganda machine." Nevertheless, it has served as a crucial instrument for communicating its citizens' needs to party officials, and for (favorably) conveying the party’s policies and initiatives to citizens.
Xinhua has also served as an instrument for increasing China’s foreign influence. It delivers its content through multiple mediums, including print, broadcast, and online, and in multiple languages, including Arabic, Chinese, French, English, Japanese, Portuguese, and Russian. In recent years, Xinhua has acquired commercial real estate in New York’s Times Square, bolstered its English-language reporting staff, and started an English-language satellite news network. Such efforts are capable of producing strong journalism — especially about matters only loosely related to China — but they are generally driven by a desire to spread perspectives that are aligned with those of the Chinese state.
State-controlled journalism is not limited to China. It is present under many authoritarian regimes, including Eritrea, North Korea, and Turkmenistan. Additionally, even in semi-democratic societies, state-controlled media may exist and reflect the political positions of ruling parties. In some cases, the dominant perspectives conveyed by such outlets change drastically as political power transitions between parties, making state-controlled media a bellwether of power.
Key Takeaways
• State-supported journalism refers to journalism that is directly supported by state governments.
• Strong, independent public-service journalistic outlets can emerge in media systems that receive substantial state support. Many European countries have well-regarded public-service broadcasters that promote a well-informed citizenry.
• State subsidies can also support state-controlled media outlets that are designed to promote the viewpoints of ruling parties and serve as instruments for advancing foreign influence. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/04%3A_Journalism_Economics/4.05%3A_State-Supported_Journalism.txt |
Introduction
The term audience fragmentation describes a process whereby a mass audience (or few audiences) is broken up into many small audiences by virtue of divergent media consumption habits. With the proliferation of online journalism and digital devices, audiences have become empowered to access more content from more publishers and on the audiences' terms. Consequently, individual news consumers have developed more specific tastes and consumption patterns.
Consider asking your friends where they get their political news from. There’s a good chance they’ll each list a different set of sources. (There will likely be some overlap, since people generally befriend individuals who share their interests, but it is unlikely to be a uniform set of outlets.) Then, consider asking your parents and their friends where they get their political news from. There’s a good chance they will not only list an even more distinct set of sources but also a different set of media vehicles (e.g., television vs. online) and on a different schedule (e.g., live at a certain time vs. on-demand). If you were to swing by a retirement community a few towns away, you’ll likely find an even more distinct media diet from your own.
In short, today’s news audiences have fragmented from a few mass audiences to many small audiences. And while that fragmentation may immediately sound like a net positive — after all, more choices should be a good thing, right? — it has introduced important challenges not only to the journalism industry but to democratic institutions.
Civic Implications of Fragmentation
The explosion of media options is still a relatively new phenomenon. For example, back in the 1960s, the majority of Americans regularly turned to one of just three evening TV newscasts (from ABC, CBS, and NBC). Broadcast news was so pervasive that 96% of the American population watched TV news coverage of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
That level of concentration and small number of options is hard to fathom today given the present array of broadcast news options (and even wider spectrum of media vehicles and journalistic outlets). Today’s audiences can seek news from text-based, broadcast, radio, and digital outlets. They can watch the news through live video, social video, 360 video, and even virtual and augmented reality. They can turn to mainstream or independent outlets and partisan or non-partisan outlets. They can choose between international, national, local, and even hyper-local coverage of a topic. They can often consume those news products live or on-demand. The list goes on and on.
However, having access to so many options has a major downside. The paradox of choice can make it tough for news consumers to leave their comfort zones or even avoid news altogether. For example, how often do you sign on to Netflix to watch something, only to realize that you’ve spent 10 minutes browsing and are no longer in the mood to watch anything at all? A similar process of fatigue occurs in what can sometimes feel like an over-saturated news ecosystem.
Having so many options also allows people to more easily turn to slanted news sources that support their existing points of view. This phenomenon is called selective exposure and involves people actively choosing to pursue a fraction of the available information or information sources, typically along some lines of preference (e.g., political preferences). This can trap news consumers in echo chambers that limit their exposure to new and divergent perspectives. That, in turn, can also lead to increased polarization within societies, particularly when it comes to political affairs. Such polarization can make it difficult for citizens to engage with one another because not only do they approach opposing viewpoints with greater antipathy but they also tend to draw on very different bodies of information about the world. This makes dialogue, debate, and compromise — the cornerstones of democratic society — difficult.
Professional Implications of Fragmentation
Audience fragmentation also poses economic and professional challenges for journalists and the organizations that employ them. It provides incentives for journalistic actors to specialize. Generalist outlets that provide overviews of many different topics are less desirable to audiences that know what they want and want in-depth or exclusive information about that topic. By specializing in niche areas, journalistic outlets can capture smaller but loyal audiences. While generalist outlets will still continue to exist, there are likely to be fewer of them in the future than in the past.
The fragmentation of audiences and increased availability of options also place even more pressures on journalistic outlets to stand out within an attention economy. Outlets must compete furiously with one another because there is a greater supply of news content than there is attention to take it in. This competition is magnified exponentially when you also factor in non-news media competitors, such as beauty vlogs, video game streams, and history podcasts. (Consider that in 2019, 500 hours of video were being uploaded to YouTube alone every minute.) Consequently, journalistic outlets are not only competing against one another to produce good journalism, they are also competing with one another (and other media organizations) to have their content capture the attention of a sufficiently large number of increasingly fragmented audiences.
It is unlikely that the processes underlying the fragmentation of audiences in recent decades will be reversed in the coming years. In fact, the opposite is more likely: Audiences will probably become even more fragmented as new technologies give audiences more agency and as technological actants further personalize audiences' news experiences. This will require journalistic outlets and society at large to continue to adapt to the existence of niche audiences that frequently draw upon divergent bodies of knowledge about current affairs and the broader world.
Key Takeaways
• The term audience fragmentation refers to a process whereby a mass audience (or few audiences) is broken up into many small audiences by virtue of divergent media consumption habits.
• The paradox of choice can make it tough for news consumers to leave their comfort zones. More choices also make it easier for people to turn to news that supports their existing points of view through selective exposure.
• Audience fragmentation has required journalistic outlets to adapt to an attention economy, which involves increased competition from many media options and promotes professional specialization. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/05%3A_Journalistic_Audiences/5.01%3A_Audience_Fragmentation.txt |
Introduction
User-generated content, also known as UGC, refers to content that is created and shared by users of platforms and products, including social media and news websites. UGC may come in an array of forms and formats, such as text, photos, videos, audio, and memes.
The proliferation of networked devices and interactive platforms has led to an explosion of user-generated content. Many of today’s most popular service-oriented websites are based in whole or in part on user-generated content. For example, TikTok’s content base is largely comprised of user-submitted videos; Yelp revolves around citizen reviews of businesses; and Rotten Tomatoes features movie ratings from regular people alongside reviews by professional film critics. Even major platforms like Facebook and Twitter could not exist without user-generated content.
The explosion of user-generated content has led some scholars to argue for an in-between category of individuals called produsers, who readily interchange from being the users of a product to producers of product-related content. For example, highly motivated fans of the TV show My Little Pony can create a wiki-based community around the show that details each pony’s backstory and offers original analyses of the show’s main themes. As such, scholars have argued, the distinction between producers and audiences has been further blurred in recent decades.
UGC in Journalism
Although user-generated content is common across all digital domains, it plays a unique role in the context of online journalism. Journalists utilize user-generated content to complement, augment, inform, and even provide the basis for their own journalism. Meanwhile, audiences use it to make their own voices heard and to engage in the process of reporting and sharing information.
To illustrate the evolution of user-generated content within the context of journalism, consider the letter to the editor. Before the internet, such letters were the most common means for audiences to get in touch with news producers. People wrote letters to the editor reflecting on the news, sharing their own stories, complaining about specific types or topics of coverage, asking questions for clarification, and sharing news tips with journalists. Some of those letters would then go on to appear in the newspaper — typically in a designated area within the Opinion section — making them an early form of user-generated content. However, those letters were limited to text as a medium, depended on the publisher’s schedule for publishing letters (and willingness to publish a letter), were generally subject to an editor’s alterations (they would often abridge the letters), and were frequently in competition with other letters about the same topic. In short, space constraints meant that only a tiny fraction of letters were ever published and rarely on the letter-writer’s terms.
In contrast, today’s news websites, apps, and social media pages regularly solicit and share user-generated content alongside journalist-produced news. Journalistic slideshows of sporting events (e.g., a local high school football game) frequently feature fan-taken photos. Comments sections at the bottom of articles invite readers to share their thoughts about (or responses to) news. Journalistic outlets' Facebook accounts ask readers for their worst weather-related disaster stories. Hashtags allow Twitter and Instagram users to connect their own stories and images to coverage of a topic appearing on news websites through different widgets on the page. Some news websites even allow community members to upload events to be included in the outlet’s online calendar page. And, some news aggregation websites focus largely on user-generated content, as with sports news portals that source from popular fan blogs.
As such, some journalistic outlets have turned to user-generated content as a way to advance their objective of providing the public a forum for engaging with civic information and to make journalism more participatory. Others have turned to UGC primarily as a cheap source of content or to increase the time users spend on the website. In short, the extent of the use of user-generated content, and the ways in which UGC are incorporated into news products, does vary widely across outlets, but the industry as a whole makes use of a lot more user-generated content today than in prior decades.
Benefits and Complications
There are many reasons why user-generated content is valuable for journalistic outlets. At an ideological level, it can be a way to give news audiences a voice in the coverage and dissemination of information, and engage them with the news and the process of reporting it. For example, CNN’s iReport was an early attempt by a journalistic outlet to create a digital platform designed to help audiences easily share their own video-based citizen journalism.
At an economic level, research suggests that creators of user-generated content tend to become more active and loyal members of the spaces they contribute to (e.g., an online community or news website). That engagement and loyalty can help generate positive financial outcomes as well, since such users may visit more frequently and feel even more motivated to pay a subscription fee or make a donation. Moreover, user-generated content can be a free alternative to professionally produced content (e.g., fan photos from a game that replace a photojournalist’s work) or inexpensive filler (e.g., free opinion columns or a replacement for person-on-the-street interviews).
However, user-generated content also presents journalistic outlets with some challenges. It has the potential to blur the traditional boundaries of journalism by elevating the work of non-professional actors who aren’t trained in the professional norms and ethical standards of journalism. For example, user-generated photos or embedded social media posts are usually clearly distinguished as such by credit lines and other signals that make clear that the author of the work is not a journalist. However, research has shown that audiences often do not meaningfully distinguish messages produced by different authors (who may employ different standards). That is, while audiences can accurately identify that a news story and a tweet embedded within it were produced by different people, they often muddle the messages together.
This can become especially problematic when it comes to forum-style user-generated content appearing alongside news products (e.g., comments under an online news story). Such content may feature personal opinions and stories, many of which are much more overtly biased than journalistic standards allow. They may also include misinformation and disinformation, as well as deeply unprofessional elements, such as insults or curse words. Journalistic outlets therefore have an ethical duty to engage in some form of content policing. This can be both morally problematic (e.g., determining what kind and amount of moderation is appropriate) and economically challenging (e.g., having to hire a team of moderators). It can also be legally problematic if a journalist excerpts user-generated content that is defamatory without engaging in basic fact-checking measures.
Finally, journalistic outlets must increasingly cope with the fact that user-generated content and online discussions about news are increasingly being produced or taking place on platforms outside their own. Put another way, while letters to the editor were previously sent to the journalistic outlet (giving them control over if and how to use that content) more of today’s engagement is occurring on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter (not only resulting in less journalistic control over the content but increasing their dependency on third-party platforms). Thus, in a way, professional journalistic work is becoming a content subsidy of its own for discourses that largely take place on forums outside the outlet’s own.
Key Takeaways
• User-generated content refers to content that is created and shared by users of platforms and products. It can include text, photos, videos, audio files, memes, and other types of content.
• Journalistic outlets are not just destinations for consuming news. They have become platforms for user engagement and interaction with news. However, that engagement is increasingly occurring on other platforms.
• Creators of user-generated content tend to become more active members of the online communities they contribute to and become more engaged with those sites. There is thus an economic incentive for creating opportunities for users to engage and produce content.
• User-generated content has blurred some of the boundaries of journalism and creates challenges for professional journalistic outlets. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/05%3A_Journalistic_Audiences/5.02%3A_User-Generated_Content.txt |
Introduction
While journalists have historically worked in a more solitary fashion, this is becoming less so the case today. Journalists are now more likely to work within teams in their organization, participate in collaborations across organizations, and involve their audiences in different aspects of news production.
This latter development — the incorporation of active audiences — is largely the result of new communication technologies and platforms that make it easier for audiences to engage with each other and with journalists. However, it is also the product of cultural changes and economic imperatives that have made audience participation appear more beneficial to — and in some cases necessary for — the production of 'good' journalism. Moreover, in addition to inviting contributions from audiences, new kinds of journalists have emerged whose job it is to tap into, and synthesize, the collective wisdom of the general public by monitoring their exchanges.
Journalistic Crowdsourcing
Within the context of journalism, the term crowdsourcing refers to a practice by which the cultural (i.e., knowledge), social (i.e., networks), or economic (i.e., money) capital of some public is harnessed for a specific task in the news production process.
Here, 'crowd' refers not only to the audiences of a given journalistic outlet but to the broader public they can reach via multiple communication channels, such as Twitter, Facebook, or even their own media products. 'Sourcing,' in turn, refers to the practice of collecting the resources (such as knowledge, material, or money) needed to advance an organizational or news production task. Journalistic crowdsourcing can thus involve the participation of non-journalists in identifying news, gathering news information, verifying and making sense of the gathered information, and distributing the produced form of that information. In the case of its sister act, crowdfunding, it can involve soliciting ad-hoc contributions to support a particular news production task, story, or project.
There are many reasons why a journalistic outlet might want to engage in crowdsourcing. For example, they may have access to more material than their reporting team can process, as is the case with large leaks of private documents or when governments aim to hide embarrassing information by overloading journalists with materials following a public information request. In this sense, crowdsourcing can be a free form of labor. Alternatively, journalistic outlets may believe that having more eyes will reduce mistakes and perhaps help their reporters identify important things that they missed. In this sense, crowdsourcing can be a way to improve traditional journalism. Or, journalistic outlets may find that they can build a following and increase brand loyalty by making audiences feel like they’re part of a team. In this sense, crowdsourcing can be a way to make journalism more sustainable.
For participants, the reward is often non-monetary since journalistic outlets rarely ever pay or reimburse participants for their labor. Instead, the reward is usually symbolic, such as by receiving some form of recognition for the work. This might be something as small as an icon or 'badge' next to their username on the website. It may also be more intrinsic, such as a feeling of satisfaction from having contributed to a social good or addressed a social problem. Sometimes, participants simply believe they’ve gained a skill or knowledge as a result of their participation.
Crowdsourcing can go very wrong, however. For example, shortly after the Boston Marathon bombing, online crowds on Reddit pored through pictures of the event to identify the perpetrators. They eventually zeroed in on two men and published photos of them that supposedly offered proof that they were the bombers. The New York Post famously took one of those pictures, enlarged it to cover its entire front page, and suggested that those two men were responsible for the bombing. It soon became evident that those men were not the bombers. However, by that point, their names had become public, their reputation had been tarnished, and they began receiving online and offline abuse. That abuse did not go away even after the actual perpetrators of the bombing were charged and convicted.
Kinds of Participation
The majority of crowdsourcing efforts to date have sought to incorporate audiences into the formative stages of news production, such as when stories are being identified, basic information is collected, and collected information is verified. Sometimes, journalists will solicit audience help for disseminating stories, in order to increase its reach. However, audiences rarely ever have a chance to participate in the editing stages — though it is theoretically possible for them to do so.
Scholars have identified five kinds of crowdsourcing activities that are designed to help non-journalists share their individual knowledge to create a form of collective knowledge. The first kind is voting, wherein the crowd helps prioritize the stories that reporters should tackle or flags phenomena of interest. The second is witnessing, or the sharing of first-person accounts of what happened during a breaking event. The third is sharing personal experiences, or the conveyance of experiential knowledge to reporters. The fourth is offering specialized expertise, wherein members of the crowd are able to contribute expert knowledge drawn from their professional experience or hobby. The fifth is completing a task, where the support comes by way of volunteering time to engage in semi-structured (and sometimes menial) efforts, such as sorting documents, cleaning datasets, or flagging information that may be of journalistic interest.
One of the first major examples of news organizations engaging in large-scale crowdsourcing occurred when The Guardian, a newspaper based in the United Kingdom, published 700,000 pages of information related to an information request about the expenses paid by members of the British Parliament. They asked members of the public to read through those pages and flag information of interest, such as overly expensive dinners or the use of government funds to pay for seemingly personal expenses (e.g., a mortgage). The Guardian created a website that would randomly assign a document in their trove to a visitor. That visitor could then flag particular pages from the document and note why they thought it was interesting. Each document would be reviewed by multiple people, and the system would average out the scores to surface the most flagged documents and pages to the professional journalists. The Guardian got more than 20,000 people to look through the expenses, and they were able to cover 170,000 pages within the first four days alone. Participants received no reward beyond feeling like they were part of something bigger. If they were particularly involved, they also received some symbolic resources by having their username appear on a leader board appearing on The Guardian's website. (The Guardian thus gamified the experience to increase participation.)
Ambient Journalism
The ability, and willingness, of crowds to participate in journalism has also helped spawn new kinds of journalism. An example of this is ambient journalism, or journalism that is produced, distributed, and received continuously via new communications technology, such as social media and microblogging, and within which the journalist serves as the clearinghouse for crowdsourced information.
Ambient journalism is different from traditional forms of journalism because it is both more fragmented in nature and it requires audience participation. It is fragmented in that news is typically — though not necessarily — presented in small bites, as with tweets. It requires audience participation because ambient journalism focuses on gathering news information from the streams of collective intelligence made available through social media platforms. The journalist’s primary functions within this form of journalism are to actively monitor networked media (e.g., Twitter) for newsworthy information, triangulate and verify that information with the help of other actors using those media (e.g., other Twitter users), and serve as an authoritative source of information within that platform. It is thus a particular approach to crowdsourcing journalism.
To illustrate the value of ambient journalism, consider the case of Andy Carvin’s coverage of the revolutions in Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt in 2011. Few Western journalistic outlets had people on the ground in those countries during the initial stages of their revolutions. Moreover, it quickly became difficult to report from those places as governments cracked down on reporters and restricted outside communication. Some of the foreign correspondents who were able to report on-site also did not fully understand the many facets underlying the anti-government movements.
Andy Carvin, who was then a digital media strategist at National Public Radio — so not even a foreign correspondent himself — quickly noticed that there were a lot of people in those countries who were tweeting about their experiences and capturing video of what was going on. Instead of hoping that NPR could dispatch journalists to those countries (and hoping that those journalists could find their way to the right places at the right times to capture breaking news), Carvin opted to tap into the collective intelligence of the citizens of those places.
Carvin recognized that the majority of the people tweeting information about those revolutions were either anti-government activists or pro-government activists. Put another way, the would-be sources had a stake in the issue and evident biases. However, what Carvin realized is that there were so many people in the network that he could work with them to triangulate the information he was seeing. If he saw video about government forces attacking protesters in a particular city block, he could ask others to share videos from different angles or even ask people to visit that block and capture additional video of the aftermath. If he did not understand what was being said by a source — or whether it was coded speech — he could ask the Libyans, Tunisians, and Egyptians on the network to translate or contextualize that speech. As sources demonstrated their reliability, Carvin would return to them.
Carvin’s work earned him a huge online following during those revolutions. He was seen as a reliable and trustworthy clearinghouse for information during a tumultuous and confusing event. Amid a constant stream of information, audiences could have confidence that the material he was putting out there was either verified or reliable, or clearly qualified as unvetted information. Moreover, journalists working for other outlets also kept a close eye on Carvin’s Twitter feed, following his lead as he helped break information.
Carvin later left NPR and started his own journalistic outlet that existed primarily on social media. Similar efforts have followed. Some of these are comprised of larger teams covering international affairs, such as Bellingcat. Others are led by individuals who cover smaller communities and local issues. As such, ambient journalism and crowdsourced journalism have become distinct forms of journalism that help unite contributions by journalists and their publics.
Key Takeaways
• Journalistic crowdsourcing refers to a practice by which the cultural, social, or economic capital of some public is harnessed for a specific task in the news production process. It often comes as a direct benefit to journalistic outlets, with participants typically receiving only symbolic rewards.
• Journalistic crowdsourcing can involve the participation of non-journalists in identifying news, gathering news information, verifying and making sense of the gathered information, and distributing the produced form of that information.
• Ambient journalism refers to journalism that is produced, distributed, and received continuously via new communications technology, such as social media and microblogging, and within which the journalist serves as the clearinghouse for crowdsourced information. It has been used by journalists to cover developments from local protests to international affairs. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/05%3A_Journalistic_Audiences/5.03%3A_Crowdsourcing_and_Ambient_Journalism.txt |
Introduction
To be a journalist is to doggedly pursue important information intended to inform and serve the public. Sometimes, that information might place an individual or organization in a negative light, threaten their reputation or livelihood, or otherwise create conflict as a result of its publication. Pursuing and exposing the truth therefore comes with risks.
Journalists across the world face threats and intimidation while doing their jobs. Sometimes, this comes as general public disdain or name-calling by members of an audience or a person implicated in a story. But, in some cases, journalists face physical, mental, and emotional violence both online and offline in the course of reporting. A global trend toward violence against journalists is especially acute in countries where the freedom of the press is not well protected (e.g., Egypt and the Philippines). However, it is growing as a problem in the United States as well.
Attacks Against the U.S. Press
Although the United States has historically been seen as a beacon for the free press, its ranking on press freedom indices in recent years suggests that is no longer the case. For example, the 2021 World Press Freedom Index ranks the United States as the 44th most free country for journalists (out of 180). This places the U.S. below countries like Taiwan, Botswana, and Trinidad and Tobago. Furthermore, the 2021 ranking is not an aberration: the U.S. has not been ranked better than 40th since 2013.
The World Press Freedom Index takes multiple factors into account, one of which is violence against journalists. According to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, nearly 400 journalists were assaulted and more than 130 were detained during 2020 alone. This was a significant increase from even just five years earlier, and it points to changing attitudes — and, namely, increased animosity — toward journalists by different segments of society.
Some of these attacks are encouraged (if not driven) by popular figures and media personalities who decry journalists as "enemies of the people." Indeed, former President Donald Trump’s use of such language and frequent public attacks on specific journalists, specific outlets, and the institution of journalism have been credited with influencing the exceptional amount of violence against journalists during his time as president. During Trump’s rallies, it was not uncommon to hear supporters yelling at the journalists tasked with covering those political events. Similarly, photojournalists captured striking photos of supporters wearing t-shirts with slogans like: "Rope. Tree. Journalist. No assembly required."
However, the violence against U.S. journalists was not strictly enacted by partisan supporters. Scores of journalists were detained, arrested, and sometimes attacked by police officers and security services when covering protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. In one exceptional case, a foam bullet left one photojournalist blind in the left eye. More frequently, journalists were shoved to the ground and prevented from doing their jobs despite being clearly credentialed. (In Minneapolis, police officers arrested a credentialed CNN reporter live on air while he was reporting.)
What was perhaps most striking to media observers about these incidents is that the journalists' behaviors (e.g., encroaching upon the locus of action while respecting authorities' commands) were not too different from times past. What seemed to have changed was the response they faced from the authorities — and the fact that such attacks were not publicly elected by some social and political elites, or even large segments of U.S. society.
While only some of those assaults were captured on video (often by protesters engaging in acts of journalism), their frequency and violence resulted in government officials in a number of European countries calling on American officials to better protect journalists and respect the freedom of the press. Put another way, the U.S. was no longer being seen as a beacon of press freedoms; it was seen as a place where journalists needed support in order to carry out their duties. These sentiments were echoed in editorials by multiple journalistic outlets, as well as watchdog organizations (e.g., Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists).
Online and Offline Violence
Research shows that violence against journalists is correlated with rhetorical attacks against journalists in elite discourse. Put another way, as rhetorical attacks against journalists have risen, so have different forms of violence against them. This is of particular concern as partisan rhetorical attacks against journalists have become more frequent and sustained in recent decades. This is not just a recent phenomenon, though. Right-wing radio has consistently assailed "the mainstream media" since at least the 1970s.
However, mainstream politicians, especially among the Republican party, have become increasingly bold with their attacks on news media over the past two decades. For example, in 2019 alone, former president Donald Trump used the insult "fake news" on Twitter 273 times and called the press "the enemy of the people" 16 times. Trump’s administration also barred well-regarded journalists from covering certain events and canceled the historically traditional daily White House press briefing, all under the guise of fighting unscrupulous journalists. Indeed, that same year, an edited montage video depicting then-President Trump shooting and stabbing journalists was played publicly at an event for his political supporters.
Scholars and advocates of press freedom worry that actions from the upper echelons of major political party, and those of some of their political supporters, serve to vilify journalists and incite public attacks against them. A study from Pew Research backs up this perception: People who supported Trump while he was president perceived journalists to be less ethical. Moreover, mainstream journalists who covered Trump’s administration were frequently subject to an array of online name-calling every time they posted a new story.
The violence is not just rhetorical, though. For example, in May 2017, a Republican candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives, Greg Gianforte, body-slammed a journalist covering his campaign. The attack was fierce enough to send the journalist to a hospital. Although Gianforte was later convicted of assault, his actions were publicly praised by then-President Donald Trump and celebrated in some corners of society. Moreover, Gianforte would go on to win two terms to the U.S. House of Representatives and become governor of Montana.
Violence Against Journalists Abroad
Violence against journalists is even more prevalent and pernicious in some places outside of the United States, though. The Middle East, Latin America, and parts of Asia have proven to be especially dangerous for journalists. It is estimated that more than 800 journalists around the world have been killed on the job during the past decade alone. (Such numbers likely underestimate the reality.) There are many more global incidents of violence against journalists that include kidnapping, detention, and torture.
The disappearance of Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi has become a terrible symbol of the need to increase protections for journalists worldwide. The Washington Post writer reported critically about political corruption in the Middle East. In October 2018, he was assassinated in gruesome fashion by Saudi government actors who wished to silence his voice. Despite the evidence linking Khashoggi’s murder to the Saudi crown prince, few concrete sanctions were placed on Saudi Arabia by countries that advocate for press freedom.
In another high-profile case, Maria Ressa, a Filipino-American journalist who founded a journalistic outlet called Rappler, was convicted of cyberlibel in the Philippines in 2020 after years of reporting critically on Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte. Press freedom advocates allege that the Duterte government was behind the lawsuit — which was advanced by a businessman who was the subject of one of Rappler’s stories — and pressured the courts to interpret a 2012 law intended to combat child pornography, identity theft, and libel in a "Kafkaesque" way that could criminalize critical journalistic conduct. The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines, as well as international watchdog groups, have decried the ruling as an example of authorities using legal mechanisms to restrict critical journalism.
While a range of journalists face violence, there is one group that is particularly vulnerable: freelance journalists who cover conflict zones. Declining news budgets have resulted in more conflict journalism being performed by freelance reporters. Such reporters receive limited institutional assistance relative to staff reporters at mainstream international journalistic outlets, such as limited legal support, little access to on-the-ground resources like a security detail, and lack of access to services like emergency extractions. However, freelancers often need to take greater risks in order to gather information (e.g., photographs) from the front lines of conflict in order to have their stories get picked up by major journalistic outlets (and, in turn, get paid). Consequently, freelancers are disproportionately more likely to get killed when reporting abroad, and especially in war zones.
Female and Minority Journalists
Some research has found that women in journalism are more susceptible to violence than their male counterparts, particularly online. A study by the International Center for Journalists published in 2020 documented the variety of physical and psychological threats female journalists face online, which fall under the category of "gendered online violence."
Gendered online violence includes acts like cyber-bullying and online harassment, targeted toxic attacks, threatened sexual violence, and violations of digital security and online privacy (e.g., 'doxxing'). Such acts can further complicate the already difficult online environments that many journalists must operate within, and make female journalists especially vulnerable. These gendered online attacks occur on a variety of sites and platforms, from online news comment streams on a journalistic outlet’s website to social media interactions on platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
Similarly, journalists belonging to minority ethnic groups are more likely to face online harassment than their majority counterparts. These attacks often come by way of ethnic slurs and coordinated action, and they tend to be more personal in nature. Newsrooms, in coordination with law enforcement, continue to develop best practices for preventing and reacting to this type of harassment, including creating clear standards for interactions allowed on their news websites.
All of this serves as a reminder that the practice of journalism is not only difficult but also dangerous.
Key Takeaways
• Journalists across the world face physical, mental, and emotional violence — both online and offline — as a result of doing their jobs.
• Violence against journalists is especially acute in countries where freedom of the press is less protected than in the United States, but it remains a problem in the U.S. as well.
• Offline violence against journalists is correlated with rhetorical attacks against journalists in elite discourse. Because the United States has long been viewed internationally as a bastion of press freedom, the anti-journalist behavior and rhetoric of recent years has set a dangerous example for other countries.
• Women in journalism are even more susceptible to violence than their male counterparts, particularly online. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/05%3A_Journalistic_Audiences/5.04%3A_Violence_Against_Journalists.txt |
Introduction
In order to understand contemporary journalism and how it may continue to develop, it is important to understand its past.
Journalism did not begin in the United States. Early examples of news texts can be traced back to the 1470s, and what is generally recognized as the first newspaper — the Relation — was published in France in 1605. However, although the early development of U.S. journalism took many cues from its European counterpart, it would soon begin to chart its own path and would later go on to be a key exporter of journalistic technologies and values to the rest of the world.
The Early Colonial Press
Early U.S. journalism was very different from what we see in today’s newspapers. First, there were no headlines or images, meaning that journalists had to depict events with nothing more than their words. Second, the early press generally focused on international news. Domestic affairs were often left alone because publishers did not want to upset local leaders, who could draw upon their governmental authority to shut down the newspaper. Additionally, this emphasis on international affairs led to a very different understanding of 'news,' as information was often weeks if not months old by the time it was printed. Third, a single person would often serve as the publisher, editor, and reporter, and they often filled news pages with the things they heard from other people as they arrived from abroad (or with things they read in other texts brought by the travelers). Fourth, the news was written for the political and mercantile classes, meaning that the issues were tailored to economic and political interests and used a language suited to the well-educated. Finally, much of the early press was subsidized directly either by the government or by wealthy patrons, which again created risks for journalists who wrote things that upset local officials or benefactors.
We can see these features, and key developments in the early U.S. press, play out in the newspapers of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The first multi-page newspaper published in the United States is believed to be Publick Occurrences, which was published in Boston in 1690. It was just four pages long and focused on international topics, including criticisms of the British military’s treatment of French prisoners and rumors of incest within the French royal family. Although it was intended to be published regularly, it only lasted one issue because the colonial government shut it down for not having a license to publish.
In 1704, the Boston News-Letter became the first licensed newspaper, proudly proclaiming that it was "published by authority" (of the governor). It was heavily subsidized by the British government and primarily contained transcripts of political speeches and details about European politics and wars.
Growing Independence
By 1721, however, the U.S. press had begun to assert more independence, as evidenced by The New-England Courant. That newspaper was published by James Franklin, and his little brother, Benjamin, wrote scathing critiques of the local government under a pen name. In fact, James Franklin was ultimately imprisoned after refusing to reveal who was behind those critiques. However, the paper’s critical tone helped make it popular, especially among more independence-minded citizens. That popularity encouraged other newspapers to take a more critical tone, and for new, even more critical publications to emerge.
This period was pivotal in that it helped to loosen the early governmental restrictions on speech and publication — which were the norm not only in the colonial United States but in many parts of Europe. Censorship made governments appear fearful and could actually intensify curiosity, speculation, and rumors. Moreover, publishers were sometimes able to evade orders by relocating their operations or simply changing the name of the newspaper.
More importantly, however, during this period, journalism became a vehicle for capturing and consolidating public opinion, and for conveying citizens' concerns to public officials. The expanding reach of journalism meant that public officials could no longer easily pretend to be unaware of the concerns raised in the growing publications. Unsurprisingly, however, those officials soon began to realize that establishing friendly ties with news organizations (by supplying editors with favorable 'news stories,' and sometimes even direct income) could serve their interests better than outright censorship. Additionally, new political party-sponsored newspapers also emerged during this time.
This period also saw the expansion of press freedoms. Proponents of the liberty of the press argued that unfettered expression was a matter of human dignity, personal self-fulfillment, and representative governance. A key example of this occurred in 1734, during the prosecution of John Peter Zenger. Zenger published articles in The New York Weekly Journal that were critical of the royal governor of New York, William Cosby, and Zenger was subsequently charged with making claims that were harmful to Cosby’s reputation. At that time, in England and its colonies, defendants were more likely to face a severe penalty if their claims were truthful. (The logic was that a more truthful claim was even more harmful to a person’s reputation than a false one because the allegations were, well, true.) However, Zenger’s attorney was the first to successfully argue that the press has "a liberty both of exposing and opposing tyrannical power by speaking and writing truth." This was a fairly novel argument at the time, and it captured the growing public support for independent and critical journalism. The argument’s success led to truth becoming a legally recognized defense against libel and defamation while further bolstering public support for freedom of the press.
A later example also captures the growing independence and power of the colonial press. To generate more revenue and maintain control of the press, the British government passed the Stamp Act of 1765. The Act imposed a tax on colonial publishers and required that many printed materials in the colonies be produced on stamped paper produced in London. The law was violently resisted in the colonies — it spurred cries of "no taxation without representation" — and the British government soon had to rescind it.
By 1775, there were roughly 37 weekly newspapers in the colonies. Those newspapers played a major role in defining the grievances of the colonists against the British government. Many of those newspapers, which were generally supported by different political factions, wrote in a highly interpretive, subjective manner. Moreover, they often wrote in support of independence. Put another way, during this period, the colonial press was hardly neutral. Additionally, it was loyalist newspapers that were being increasingly forced to shut down during this time, due to pressure — sometimes violent — from the colonists.
The Press in a New Nation
Shortly after its declaration of independence, the United States became a world leader in terms of its official guarantees for the freedom of expression. Citizens sought to secure the right to free expression, and nine of the 11 revolutionary-era state constitutions expressed that liberty of the press ought to be "inviolably" preserved or "never" restrained. Indeed, this sentiment is reflected in the very first amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which states that Congress shall make "no law" abridging freedom of the press.
Such absolute guarantees did not manifest in practice, however. Historically, deviance from that principle has been especially pronounced during times of hysteria and partisan animosity. For example, the Federalist majority in Congress responded to international and domestic tensions by passing the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798. The Sedition Act in particular criminalized making false statements that were critical of the federal government, and it was used in the prosecution and conviction of many Jeffersonian newspaper owners who disagreed with the government. Shortly after the Federalists lost control of the government in 1800, the Sedition Act expired.
Nevertheless, truth continued to be recognized as a defense against important legal threats — in this case, against charges of sedition. However, some journalists were still convicted when their expressed opinions were not provably true. Despite these unfortunate incidents, the newly formed United States still generally promoted press freedoms by engaging in acts like opening legislative branches to the press (galleries were established to allow journalists and citizens to observe both branches of Congress) and continuing a tradition of open courtrooms.
Key Takeaways
• Journalism during the colonial period was vastly different from journalism today, not only in format but also in its focus, manner of expression, and funding.
• It was not until the 1730s that truth became a successful defense against charges of libel and defamation. Prior to that, truthful claims were seen as being even more injurious to a person’s reputation, and thus were subjected to higher penalties.
• The colonial press was crucial in helping to consolidate colonial grievances and mobilize public opinion toward independence from the British government.
• The freedom of the press is codified in the founding documents of the United States, though there is also a long history of U.S. government restrictions of the press. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/06%3A_History_of_U.S._Journalism/6.01%3A_Early_U.S._Journalism.txt |
Introduction
Change was a constant feature of journalism in the 19th century, driven in large part by the rapid economic, social, and technological development of the United States. By the start of the 19th century, there were already more than 200 newspapers in the United States, and they had become far more diversified than before.
The owners of newspapers — and newspapers remained the primary source of news during this period — were often printers who received income from subscribers, advertisers, merchandise sales, and other printing work for individuals and governments. The development of the U.S. Postal Service and a growing naval sector allowed news distribution to extend far beyond the major cities. Additionally, early forms of user-generated content became more frequent as newspapers published more letters, literary materials, and political essays. Daily newspapers grew even more common, and news reporting started becoming more systematic. By the end of the 19th century, the press had completed a significant shift away from being sites of political debate and toward being commercially driven enterprises.
The Penny Press
Throughout the early 1800s, newspapers continued to be highly partisan, and they derived considerable income from political parties and government subsidies.
However, by the 1830s a combination of factors had significantly altered the news industry by making news products cheaper and more accessible. Socially, literacy rates rose, resulting in larger potential audiences for news products. Economically, disposable income began to rise as the standard of living increased for some of the nation’s residents. Technologically, high-speed steam presses made it possible for newspapers to be printed faster than ever.
The confluence of these factors led to the birth of the so-called Penny Press period, during which newspapers became cheaper and gained even wider circulation. While newspapers continued to be partisan tools, especially in rural areas where the owner/editor of a small press would often be involved in local politics, additional commercial options also emerged, and news was further commodified within a capitalist framework.
During the early 1830s, French intellectual Alexis de Tocqueville traveled throughout the United States and produced influential writings about American culture. Within his classic book, Democracy in America, Tocqueville remarked that almost every community he visited had its own periodical, which he saw as evidence of the power of the people and American sovereignty. The American ideals of free expression were propelled to the global stage by Tocqueville (and other intellectuals), and they became instruments of social transformation in other parts of the world. The writings also elevated the U.S.'s growing international stature in matters pertaining to freedom of the press.
Such accounts did overlook important issues within the press during this time, though. For decades before and after the American Civil War, journalists and editors in different parts of the country struggled to write about inequality and discrimination in the United States, and the white press often refused to cover issues affecting the country’s Black communities. It was not until 1827 that the country’s first Black-owned newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, was founded in New York — and largely in response to the many pro-slavery newspapers in that city. Even the abolitionist papers of the time often characterized Blacks as powerless or ignorant, and rarely gave a voice to people of color. However, Freedom’s Journal operated for just two years, illustrating the challenges that alternative and minority-owned media would continue to face in the years to come.
The Telegraph and News
The 1830s also saw the development and proliferation of a technological actant that has had a lasting effect on journalism: the telegraph. The first commercial telegraph in the United States was developed by Samuel Morse (of Morse code fame). The device allowed messages to be quickly transmitted across large distances via electrical wires.
The development of the telegraph redefined time and space, in the context of journalism. It made it possible for 'news' coming from afar to actually be new. For example, events happening in Virginia could now appear in the next day’s edition of a New York-based newspaper. This created a new class of reporter — the correspondent — who would travel to different parts of the country and send dispatches via telegraph to an editor, who would tidy up and publish a story. That, in turn, coincided with the American Civil War, which led to the creation of the war correspondent, who could offer frequent updates on battles as they were fought at the front lines. Moreover, the deployment of submarine cables linking the United States to Europe and other countries made it easier to bring 'the world' to local audiences in a timely fashion.
The cost and unreliability of the telegraph also promoted a more terse style of writing, which would become very influential in U.S. journalism. Since transmissions sometimes failed partway through, correspondents not only produced shorter stories but also organized them using the inverted pyramid style of writing. That style prioritizes information such that a news story begins with the most newsworthy information on top, followed by important contextual details, and concluding with relevant background information. Oftentimes, the correspondent would only transmit the most important information, leaving editors to fill in the background at the bottom of a news article. The inverted pyramid remains the most commonly used writing style at many U.S. journalistic outlets.
More Commercialized Press
Although technology acted as a key enabler for new forms of journalism, popular demand and the growing commercialization of the U.S. press also led to important changes in content and ownership. There was now growing demand for entertainment, crime stories, and business news — and especially financial news from London, which was then the financial capital of the world. Increased competition also sparked increased pressure for journalists to produce news quickly, accurately, and reliably.
Newspaper magnates also began to emerge during this period. For example, Edward W. Scripps built a large portfolio of newspapers by lending money to launch publications and acquiring control of the most successful ones. Scripps, in particular, tended to take a more hands-off approach, granting his local editors considerable autonomy so long as they met revenue objectives via advertisements and subscriptions.
Other magnates were far more hands-on, though. Recognizing news media’s power to influence change in society, William Randolph Hearst — on whom Orson Welle’s classic film Citizen Kane is based — purchased a number of newspapers in the 1890s and routinely intervened in their editorial decision-making and used them to publish his personal views. He would go on to use one of his newspapers, the New York Morning Journal, to provoke American outrage against Spain through sensationalist and often false articles. Such coverage contributed to the Spanish-American War in 1898, and helped fire off a circulation rivalry between Hearst’s Morning Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s (of Pulitzer Prize fame) New York World.
The Morning Journal's coverage was emblematic of the so-called yellow journalism that became prevalent at the time. Yellow journalism sought to draw larger audiences by using misleading, eye-catching headlines that were displayed in huge print (even for minor news). Those headlines were accompanied by sensationalized and highly suspect articles that contained fake interviews, pseudo-science, scandal-mongering, and dramatic emotional language. Those articles often appeared alongside lavish illustrations, many of which bore little resemblance to reality and simply dramatized events. Yellow journalism thus offers an example of commercialism run amok within the context of journalism, and it is representative of an era of powerful proprietors exploiting newspapers to advance their personal whims.
Not all journalism during that time was poor or sensationalized, though. This period also offered examples of pioneering investigative journalism. An example of this was Ida B. Wells, who documented lynching in the United States throughout the 1890s. Wells investigated claims that lynchings were reserved for Black criminals only, and brought to light not only the barbarism of lynchings but also how they were being used to intimidate Blacks who created economic and political competition for whites. Wells' publishing office and press was destroyed by a white mob, forcing her to relocate from Memphis to New York in order to continue her reporting, which was then carried nationally by the growing Black press.
Ultimately, what is perhaps most remarkable about the 19th century is that journalism shifted from being an information good available to a relatively limited number of people in the early 1800s to a widely available commodity oriented toward giving mass audiences consumer choice about by the end of the century. It was no longer gathered and distributed primarily for political communication, trade, and pleasure. Rather, it was commodified with an eye toward the creation of mass media markets. As such, the 19th century is crucial to journalism history because it represents the victory of commercialism in the U.S. press — and also illustrates some of its worst excesses.
Key Takeaways
• By the 1830s, higher literacy rates, lower product costs, and more efficient printing presses helped popularize mass circulation newspapers. Mass media was thus the product of social, economic, and technological developments.
• The telegraph changed the temporal and spatial nature of journalism, allowing journalism to be quickly transmitted from far-away places. It also created new jobs in journalism and helped shape the inverted pyramid style of writing that is still commonly used today.
• The mid- to late-1800s saw the development of an even more commercialized news industry, with powerful newspaper magnates and highly sensationalized 'yellow journalism' emerging toward the latter part of the century. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/06%3A_History_of_U.S._Journalism/6.02%3A_Journalism_in_the_19th_Century.txt |
Introduction
Journalism in the early 20th century was marked by continuities from the 19th century, such as the expansion of corporate power, increasing literacy rates, and the further professionalization of journalism. However, this period also saw the emergence of new forms of journalism, including muckraking, as well as the development of public relations as a distinct industry. It was a busy period for an industry quickly growing in size.
Between 1880 and the start of the 20th century, the number of English-language daily newspapers grew from 850 to 1,970. The number of weekly newspapers also tripled. New magazines were published and thrived, often by developing new niches (i.e., meeting different specialized information needs and audience wants) and especially by providing longer feature stories about daily life. Print journalism was thus a major industry within the broader U.S. economy, and consumers had more (and more niche) options than ever before.
Print Media and Muckraking
The turn of the century also helped produce a new form of journalism, called muckraker journalism. This form was characterized by the use of journalism to critically interrogate and expose social ills and corruption. Muckraker journalism was therefore often driven by an agenda (e.g., an expressed intent to show the shortcomings of capitalism or even democracy) but this agenda was supplemented with meticulous reporting. At the forefront of muckraker journalism was the magazine McClure’s, which by 1898 already had a circulation of 400,000.
One example of muckraker journalism was a 1903 story by Lincoln Steffens titled, "The Shame of Minneapolis," which was part of a series of stories examining corruption in major U.S. cities. Steffens, a relentless and tenacious reporter, set out to Minneapolis and discovered that its recently elected mayor was working with a complicit police force to ignore illegal gambling and prostitution in exchange for bribes. His exposé drew great scrutiny to the mayor’s misdeeds, and the mayor fled the state shortly thereafter, throwing the entire city government into disarray. A new mayor was then installed, who replaced many of the officials appointed by the previous mayor and fired many of the officers in the city’s police force.
Another example can be found in the work of Ida Tarbell, and her reporting on Standard Oil in particular. Standard Oil was not only the largest oil refiner in the world at the turn of the century, but also one of its biggest and most ruthless companies. During her investigation, Tarbell acquired and dug through hundreds of thousands of pages of documents that were physically scattered around the country. Tarbell also interviewed oil executives, industry competitors, government regulators, and academic experts. Her work was serialized into 19 articles that appeared in McClure’s and demonstrated Standard Oil’s strong-arm tactics, manipulation of competitors, and abuse of workers in order to advance its corporate goals. The story’s success played a major role in the U.S. government’s decision to break up Standard Oil into 34 different companies under antitrust laws.
The term "muckraker" itself became associated with two distinct meanings. While it has been attached to investigative journalism that "digs deep for the facts," like that of Tarbell, it is also sometimes used pejoratively to refer to work that sensationalizes an agenda-driven form of journalism. The latter meaning became popularized due to President Theodore Roosevelt’s criticism of the progressive-minded journalism of the time, and in particular when he remarked that, "the men with the muck rakes are often indispensable to the well being of society; but only if they know when to stop raking the muck."
The Professionalization of Journalism
The early 20th century also saw more directed efforts to professionalize journalism in the United States. The very first journalism schools (housed at the University of Missouri and Columbia University in New York) were only established in 1908. These universities were important because they launched the process of formally training journalists (via a shared education). That, in turn, would go on to promote more widespread adoption of best practices in journalism and eventually the creation of professional codes of ethics within the industry. It is important to note that relatively few journalists were university-educated at that time, though. (That would remain the case until the 1960s.) Moreover, many journalism schools began within English or Literature departments, creating a strong connection between journalism and literary non-fiction.
It was also not until the 1920s that "objectivity" and "neutrality" became norms within U.S. journalism. Much of the journalism before that time was incredibly pointed and took clear positions on issues. This was evidenced clearly by the predominantly progressive ideals of the aforementioned muckraking era, but also by the clear political affiliations of many news organizations in the prior centuries.
Scholars have argued that the shift toward objectivity was not primarily driven by changing journalistic ideals. It was largely a business decision. As the potential audiences for journalism grew and the number of competitors increased, newspaper owners found that they could differentiate themselves from competitors and have broader appeal by simply acting as observers (and thus not offending as many readers). As such, the contemporary cultural emphasis on neutrality and objectivity in U.S. journalism is a historically recent phenomenon.
Journalism and Public Relations
Journalism was not the only communication discipline to grow and become more professionalized during this period. Public relations also originated as a distinct practice at the turn of the 20th century. This was an outgrowth of advertising, which had long been established by that point. However, in contrast to advertising, which sought to sell products and services directly to people, public relations focused on influencing intermediaries (like journalists) in order to promote more favorable representations of companies and their products or services. This involved a new skill-set, which was sharpened over decades, to make positive coverage of clients (e.g., companies or celebrities) appear natural.
The first news-oriented public relations agency, the Publicity Bureau, was established by George Michaelis in Boston in 1900. Two years later, William Wolf Smith, a former reporter at The New York Sun would establish the first Washington D.C.-based PR agency, cementing the linkages between public relations, journalism, and public affairs. These companies were hired by clients ranging from Harvard University to railroad syndicates to generate support for legislation that was favorable to those organizations, and especially to fight industry reform legislation being pushed by the Roosevelt administration.
The United States government quickly took note of public relations. By 1910, the U.S. government began employing press agents of its own. These agents were tasked with sending handouts to Washington-based newspapers. The first governmental press conferences were also held later that decade, under the Woodrow Wilson administration. Over time, presidential administrations would increasingly try to cultivate favorable perceptions of their work in a highly organized fashion. Although the word "spin" would not be commonly used until the 1980s, the federal government and many large companies had either established press relations offices or hired public relations agencies by the 1930s.
The press agents who worked in public relations departments were tasked with promoting truthful accounts of their organization’s or client’s good deeds. However, they also would — and still do — engage in dishonest behaviors like selectively releasing information, issuing 'non-denial' denials, burying toxic information within long press releases filled with less-consequential positive information, and delaying the release of information to minimize its impact. Journalists have thus had to become very attuned to their sources' motivations and approach information with a critical eye.
Key Takeaways
• Muckraking was an early form of investigative journalism that sought to call attention to social ills and corruption. It is also sometimes used pejoratively to refer to sensationalized, agenda-driven journalism.
• The contemporary cultural emphasis on neutrality and objectivity in U.S. journalism is a historically recent phenomenon, as those values only started to become prevalent in the 1920s.
• Public relations, in which communicators attempt to persuade intermediaries (e.g., journalists) to report favorably on the communicator’s clients, became a distinct industry at the start of the 20th century. It is commonly used by companies and governments alike today. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/06%3A_History_of_U.S._Journalism/6.03%3A_Journalism_in_the_Early_20th_Century.txt |
Introduction
U.S. journalism after the early 20th century was marked by remarkable and fast-paced technological developments, which fostered the conditions for significant industrial change. However, although change remained a constant during this time, there was also remarkable continuity. For example, many of the transformative new technologies that were introduced in the mid to late 20th century resulted in journalism that, at least initially, looked an awful lot like what was already available: Radio news initially had presenters reading newspapers; television news initially sounded just like radio news, but with images of the presenter before a desk and microphone; and news websites tried to mimic the newspaper format.
Nevertheless, these technologies would intersect with broader social, cultural, political, and economic shifts in the United States to produce different ways of not only thinking about journalism but also practicing it. Put another way, technology played a major role in spurring change, but it was its intersection with broader phenomena that shaped the journalism we see today.
Radio
Regular evening radio broadcasts in the United States began in 1919, and they were mostly operated by small organizations at first. Radio content at the time primarily consisted of broadcasts of lectures, political speeches, and music. However, in 1926, the first major U.S. company dedicated to running a broadcast network was founded. It was called the National Broadcasting Company, or NBC.
By 1930, NBC was operating its first regular news program, a 15-minute weekday segment led by Lowell Thomas. At first, much of radio news consisted of presenters simply reading the major stories from the day’s newspapers. This resulted in a press-radio 'war' in which newspapers and news associations sued radio broadcasters to limit their ability to distribute news on the radio.
Those attempts were largely unsuccessful, and by 1935, wire services — organizations that focused on gathering news and licensing it to other organizations to publish — were becoming major content providers to radio programs. Increasingly, radio operators also began to develop their own news operations to differentiate themselves, and thus became competitors in their own right with newspapers.
As small newsrooms grew within radio stations, they also began to cultivate a distinct news communication style. Radio copy (news) was written with a distinct fluidity and tailored for the ear, unlike the newspaper copy that stations had previously relied upon. At first, radio news bulletins were usually just five minutes long and consisted of seven to 10 stories, each of which was rarely longer than 75 words, with the exception of the top story of the day.
News and commentary programs greatly expanded at the beginning of World War II. Technological advancements allowed radio reporters to bring the sound of war to listeners, and radio began to flourish as a news information source. Entertainment programs were frequently interrupted to bring news reports from various cities around the country and the globe. Some radio journalists and news presenters, such as Edward Murrow and William Shirer, became household names around the nation.
While radio created many new opportunities for journalists, it also allowed newsmakers to bypass journalists in ways that were not previously possible. Radio provided a means for elected leaders and other powerful actors to communicate directly with citizens, rather than to have their words interpreted and/or partially re-broadcasted by journalists. This was aptly illustrated by the so-called "fireside chats," or radio addresses, that President Franklin Roosevelt held throughout the 1930s and early 1940s. Roosevelt used the radio to communicate directly with Americans in order to calm national fears and promote support for his policies. The addresses, which would reach up to 58% of U.S. households, were credited with bolstering his popularity during that time.
By 1948, the invention of the transistor and its subsequent development for use in radio sets allowed radios to become even smaller and no longer dependent on a fixed electrical connection. This increased radio listening away from home, which became especially important with the proliferation of automobiles in the Post-War period. The development of FM radio technology would lead to a growing body of radio stations, including all-news radio stations and new formats for radio news. By the 1960s, National Public Radio, or NPR, would also be established as a network of noncommercial radio stations that were funded in part by listener donations and government subsidies.
Television
Another major technological advancement was the television. One of the world’s first television stations (W2XB) began broadcasting in New York in 1928. However, regular TV newscasts would not begin in the United States until 1941, when CBS started airing 15-minute daily news programs. At the local level, stations initially hired employees who would simply be filmed as they read wire news copy — much like the early days of radio. However, stations would later go on to hire teams of reporters and videographers who would produce original content for broadcasters, and thereby make television news its own form.
NBC’s Camel News Caravan with John Cameron Swayze is often considered to be the first major national TV newscast, and it began in 1949. (Camel, a cigarette company, was the sponsor of the program and thus had considerable influence on the show.) However, it was not until the 1950s and 1960s that television journalism exploded in popularity. This was due in part to the extraordinarily fast adoption of televisions in post-war America. In 1950, just 9% of households had a television set. By 1960, that number had grown to 87%. This was a truly remarkable pace for technological adoption, and television news capitalized on it.
Throughout the 1950s, the 16-millimeter camera gained widespread adoption and made TV news production more mobile. This not only magnified the value of immediacy in television news, but it also increased the need for television news to have compelling visuals. Put another way, stories that lacked compelling visuals became less likely to be featured in television broadcasts. Additionally, the 1950s saw the invention of the teleprompter, which allowed news presenters to look straight into the camera while reporting the news. This made viewers feel like they had a more personal connection with television journalists, especially in relation to the comparatively anonymous radio and newspaper reporters.
By the early 1960s, television was establishing itself as the primary source of news information for Americans. Televised newscasts were becoming immensely profitable, and both local and network newscasts were adopting longer formats between 30 minutes and one hour. Moreover, several critical events throughout that decade glued Americans to their televisions. One key event was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. An estimated 96% of American households tuned in for news coverage of that incident, which completely captivated many Americans for more than four days. That decade was also marked by vivid images of civil rights protests, the Vietnam War, and the Apollo moon landing. CBS' Walter Cronkite had, by the 1960s, become one of the most trusted people in America, and his evening broadcasts would command extraordinarily large audiences for nearly two decades.
Starting in the late 1960s, television news outlets turned to news consultants to increase their viewership and commercial success. This led to the development of the eyewitness news style of reporting that is more action-oriented and visually appealing (e.g., by placing reporters outside of crime scenes or in the middle of a weather event). Moreover, television news transformed during this period to include more entertainment news, shorter sound bites, and reduced coverage of government and public affairs — things that news consultants believed would increase the appeal or profitability of news programs. In important ways, the commodification of news during the late 20th century was most acute in mainstream TV journalism.
Cable and Satellite
Starting in the 1970s, nationally distributed television channels expanded in the United States via cable technology. The first 24-hour television news network was CNN (Cable News Network), which launched in 1980. Although CNN was commercially successful throughout the 1980s, it was not until the early 1990s that it distinguished itself and became a major player in the news industry.
CNN made war coverage an international viewing experience by broadcasting directly from Baghdad in 1991 as U.S. troops invaded the city during the Gulf War. CNN was not only able to provide live, around-the-clock coverage of the war, but it was also able to leverage satellite technology to reach audiences around the globe. CNN also helped pioneer portable satellite newsgathering equipment that allowed small reporting teams to report live under distressed conditions from many parts of the world.
CNN’s success was so great that it led to the coining of the term CNN effect to denote a phenomenon wherein 24-hour news networks had become so powerful that they could influence the political and economic climate. Scholars have since found that 24-hour news networks are particularly influential among policymakers and so-called political junkies that consume disproportionate amounts of political news. Critics have argued that 24-hour news networks promoted the needless dramatization of less-important news in order to make even the mundane seem riveting (and worthy of attention at all times of the day), and hyper-activated a culture of chasing episodic, breaking news. Such developments have been lamented in light of its disproportionate influence on the political class. Indeed, throughout the 1990s, the phrase "wag the dog" gained popularity, in part due to the episodic and increasingly pack-driven nature of mainstream TV news coverage. The phrase is intended to capture the phenomenon wherein individuals (mainly politicians) create a diversion from a politically damaging issue — as with a president launching a military strike, which will inevitably receive ample news coverage, in order to distract from allegations of impropriety.
CNN’s success also spawned more 24-hour news networks, including Fox News and MSNBC. Fox News, in particular, branded itself as a moderate (and later conservative) alternative to what it called "the liberal mainstream media." Within a decade, Fox News would have the nation’s largest viewership of any cable network as it established itself as the centerpiece of conservative journalism. Fox News also helped popularize opinion news show formats that are more akin to entertainment than journalism. (Fox News has repeatedly defended itself in legal cases by arguing that key figures on such shows are entertainers providing opinions, and not journalists making factual claims.) Seeing Fox News' success, MSNBC subsequently attempted to establish itself as a liberal alternative to Fox News, but with far less commercial success.
While the proliferation of satellite technology helped spread U.S. news channels to Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and other parts of the world, it also made it easier for international outlets to distribute its journalism to global audiences. Among these are Japan-based NHK World, Qatar-based Al Jazeera English, and Turkey-based TRT World. As a result, non-Western perspectives on world issues have gained a wider audience in recent years.
The Internet
Although it was initially developed in the 1960s, the Internet did not gain widespread adoption until the early 1990s. Internet access was at first quite slow, which largely limited websites to showing text and some images. Moreover, traditional journalistic outlets generally failed to see the internet as a transformative technology and were very slow to react. Newspaper websites were made to look very similar to the newspaper themselves, with the content placed online for free (even as that same content was charged for in print). Industry analysts attribute some of newspapers' current financial challenges to their slow response to the development of the Internet — though other missteps and societal shifts also played a part.
However, the Internet has challenged the foundations of journalism in ways few previous technologies had. First, it arguably democratized news production and distribution, enabling any person to create a micro news outlet without investing the vast sums of money required to start a newspaper or broadcast station. That, in turn, drastically increased competition and created a seemingly endless menu of consumer choices. Second, it upended the advertising market, giving advertisers more non-news options where they could reach audiences. It also allowed advertisers to reach audiences directly through the advertiser’s own websites and social media channels, thereby bypassing traditional media. Third, it made journalism interactive and even more instantaneous, altering audience expectations for when and how often news is published (including expectations for personalized, on-demand content). It also enabled shorter, incremental forms of news productions, such as live tweeting. Finally, it increased the distribution range for journalistic outlets, enabling local U.S. publications in Massachusetts to reach expats in Asia while enabling Asian publications to reach immigrants in Massachusetts.
In understanding the recent developments of journalism — and its major challenges — it is thus helpful to understand its historical trajectory. It took about two hundred years for the technology that facilitated the development of the modern newspaper to emerge. This allowed journalism to adapt more progressively to the country’s changing social and cultural character, and the resulting economic opportunities and challenges. In contrast, the past century has been marked by a much faster technological revolution that has significantly disrupted journalism’s economic underpinnings. As such, U.S. journalism is likely to reinvent itself again in the coming years, as it has in the past. What is certain, however, is that journalism’s future will be shaped in part by its long history, and may yet come to resemble aspects of its past.
Key Takeaways
• Radio journalism began developing its unique traditions in the 1930s and became a major source of news for Americans during World War II. It was also one of the first technologies that allowed elected officials to bypass journalists when speaking to mass audiences.
• Television journalism began developing its unique traditions in the 1940s, but it was not until the 1950s that it became a major news source for Americans. Today, most people in the U.S. get their news from local and national television broadcasts.
• Twenty-four hour cable news networks were only established in the 1980s, but quickly entrenched themselves as major news sources in the 1990s. Today, Fox News is the most widely watched 24-hour cable news channel and is a major player within the conservative news ecosystem.
• Journalistic outlets — and newspapers in particular — responded very slowly to the development of the Internet, which has since played a major role in disrupting the economics of commercial journalism in the U.S. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/06%3A_History_of_U.S._Journalism/6.04%3A_Journalism_After_the_Early_20th_Century.txt |
Introduction
The First Amendment is the cornerstone of journalistic freedom in the United States. It states: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Initially, the First Amendment applied only to laws enacted by Congress. However, over time, the courts have interpreted its provisions more broadly to encompass any form of government interference. The First Amendment is relatively distinctive in that few countries offer such unequivocal statements of support for journalistic work within their legal frameworks.
Roots of the First Amendment
Shortly after the U.S. gained independence from Britain, Thomas Jefferson, who was then an ambassador to France, and James Madison corresponded about the need for a Bill of Rights. Madison, in particular, championed the document because he believed it would enable independent courts of justice to protect individual rights and would educate citizens about their rights and responsibilities within the newly formed democratic republic.
It is not an accident that the First Amendment, and its protection of speech and the press, leads the Bill of Rights. Jefferson himself wrote: "Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost." Alongside Jefferson, Madison played a significant role in getting the state of Virginia to adopt its Statute for Religious Freedom, and Madison consistently championed religious and political liberty throughout his life. Notably, Madison pushed to change words like "should" or "ought," which were used in earlier state declarations of rights, with less equivocal language like "shall."
While Madison strongly pushed to have the First Amendment apply to both the federal government and the states, legislators could only agree on a federal application. Thus, it was not until the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 — by which time the American Civil War had taken place and the country’s views on federalism had shifted — that the First Amendment would be consistently applied at the state level as well. As such, for much of the first century of the United States' existence, the legal protections offered to journalists on key aspects of libel, prior restraint, and other First Amendment issues varied from state to state.
The First Amendment and the Supreme Court
Despite the First Amendment’s unequivocal language, Congress (and state legislatures) have passed a number of laws that abridge the freedom of speech and of the press. Put another way, in trying to promote other ideals, such as national unity and contemporary notions of decency, legislative bodies have adopted many laws that infringe on speech and press freedoms. (Cynics would add that politicians have advanced of those laws for less admirable reasons, such as to protect corrupt public officials from the searching eyes of journalists.)
In instances where the First Amendment clashes with other interests, the U.S. Supreme Court is often the final arbiter over what constitutes an acceptable infringement on speech or the press. Since 1804, there have been nearly 900 major rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court and other courts that directly involve First Amendment freedoms. The 20th century was a particularly busy period for the Supreme Court, and a number of its decisions have expanded speech and press rights.
Some of the First Amendment issues most closely related to journalism that have been tested in court include access to information and places, anonymous speech, protection of sources, copyright, free association, incitement, prior restraint, privacy, and the publication of confidential information. Put another way, much of the guidance about which journalistic activities are legally permissible come not only from laws passed by the United States' legislative branch but also from the interpretations of the First Amendment by its judicial branch.
Protections for Political Expression
A central theme in judicial decisions about the protections and limitations of the First Amendment is that political expression receives greater legal protection than commercial expression. Put another way, the courts have long recognized the importance of a so-called 'marketplace of ideas' in the political realm, wherein ideas should be allowed to freely compete with one another. Under the marketplace perspective, the best ideas should emerge victorious from robust competition, which in turn should result in a better-functioning democracy. In order to permit robust competition, the thinking goes, restrictions on communication — and political communication in particular — should be limited.
While there are significant limitations to that marketplace metaphor — for example, some people effectively have a louder voice than others because of their position in society, and people are not fully rational beings — it has nevertheless resulted in the courts holding public affairs journalism and political opinion pieces in high regard because they see such work as being central to promoting the founding ideals of sovereignty and self-governance. Moreover, U.S. courts have on many occasions explicitly referenced the value and importance of promoting a vibrant journalism ecosystem that can serve as a 'fourth branch' of government and as a watchdog against corruption and public misdeeds. For example, former Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black famously wrote in 1971 that "only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government … and … prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people."
The courts will therefore often weigh the public benefit of a journalistic product (e.g., news article or broadcast segment) against the harms it could cause to an individual (e.g., their privacy) or the country as a whole (e.g., its national security). The First Amendment does not at all grant journalists or journalistic outlets a blanket immunity against legal liability. However, it does tend to offer them greater protection than might be afforded to other forms of communication, such as advertising and entertainment (provided such advertisement or entertainment is not itself political in nature). For example, restrictions on fraudulent advertising are less likely to be seen as violating the First Amendment than restrictions on political editorials that contain false information.
In short, although the First Amendment does not forbid legislators from regulating journalists and journalism, it is the cornerstone for most legal defenses of U.S. journalists and their activities. It also grants journalists in the U.S. stronger protections against both government intervention and civil charges from the subjects of their stories than journalists in most other countries. Its placement at the top of the U.S. Bill of Rights also signals that journalism and free expression lie at the heart of the so-called American Experiment.
Key Takeaways
• The ideals behind the First Amendment stand at the core of the founding documents of both the United States of America and its member states.
• The First Amendment is the cornerstone for most legal defenses by journalists against a range of different charges.
• The Supreme Court is often the final arbiter of disputes between the freedom of expression and other national interests.
• The Supreme Court has repeatedly considered expressions about political and public affairs to be particularly worthy of First Amendment protections. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/07%3A_Journalism_Law_and_Ethics/7.01%3A_The_First_Amendment.txt |
Introduction
In order to effectively perform their journalistic activities, journalists must be aware of the laws that govern basic practices, such as attending public proceedings and protecting sources. Journalists in the U.S. generally benefit from laws that promote and presume transparency in government as well as from Supreme Court decisions recognizing that journalists have the ability to broadcast documents that are in the public interest even if a third party obtained them illegally.
However, journalists in the U.S. by and large do not receive special protections from the government by virtue of their job. They are generally treated like any other citizen, and laws therefore tend to apply equally to journalists and non-journalists. (There are some laws, including so-called "shield laws," that provide special protections to journalists. However, such laws only apply at the state level, and only in some states, and with several restrictions.) Moreover, journalists must navigate complex legal questions about an individual’s reasonable expectation of privacy and must be aware of laws pertaining to the recording of exchanges, such as interviews, that vary from state to state.
Access to Information and Places
The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that journalists and journalistic outlets do not have special access or rights to government files or to public property. Put another way, journalists often receive the same access to information or places as any other member of society.
However, the Court has generally promoted permissive (open) access to information produced by the government and to public spaces. This means that journalists have a right to gather news on property that is open to the general public, such as public parks and outside public buildings. It also means that journalists are presumed to have access to public proceedings, such as city council meetings and the meeting minutes that result from them. Additionally, journalists are generally presumed to have access to government data and reports, unless such documents are determined to be protected by narrow exemptions (e.g., privacy or national security). However, the Courts have been unsympathetic to those who try to gather news on private property, including homes and places of business, without the proprietors' consent. In those cases, journalists can be arrested for trespassing, even if their work involves a story that is in the public interest.
At the federal level, journalists' access to documents produced by the federal government is largely governed by the Freedom of Information Act and journalists' access to official federal government proceedings and meetings is largely governed by the Government in the Sunshine Act. States also have their own individual open records and open meetings laws, which govern the same things but within the jurisdiction of the state (e.g., local courthouses). Some states, like Florida, have permissive transparency laws that make it easier for journalists to be watchdogs. Other states, like Massachusetts, have more restrictive laws, which make journalists' jobs more difficult.
It is important to note that such laws only apply to government agencies (and, in some instances, private companies acting on behalf of the government). In general, private companies and corporations do not have to comply with records requests. Notably, any government rejection of a public records request must be accompanied by a written explanation that includes the statutory reason for why the request was denied. Government employees sometimes do not have a good understanding of the laws themselves, and falls to the journalist to educate them. As such, it is very important that aspiring journalists familiarize themselves with regulations about access to information so that they may trigger the relevant legal requirements when asking government agencies for information (and push back when their request is improperly rejected).
The Supreme Court has also repeatedly ruled in favor of allowing journalists and journalistic outlets to publish confidential information and leaked information about matters that are in the public interest. In the case Bartnicki v. Vopper (2001), a teacher union’s chief negotiator, Gloria Bartnicki, was illegally recorded speaking with the union president about a contentious collective bargaining negotiation with the regional School Board. That intercepted recording was shared by the president of a local taxpayers' association with Fredrick Vopper, a talk radio host, who then played the tape on his show. Bartnicki contended that Vopper broke the law by broadcasting an illegally recorded conversation. In a 6-3 decision, the Court ruled that as long as someone did not violate a law in obtaining information — in this case, Vopper simply received and published the recording and did not illegally record the conversation himself — then that someone may generally publish the information so long as it involves a "matter of public concern."
While the Vopper decision was more recently affirmed in the case United States v. Stevens (2010), other recent national security and anti-espionage laws have tested the Court’s resolve in this regard. As such, journalists still run a legal risk when publishing leaks and information obtained through illicit means — especially if such information intersects with national security concerns.
Anonymity and Sourcing
The Supreme Court has generally protected anonymity under the First Amendment. However, such rights have been balanced against competing interests in areas of political activity, national security, and campaign finance.
Of particular note is that journalists can be legally compelled to reveal their anonymous sources. For example, journalists may be held in contempt of court or face obstruction of justice charges for failing to reveal who a source is during a civil or criminal proceeding against that unnamed source.
A landmark ruling in this area came in the Supreme Court’s decision in the case Branzburg v. Hayes (1972). Paul Branzburg, a reporter for The Louisville Courier-Journal, observed (in the course of his regular reporting duties) people manufacturing and using hashish. He then wrote two stories about drug use in Kentucky. Two of the individuals pictured and featured in the article were granted anonymity by Branzburg because they feared prosecution. However, when the article came to the attention of law-enforcement personnel, Branzburg was subpoenaed before a grand jury for the articles and ordered to name his sources (so they could be prosecuted). Branzburg refused to name the sources, citing First Amendment protections. Branzburg’s argument was rejected and he was punished for being in contempt of court. In a 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court asserted that the First Amendment’s protection of press freedom does not give journalists special privileges in court, and that Branzburg was correctly held for being in contempt of court.
The consequence of this is that journalists in the U.S. can be legally forced to reveal their sources. Journalists who decide not to comply can be imprisoned for obstruction of justice or contempt of court. This is not a hypothetical, either: Multiple journalists in the U.S. have spent time in jail because they believed they had a duty to protect their sources and live up to their promises when granting anonymity. Thus, journalists must be very careful and judicious when promising anonymity, and they must be prepared to face the potential consequences of such promises.
Privacy and Recordings
The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that journalists are free to photograph, film, or record audio in public spaces, as long as they are not getting in the way of the proceedings. This includes recording public officials and law enforcement officials as they carry out their duties in public — regardless of whether they consent to being recorded. For example, it is perfectly legal to record police officers as they marshal a protest on a city street, so long as the journalist is not obstructing the officers and adhering to their safety directives.
What constitutes a 'public space' can get tricky, though. For example, a public state university like the University of Massachusetts Amherst has some spaces that can be considered public forums, such as Haigis Mall and the campus pond, both of which can be accessed by the general public via public pathways. People (including visitors, students, administrators) can be freely recorded in such spaces. In contrast, UMass classroom buildings may be restricted to student use only, and students are likely to have an expectation of privacy within those spaces. As such, recordings in those spaces are only possible with the permission of the students, and in some cases, the university itself. This becomes even trickier when there is an invited speaker giving a lecture in an auditorium: Although that speaker may be speaking at a public institution, UMass officials have the legal authority to restrict any recordings of an event that takes place in UMass space. Conversely, they may choose to make the event completely public, in which case recordings of the speakers and attendees may be unrestricted.
At the heart of the Court’s interpretations of such incidents is the recorded individual’s expectation of privacy. In settings where a 'reasonable person' would not expect to be recorded, they may be able to make an intrusion on seclusion claim. For example, if a photojournalist positions themselves on a public sidewalk and uses a telephoto lens or a drone to record a person engaging in a private act at home, then the journalist is likely to have intruded on that person’s seclusion. Similarly, journalists may run afoul of the law by publishing private information about someone — such as details about a health condition — especially if that information is not deemed to be in the public interest.
Recording laws are especially relevant to journalists when it comes to interviewing sources. In some jurisdictions, journalists may record private exchanges (e.g., a phone interview) only if all people being recorded consent to the recording. Massachusetts is one such state, where so-called 'two-party consent' is required for any recording of private conversations. Put another way, it is a crime to secretly record people in Massachusetts when there is an expectation of privacy, as with a phone interview.
Many jurisdictions only require one party to consent to a recording, but it is nevertheless good ethical practice for journalists to request permission from their interviewees before recording the interview. When interviewing people across state lines — as with a long-distance phone call or video chat — it is safest to assume that consent from all parties is required because circumstance-specific legal questions may arise about which state’s consent law is most applicable.
Key Takeaways
• Journalists do not have special access to government documents or to public spaces. Laws that apply to regular people also apply to journalists.
• The Freedom of Information Act and the Government in the Sunshine Act govern journalists' access to public records and meetings at the federal level. States have their own separate laws for state records and meetings. Government records and meetings are typically presumed to be open, unless they fit into specific exemptions.
• Journalists can be forced by the courts to reveal their sources under penalty of imprisonment. U.S. journalists have been imprisoned for not revealing anonymous sources.
• In some states, including Massachusetts, interviewees must consent to having an interview recorded. Even when consent is not legally required, it is still good practice to ask for it. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/07%3A_Journalism_Law_and_Ethics/7.02%3A_Access_Anonymity_and_Privacy.txt |
Introduction
Journalists in the United States benefit from strong protections against government censorship that are rooted in the Free Press clause of the First Amendment. As such, journalists generally cannot be stopped from publishing even highly problematic information, from falsehoods to highly sensitive government documents. However, although journalists may be free to publish something, they can still face legal risks after publishing it.
In a similar vein, the First Amendment allows journalists (and other citizens) to advocate for a range of opinions, ideas, and actions — even those that run afoul of the law. And, the United States legal code permits journalists to make 'fair use' of copyrighted materials in their reporting, allowing them to both show and tell audiences about newsworthy affairs. However, such protections are not unconditional, and journalists must be aware of the legal framework in the U.S. in order to minimize their legal risks before and after publication.
Censorship and Prior Restraint
The Supreme Court has historically demonstrated a very strong aversion to government censorship of journalism, and has only permitted it in very limited circumstances. What we typically think of as censorship falls under the legal definition of prior restraint, which refers to an official government restriction of speech before it is published.
A landmark decision in this area was the case Near v. Minnesota (1931). Jay Near, who was the editor of The Saturday Press, had published a series of articles attacking several Minneapolis city officials for dereliction of duty. One of those officials sued The Saturday Press for engaging in "malicious, scandalous and defamatory" speech. The Minnesota state court agreed. It decided to ban any further publication of The Saturday Press under the Minnesota Public Nuisance Law — thereby effectively shutting down the publication. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that Minnesota’s law was "the essence of censorship," and further held that the government did not have the power to bar the publication of Jay Near’s writings in advance because it would constitute an impermissible prior restraint on expression. Such restraints, the court ruled, were only permissible in extreme cases, such as when publishing information would reveal crucial military information that would place troops at risk, when a publication contains obscenity, or when a publication may directly incite "acts of violence."
Although such prior restraint wasn’t allowed, the court’s decision was clear in that it would not stop any individual from suing Jay Near or The Saturday Press after publication. Put another way, protection against prior restraint does not extend to protections against other legal risks that may arise from publication. In fact, some charges, such as libel, require a demonstration of harm — which may only be established after publication.
The Near decision was reinforced in another crucial case, New York Times Co. v. United States (1971), which is also known as the "Pentagon Papers" case. In that case, Daniel Ellsberg secretly made copies of a large, classified government study of the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War and provided the documents to The New York Times. After several months of review, the Times began publishing a series of stories that included portions of the classified documents. President Richard Nixon’s administration, citing national security concerns, obtained a restraining order barring further publication of the Pentagon Papers. Following an emergency hearing, the Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, dissolved the restraining order, observing that "any system of prior restraints comes to this Court bearing a heavy presumption against its constitutional validity" and that "the Government thus carries a heavy burden of showing justification for the imposition of such a restraint."
Put another way, the Court ruled that it was up to the Nixon Administration to successfully prove that publication would result in inevitable, direct, and immediate peril to the United States — a high standard that it failed to meet when suing the Times. While the Pentagon Papers case does not offer journalists blanket permission to publish confidential documents, it did reinforce the high bar that the government must clear in order to stop something from being published in the first place.
It is important to note that these court decisions, and the First Amendment itself, only guard against government censorship. The owner of a journalistic outlet, or an editor within it, is well within their rights to refuse to publish a particular story. Similarly, a third-party platform (e.g., Facebook) or moderators within its groups are generally free to ban particular stories from being shared on their platform. Additionally, these decisions offer no obstacle to self-censorship, whereby journalists choose to not publish certain material for fear of reprisal. Self-censorship is not uncommon, especially when journalists fear alienating certain sources, and losing access to them, by publishing damaging information about those sources.
Copyright
The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that copyright and free speech are compatible. In particular, it has ruled that while 'facts' cannot be copyrighted, the ways in which those facts are expressed can be copyrighted. For example, it is not possible to copyright the fact that Dr. Zamith gave a lecture about media law on a particular date. However, the exact expression, "Dr. Zamith spoke eloquently in a riveting lecture about media law that was met with great acclaim" may be copyrighted by the author. A practical consequence of this is that journalistic outlets cannot just use someone else’s original work without their permission — for example, by copying and pasting a competitor’s news story — even if they offer attribution to the original work by stating who produced it, or by linking to the original piece.
However, the Supreme Court has long been open to different 'fair use' doctrines — one of which became codified as law by the Copyright Act of 1976. The current doctrine allows portions of copyrighted products (e.g., an exclusive interview published by a competitor) to be published without their consent by someone else (e.g., in a competitor’s news article) if it 'passes' a four-part test. The four components of the test are: (1) the purpose and character of the use, including if it is for educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work. There is no codified point system for this test. Instead, courts interpret the facts of a specific case according to this general guidance and issue a determination of whether the use 'passed' the test (and is therefore not in violation of copyright protections).
Copyright therefore provides journalists and journalistic outlets with a legal remedy when their work is republished without authorization, and fair use protections can be leveraged to allow journalists to include portions of copyrighted work, such as segments from an explosive book or citizen-recorded videos, in their reporting.
Incitement and Inflammatory Speech
The Supreme Court has ruled that speech or publication that advocates for illegal conduct, such as attacking an elected official or activist, is legally protected, unless that advocacy is likely to incite imminent lawless action. This means that abstract advocacy (e.g., writing that a particular politician 'should be shot') is protected, though specific calls to action (e.g., writing that people should gather at a particular time and place to shoot the politician) are less likely to receive protection.
A crucial Supreme Court decision in this area is Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969). In that case, Clarence Brandenburg, a Ku Klux Klan leader in rural Ohio, contacted a reporter at a Cincinnati television station and invited him to cover a KKK rally. Portions of the rally were filmed and showed men in robes and hoods, some of whom were carrying firearms and engaging in cross-burning. One of the speeches made reference to the possibility of "revengeance" against two specific racial and religious groups, as well as their supporters. Another speech advocated for those groups' forced expulsion from the United States. Brandenburg was charged with advocating violence under Ohio’s criminal syndicalism statute, and he argued that his speech was protected by the First Amendment.
In a per curiam decision, meaning a decision that was not signed by individual justices but spoke for the Court as a whole, the Supreme Court ruled that such speech is protected because the "mere advocacy" of violence does not rise to the standard of "incitement to imminent lawless action," which the Court has ruled is not protected by the U.S. Constitution. In particular, the decision helped establish the two-prong "Brandenburg test," under which the government may only restrict speech if (1) the speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action" and (2) the speech is "likely to incite or produce such action."
Put another way, individuals — from opinion columnists to sources quoted by journalists — can speak, publish, and advocate freely unless it can be shown that they are putting others at clear risk. (Whether a journalist should quote certain individuals or give oxygen to problematic assertions is thus more often an ethical question.)
Key Takeaways
• The Supreme Court has historically had a strong aversion to government censorship of journalists, and the bar for preventing something from being published is very high. However, just because something can be published does not mean that journalists are free from other legal risks after publication.
• Facts cannot be copyrighted, but the ways in which journalists (and others) express those facts can be copyrighted. It is not enough to offer attribution. Unless a journalist is making 'fair use' of some copyrighted material, permission from the copyright holder is necessary.
• Speech and publication may advocate for lawless behavior, so long as that advocacy is abstract or unlikely to produce imminent lawlessness. This covers both opinion columnists and advocacy-minded journalists, as well as the sources they quote. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/07%3A_Journalism_Law_and_Ethics/7.03%3A_Censorship_Copyright_and_Incitement.txt |
Introduction
The U.S. Supreme Court has generally granted leeway for journalists and journalistic outlets to publish or say inaccurate things, as long as the errors are made in good faith.
Much of the relevant case law within the context of journalism falls under the umbrella of libel, which refers to the publication of a false statement of fact that seriously harms someone’s reputation. (Regular oral speech that is not published — with publication being anything from a printed news article to a broadcast story that airs to a tweet that appears online — falls under the umbrella of slander.) Libel is one of the main legal threats thrust upon journalists when they publish critical information. It is therefore important for journalists to be well-versed on the legal requirements for advancing a libel suit, as well as the classes of defenses that a journalist can offer.
Proving Libel
Libel charges require the plaintiff (the injured party) to prove a few different things. First, they must prove that the defendant published the defamatory statement, meaning that they distributed it to someone besides themselves and the plaintiff. There is no requirement that the statement be distributed broadly or to the general public; simply posting it on a small, private Signal group may be enough.
Second, the plaintiff must prove that a 'reasonable person' will infer that the statement is about the plaintiff. The statement does not need to explicitly name a person. As long as there is enough identifying information in the statement for a person who knows the plaintiff to be reasonably likely to recognize the statement as being about the plaintiff, the requirement may be satisfied.
Third, the plaintiff must prove that the statement harmed their reputation, as opposed to being merely insulting or offensive. Generally speaking, it must be a false statement of fact that exposes a person to hatred, ridicule, or contempt; lowers them in the esteem of their peers; causes them to be shunned; or injures them in their business or trade. This could be satisfied, for example, if a statement alleges that the plaintiff is gay and the plaintiff can show that someone began treating them differently as a result of that information.
Fourth, the plaintiff must show that the statement was published with some level of fault. Fault requires that the defendant either did something they should not have done or failed to do something they should have.
Finally, the plaintiff must show that the statement was published without any applicable privilege. A number of privileges may be available depending on what was published by the defendant and the source they relied upon for the information.
Within journalism, the most common defense against the charge of libel is truth. If a statement is truthful, then it does not matter if the plaintiff is harmed. For example, an article claiming that Dr. Zamith clubs baby seals for fun would not be libelous if I had repeatedly clubbed baby seals for personal enjoyment, even if the publication resulted in fewer students taking my classes. (For the record, I do not club baby seals, for fun or professional reasons.) Notably, the burden of proof is generally on the plaintiff to show that a statement is false. Thus, in that example, I would have to show that there’s no evidence that I engage in such behavior — and any video showing me engaging in the act should be enough to summarily dismiss the libel suit. (In limited circumstances, the burden of proof may fall to the defendant.)
Statements of pure opinion, which cannot be proven true or false, cannot form the basis of a defamation (or libel) claim. For example, the assertion that "Dr. Zamith is a jerk" is clearly a statement of opinion and cannot serve as the basis of a libel claim. (However, the assertion that "Dr. Zamith is a jerk because he clubs baby seals" involves a statement of fact.) Additionally, the standards for harm and fault do vary depending on the plaintiff’s position in society.
Public and Private Figures
Two particular Supreme Court decisions have clarified the libel protections and responsibilities for journalists. In New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964), the Times was alleged to have committed libel by publishing a full-page advertisement by supporters of Martin Luther King Jr. that criticized the police in Montgomery, Alabama, for their mistreatment of civil rights protesters. The ad had a number of factual inaccuracies, such as the number of times King had been arrested during the protests, and the Times subsequently published a retraction of the advertisement. Nevertheless, Montgomery Public Safety commissioner, L. B. Sullivan, sued the Times. Although he was not named in the ad, Sullivan argued that the inaccurate criticism of actions by the police in the ad was defamatory to him because it was his duty to supervise the police department. In an unanimous decision, the Court ruled that "the First Amendment protects the publication of all statements, even false ones, about the conduct of public officials except when statements are made with actual malice (with knowledge that they are false) or in reckless disregard of their truth or falsity."
Put another way, when it comes to public officials, in the context of carrying out their public duties, the plaintiff must show that the journalistic error was due to an intent to harm the official or as a result of recklessness — meaning a journalist plainly disregarded information that should have been evident to them. This is a high bar, as it can be immensely difficult to prove a journalist’s intent to harm. Later cases extended the "actual malice" standard to encompass public figures, which include not only public officials but anyone who has gained a significant degree of fame or notoriety in general or in the context of a particular issue or controversy. This may include celebrities, elite athletes, or regular citizens who become embroiled in highly public debates.
Later, in the case Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc. (1974), the Supreme Court established a separate standard for private figures, such as a teacher or local business owner. In this instance, a series of articles appearing in the magazine American Opinion claimed that Elmer Gertz, a lawyer who represented an individual shot and killed by a police officer, had orchestrated the officer’s conviction; that Gertz was a member of various communist front organizations; and that he had a lengthy criminal record of his own. Gertz sued over those false statements.
Although the editor of the publication conceded the errors and stated that he had made no independent efforts to verify the claims, he countered that the publication did not involve actual malice and was protected under the New York Times Co. v. Sullivan standard. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled in Gertz’s favor, noting that public figures had access to more resources and ways to defend themselves than private figures, and therefore public figures should be held to higher standards in libel cases. The Court further held that states could formulate their own, lower standards of libel for statements made about private figures. In practice, this has resulted in a lower standard for private figures across the U.S., with private figures having only to show that a journalist was negligent, or that they failed to engage in basic journalistic practices like trying to verify basic information prior to publication.
Although journalists who follow best practices receive robust protections against libel, they must nevertheless sometimes weigh the threat of a libel suit. Even if a journalist is well-positioned to defend themselves, the legal process can be very expensive — especially if the journalist lacks the support of an organization with a legal team on retainer, as is the case for most freelancers. In fact, several powerful figures have wielded libel lawsuits as a weapon against critical journalism, knowing that even an unsuccessful lawsuit is likely to make other journalists think twice about writing critical stories about them in the future. While some states have enacted laws penalizing frivolous lawsuits in recent years, they nevertheless continue to serve as powerful weapons for silencing journalists.
Key Takeaways
• Libel refers to the publication of a false statement of fact that seriously harms someone’s reputation.
• In the United States, libel claims usually must be proven by the plaintiff, and they must prove multiple things. In contrast, a defendant needs to only show that the statement was true or based on some form of privileged communication. Statements of pure opinion are not eligible for libel claims.
• In the United States, public figures must clear a very high bar to succeed in a libel suit. The standards are considerably lower for private figures, though it remains a high bar. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/07%3A_Journalism_Law_and_Ethics/7.04%3A_Libel.txt |
Introduction
Ethics refer to the moral principles or values held or shown by an individual person.
The term comes from the Greek "ethos," which in turn refers to a person’s character. Ethics are intended to help resolve questions dealing with what is right and what is wrong. Ethics ultimately reside at the individual level — that is, they reflect what an individual considers to be acceptable behavior. However, such moral principles are shaped by one’s societal and cultural norms, religion, and even familial environments. In the case of journalism, there are also specific professional codes of ethics that journalists must abide by.
Laws vs. Ethics
Ethics are very different from laws. Philosophically, the law is typically concerned with what is legal or illegal, while ethics are concerned with what is right and what is wrong. These differ substantially, as something may be legal yet arguably unethical (e.g., enacting a death penalty) and illegal yet arguably ethical (e.g., stealing a loaf of bread to feed a hungry child). Additionally, laws are usually determined by institutions (e.g., a state government) and enforced through institutions (e.g., the police), whereas ethics are typically self-legislated (e.g., within groups or individuals) and self-enforced (e.g., through social pressure or exclusion). Finally, legality is based on statutory boundaries that are supposed to apply equally to all members of a jurisdiction. In contrast, ethics are more ambiguous and may vary considerably according to members of a group.
A simpler way to think about this, however, is that laws set a minimal standard, whereas ethics set a benchmark or ideal behavior to strive toward. Put another way, laws are about what you can do, and ethics are about what you should do.
Journalistic ethics are especially important in the United States because there is no licensing system for U.S. journalists. Anyone can claim to be a journalist, which is very different from professions like doctors and lawyers that require formal credentialing. This is not the case everywhere, either. Some countries require journalists (or the organizations that employ them) to be licensed by the government in order to officially publish journalism.
In lieu of licensing, self-regulation becomes important for promoting good journalism — both in terms of products and behaviors. The perception that journalism is both good and intends to do good is important for its recognition as a pillar of democratic society. Put another way, a strong sense of professional ethics is important for gaining the public’s trust.
A Spectrum for Ethics
There are several philosophical approaches for determining what is ethical and what is not. Placed on a spectrum, we’d likely find deontological approaches on one end and teleological approaches on the other.
Deontological approaches focus on the principles that drive the action. Put another way, even if the consequence of an action is bad, it would be moral if it was driven by good motives and followed best practices. An example of this approach is Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative approach, wherein the ethical duty is the same all of the time, in every circumstance, and with little regard for the consequences. Under a deontological approach, a reporter would be expected to refuse to go undercover and lie about their profession because lying is unethical, even if it means missing out on an important story about water contamination.
Teleological approaches focus on the result of the action. Put another way, if the outcome (or goal) is "good," then the action is moral, with little weight placed on how one reached that goal. An example of this approach would be Utilitarianism, which asserts that the most ethical act is the one that brings the greatest good to the greatest number of people. Under a teleological approach, a reporter would be expected to agree to go undercover and lie about their profession because a larger group of people — presumably, most members of a city — would benefit from the story about water contamination than would be harmed by the lying.
There is a vast middle ground between these approaches, but deontology and teleology are illustrative of the distinct approaches to processes for determining the most ethical choice in a given context. Other approaches include situational ethics, multiple duties, and virtue ethics.
SPJ Code of Ethics
In a 2013 survey of U.S. journalists, researchers found that 93% of them reported at least some agreement with the statement, "journalists should always adhere to codes of professional ethics, regardless of situation and context." Put another way, although ethics are ultimately determined by the individual, journalists in the United States strongly believe in adhering to shared professional codes of ethics.
There isn’t a single code of ethics for journalists in the United States. For example, photojournalists have their own professional code of ethics through the National Press Photographers Association, and even individual news organizations like The New York Times have their own codes of ethics.
However, the most influential code of ethics in the U.S. is the Society of Professional Journalists' (SPJ) Code of Ethics, from which other professional and organizational journalistic codes often borrow. The SPJ code is divided into four main ethical principles: seek truth and report it, minimize harm, act independently, and be accountable and transparent. These principles sometimes clash with one another, requiring journalists to balance which principles are most important under their personal ethical philosophies. SPJ’s Code of Ethics includes a series of detailed statements for each principle, which is intended to guide action for specific kinds of dilemmas.
Seek Truth and Report It
SPJ’s Code of Ethics stresses that ethical journalism should be accurate and fair, and that journalists should therefore be honest and courageous in gathering, reporting, and interpreting information.
This involves ensuring that all information is verified before it is released, and that original sources — people, publications, historical documents, or other records that document events first-hand — should be used whenever possible. Journalists must also take care not to misrepresent or oversimplify things when promoting, previewing or summarizing a story. The deliberate distortion of information must be avoided, and such distortions are patently unethical. Opinion and commentary should be clearly labeled as such, so that audiences do not confuse them with news.
Sources must be clearly identified when possible, with the public given as much information as is appropriate for ascertaining the source’s position, reliability, and potential motivations. Journalists should therefore be judicious with their offers of anonymity, and should explain transparently in their work why a source was granted anonymity. Journalists also have a moral responsibility to seek sources whose voices the public seldom hears, and to avoid stereotyping.
Journalists should diligently seek subjects of news coverage to allow them to respond to criticism or allegations of wrongdoing. Journalists should avoid undercover or surreptitious methods of gathering information unless more traditional, open methods will not yield information that is of substantial public interest. Put another way, the SPJ Code recognizes that there are instances where journalists have good reason to mask their identity and purpose — but such tactics should be used sparingly and only as a last resort. Plagiarism and fabrication are strictly forbidden.
Minimize Harm
SPJ’s code also stresses that ethical journalism treats sources, subjects, colleagues, and members of the public as human beings deserving of respect.
This involves balancing the public’s need for information against potential harm or discomfort. The pursuit of the news is not a license for undue intrusiveness or needless invasion of privacy. Journalists must therefore show compassion for those who may be affected by news coverage, and must be especially sensitive when dealing with juveniles, victims of sex crimes, and sources who are inexperienced or unable to give consent. For example, a journalist may opt to omit an undocumented immigrant’s full name and place of work from a story because it might put them in danger. It is important for journalists to recognize and respect cultural differences.
Crucially, journalists should avoid pandering to lurid curiosity, even if others do. Put another way, individuals' privacy must be weighed against the public’s need for information — and some details are simply not needed for a story to make the necessary impact. Journalists should recognize that private people have a greater right to control information about themselves than public figures and others who seek power, influence, or attention. In conjunction with this, journalists must consider the long-term implications of the extended reach and permanence of publication.
Act Independently
According to the SPJ code, the highest and primary obligation of ethical journalism is to serve the public.
As such, journalists must avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived. Often, a journalist may feel that they can disassociate their interests from their journalistic work. For example, they may believe that they can compartmentalize their romantic relationship with a City Council member and continue to effectively report on the City Council. This is rarely possible, and even if it were, the public would still likely have concerns about that arrangement — and thus become less trusting of the journalist, their journalism, and their journalistic outlet. Conflicts like these should be avoided altogether by having journalists excuse themselves from reporting on stories about topics or subjects that introduce a potential conflict of interest. When a conflict of interest is unavoidable (e.g., the reporter happened to be around when news broke involving their partner), the unavoidable conflict must be disclosed to the audience. This disclosure is a form of journalistic transparency.
Acting independently also means rejecting gifts, favors, money, or any special treatment from sources or the subjects of reporting. For example, journalists should not keep a phone that was given to them for the purpose of a product review. Similarly, it is unethical to pay sources for access or directly for information. Although there are examples of journalists paying sources for exclusive interviews, it is an uncommon and highly problematic practice in the U.S.
The SPJ code also stresses avoiding political and other outside activities that could jeopardize a reporter’s impartiality or credibility. This point has become more contentious in recent years, but most journalists in the U.S. currently believe that public advocacy or visible support for causes is problematic, and should therefore be avoided.
Be Accountable and Transparent
Finally, the SPJ also emphasizes that ethical journalism means taking responsibility for one’s work and explaining journalistic decisions to the public.
This involves explaining ethical choices and processes to audiences. This might include publishing a companion piece that describes the decision-making process through which an organization felt it was necessary to engage in undercover reporting for a feature story. It also means acknowledging mistakes and correcting them promptly. When corrections are necessary, they should appear in prominent areas so that people who were exposed to the misinformation can become aware of the correct information. These actions, too, make the journalistic process more transparent to news audiences.
Being accountable also involves exposing unethical conduct in journalism, including within one’s own organization. Put another way, even if a journalist does not engage in unethical behavior themselves, it is important for the profession of journalism for all journalists to call out bad behavior by their peers. Protecting one’s peers is often a selfish and unethical act, and it does not lead to better journalism.
Key Takeaways
• Ethics refer to the moral principles or values held or shown by an individual. They represent a higher standard than what the law encompasses.
• There are different philosophies for ethical decision-making. They typically range from a sole focus on actions to a sole focus on outcomes, with many philosophies existing in between those two extremes.
• The SPJ Code of Ethics is the most prominent and influential code of ethics in U.S. journalism. It is guided by four main principles: seek truth and report it, minimize harm, act independently, and be accountable and transparent. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/07%3A_Journalism_Law_and_Ethics/7.05%3A_Professional_Codes_of_Ethics.txt |
Introduction
Although "journalism" is a singular term, which may imply a homogeneous entity, it is helpful to think of it as an umbrella term for a number of distinct forms, practices, and genres. Put another way, journalism has many looks, can be produced in many ways, and can be about many things.
There are many ways to categorize different types of journalism. One helpful schema involves three dimensions: media vehicle, beat, and method. A single story is likely to be shaped by its categorization within each dimension. For example, you may have a television (media vehicle) segment about politics (beat) reported through a breaking news approach (method). That story would be tailored to meet the expectations (and advantages) of each of those dimensions, from its storytelling structure to the depth of the report.
Media Vehicle
There are a number of different media vehicles that can be used for conveying journalism. These include text-oriented (e.g., newspapers or online articles), audio-oriented (e.g., radio or podcasts), and visual-oriented (e.g., television or photography).
The media vehicle matters because it offers certain technical affordances (possibilities and limitations). For example, photojournalism relies primarily on still photographs to convey the essence of a development or issue. A photojournalist may need to capture multiple facets of a complex issue through a single, representative photograph — perhaps a melting glacier with a skeletal polar bear in the foreground. Put another way, the photojournalist may need to aim to convey a thousand words with just one shot. (They also write accompanying photo captions, but those rarely exceed a couple of sentences.) Alternatively, the photojournalist may be tasked with producing a photo essay, wherein they piece together multiple photographs that capture different dimensions of an issue in a manner that conveys a narrative. Photojournalism shoots can involve candid, heat-of-the-moment reporting (e.g., documenting a battle in a conflict zone) as well as documenting daily life for a particular group of people (e.g., homeless veterans).
Similarly, news produced for a television newscast is likely to differ in important ways from news produced for an online news article. For example, a story about local opioid addiction rates may need to be condensed into a three-minute TV segment. That might involve just 200 words of voice-over narration on the journalist’s part. In contrast, an average article on the BBC’s website is roughly 750 words in length. (If they’re writing for The New York Times, that’s closer to 1,000 words.) The shorter length for the newscast requires the journalist to hone in on a narrower aspect of the issue, or perhaps offer a more superficial account of its many aspects. Moreover, the style of writing differs: Writing for the ear is distinctly different from writing for the eyes.
Beat
Reporting jobs are often oriented around either beat reporting or general assignment reporting.
Beats are niche categories of journalistic coverage in which individual journalists may specialize. A beat can be a topic, a person, or an institution, though they are most commonly niche topics. For example, a political journalist might cover the politics beat, the election beat, or the Kamala Harris beat — or all three. Beat reporters immerse themselves in their beats and gain specialized insights and knowledge of the key stakeholders, actors, trends, and influences within those beats over time. As they do so, they become experts in those beats, and that expertise appears in the stories they identify and cover. Moreover, by virtue of repeatedly covering the same topics or people, beat reporters tend to develop deep and specialized sourcing networks, often resulting in elevated access to some sources and exclusive information.
Beats are not just genres. They may require distinct approaches to newsgathering and involve different audience expectations for storytelling structures. Consider the film beat: It may involve a mixture of reported and objective pieces (e.g., news about the latest film Ryan Gosling has signed on to), short lifestyle features (e.g., a non-combative and abridged interview with Gosling about his morning workout routine), and subjective opinion pieces (e.g., a review of Gosling’s latest movie). By contrast, the courts beat is more likely to have inverted pyramid-style stories detailing incidents and events derived from reviews of court documents, or reports about arguments in an on-going case. (Audiences are unlikely to expect short interviews with judges about their morning case review routine.)
Common beats include business, courts and crime, education, film, food, health, international affairs, music, politics, science, sports, style, and technology. Some outlets (especially niche publications) have even more specialized beats, like Big Tech, Medicare, or Green Energy. Many journalistic outlets organize their staffs and their editorial content based on distinctions between specialized beats, meaning that they will have a reporter (or group of reporters) who occupy a particular physical space in the newsroom and publish primarily on a dedicated portion of the news product (e.g., a "Science" section) based on their beat. While many journalists focus on a single beat, some journalists may be tasked with covering multiple beats — especially during times of newsroom cutbacks.
Not all journalists are assigned to a beat, though. Some journalists' expertise lies in their ability to quickly learn new topics and make sense of them for non-specialized audiences. These journalists are often called general assignment reporters because they may be tasked with covering an entertainment story one day and a court story the next. The need to cover such a wide array of topics often comes at a cost, though: General assignment reporters are typically more likely to get facts wrong (especially with an unfamiliar topic), may struggle to offer deep coverage, and their sourcing network for a topic may be sparse or superficial. Nevertheless, many journalistic outlets will complement their beat reporters with at least one general assignment reporter in order to have a frequent and predictable stream of news stories and to help round off the outlet’s news coverage as needed.
Method
Journalism may also be distinguished based on the approach to reporting that is used. Examples of common approaches are breaking news reporting, straight news reporting, feature reporting, enterprise reporting, investigative reporting, and advocacy reporting.
Breaking news reporting involves covering a development with a particular emphasis on timeliness. Breaking news stories depict current events, recent developments, and information that is generally just coming to light. For example, this might include a shooting outside a bar. Breaking news stories are often updated regularly as news develops and as journalists uncover new information about the sometimes ongoing event. Put another way, breaking news reporting doesn’t aim to deeply report multiple aspects of a development and package it as a single, stand-alone news product. Instead, it concedes its incompleteness and focuses on unearthing and describing the most recent developments.
Straight news reporting aims to synthesize recent developments and contextualize them into a stand-alone news product. It is similar to breaking news reporting in that it emphasizes the timely presentation of information in a clear, quick, and straight-to-the-point manner — often by using a story structure like the inverted pyramid. However, compared to breaking news reporting, there is more of an emphasis on sense-making and contextualizing information, with the expectation that a story will be more complete and not require constant updating (even if the event is still developing).
Feature reporting allows journalists to take a more creative approach to the information they present. While the newsgathering methods may be similar to those of traditional reporting, the newswriting approach is quite different. First, they are typically written with a more open-ended and less-strict story structure. Feature stories often apply creative storytelling techniques, such as playful or poetic language, narrative structures, detailed anecdotes, and multi-part vignettes. Second, because of their more open-ended writing styles and less strict relationship to timeliness, feature stories are often long-form and evergreen. Evergreen stories are not tied to a specific time peg, or timely event. They are designed to maintain their relevance to audiences for a longer period of time.
Enterprise reporting relies heavily on original reporting driven by a journalist. It is called enterprise reporting because it requires an enterprising journalist who is able to develop their own story ideas, sources, and means of gaining access to information. (The opposite of enterprise reporting would be reporting that relies primarily on press releases, press conferences, or news that is given in some way to a journalist rather than uncovered by that journalist.) Enterprise reporting often involves creative and advanced reporting methods, such as public records requests, data collection and analysis, and access to historical documents. The result is often, though not always, a longer-form and in-depth news product.
Investigative reporting is a particularly rigorous form of reporting and one of the most powerful types of journalism for advancing the public’s knowledge. Investigative reporters dedicate themselves to the sleuth-like pursuit, through a wide variety of investigative techniques, of information about a niche topic that is often difficult to access. The subjects of investigative reporting are frequently topics of deep conflict and vast public importance, such as political or corporate corruption, violence, crime, financial malfeasance, or other cases of wrongdoing and injustice. Investigative journalists dedicate weeks, months, and even years to the dogged pursuit of a specific person, entity, or topic in order to bring their subject to public light. This type of journalism is strongly associated with watchdog journalism because of the role it plays in holding powerful actors accountable. In this case, investigative journalists are the metaphorical watchdogs who seek to make the actions of the powerful transparent to their audiences. (However, watchdog journalism is a broader form of journalism that also includes traditional, day-to-day reporting on the mundane matters of governance, such as attending School Board meetings.) Investigative stories often take the shape of long-form stories (or a series of shorter stories) because of the amount of reporting and information they comprise.
Advocacy reporting is a form of reporting that distinguishes itself by formulating a clear opinion, or substantiating an existing one, with timely, factual information. This approach outwardly rejects the norm of neutrality, and instead aims to promote a cause or intervention. For example, advocacy reporting may focus on illustrating the plight of young undocumented immigrants by including anecdotes about the challenges they face, statistics about the prevalence of the issue, and offering the journalist’s evaluation of a key policy presently being considered by lawmakers. Such reporting is typically labeled as a "news analysis" or presented as an author’s column in an Opinion section. However, it may also be the approach to reporting that defines the identity of a journalistic outlet (and is therefore not segregated from the other reporting done by that outlet). Not all opinion pieces warrant the label of advocacy reporting, though. Many are better categorized as "opinion writing" if they do not follow at least some of the staple practices of journalism, like verifying information.
Hard vs. Soft News
Another way of categorizing journalism is through the distinction of "hard" and "soft" news.
Hard news journalism refers to breaking news and reports about serious or hard-hitting topics that are both timely and of civic interest. They are usually based on factual information and rigorous research. Political journalism, business journalism, and watchdog journalism are all typically recognized forms of hard news.
Soft news journalism refers to reports about predominantly lifestyle and entertainment affairs, or other topics of human interest. While such journalism may involve rigorous research, it is also more open to interpretive and literary accounts. Sports journalism, entertainment journalism, and celebrity coverage are all typically recognized forms of soft news.
Although this categorization schema is quite popular — it is not uncommon to hear those terms in the newsroom — it is also arguably over-simplistic and does a disservice to certain genres. Specifically, hard news is often used to connote a superior form of journalism, and is often talked about within the industry as being more important (and pure) than soft news. However, consider the case of a rigorously reported investigative piece unearthing corruption in a multi-billion dollar sports league, resulting in criminal prosecution of league executives. It would be a disservice to label that as soft news — with its implied inferiority — simply because it is "a sports story." Conversely, a puff piece on a politician designed to help a journalist gain access hardly warrants the label of hard journalism.
Instead, it is more fruitful to view journalism through a more nuanced typology that takes into account dimensions like the media vehicle, beat, and reporting method associated with that piece of journalism. This focuses less on a shortsighted heuristic for determining a story’s import based on its genre and instead allows us to think more about the norms and expectations associated with a journalistic form.
Key Takeaways
• One way to categorize different types of journalism is to focus on three dimensions: media vehicle, beat, and method.
• The media vehicle matters because it offers certain technical opportunities and limitations, and will have some associated norms. Most media vehicles can be sub-categorized under text-oriented, audio-oriented, and visual-oriented, but hybrid forms also exist.
• Reporting jobs are often oriented around either beat reporting or general assignment reporting. Beats refer to niche categories of coverage that journalists may specialize in.
• Journalism may also be distinguished based on the journalist’s approach to reporting. Common approaches include breaking news reporting, feature reporting, and investigative reporting.
• Journalism is also sometimes categorized under labels of "hard" news and "soft" news, with the former encompassing genres like crime and politics, and the latter genres like entertainment and sports. Although popular within the industry, this typology is arguably overly simplistic and problematic. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/08%3A_Preparing_a_News_Story/8.01%3A_Types_of_Journalism.txt |
Introduction
Opinion-based journalism has deep roots in U.S. journalism. Early U.S. newspapers regularly featured opinionated political coverage that reflected the ideals and perspectives of the papers' owners or the parties who subsidized their production. The resulting newspaper coverage was frequently partisan and subjective in a way that would seem foreign even today.
However, the relationship between journalism and objectivity grew closer over time. This was most notable in the early 20th century, when newspapers began to move toward a more neutral presentation of information in order to attract larger audiences. (By sticking to a middle ground and giving voice to multiple perspectives, journalists could more easily appeal to audiences supporting different sides of an issue. That, in turn, increased subscriptions and newspaper circulation.) Today, both objectivity and neutrality — and the image of an independent journalist providing "just the facts" — are idealized norms of U.S. journalism. Indeed, the most common complaint about journalism in the U.S. is that it is "too biased."
This goal of gathering information objectively and presenting it neutrally has not led to the disappearance of opinion in U.S. journalism. Today, the two cohabitate, sometimes uncomfortably, across organizations and the industry at large. At more traditional journalistic outlets, they are sometimes physically separated, with clearly labeled "News" and "Editorial" or "Opinion" sections. Some outlets, especially newer, digitally native ones, pool opinion and objective reporting together into a single stream. (This is not simply an old-media versus new-media distinction, though. Some newer outlets do maintain a clear separation in order to appear more professional by adhering to the traditional norms.) Additionally, some U.S. outlets reject the objectivity and neutrality norms altogether, believing that the best journalism is subjective.
Even as U.S. journalism moved toward the norm of objectivity, editors and publishers still saw an important role for subjective opinion pieces. They were vehicles through which opinion journalists, experts, and members of the community could weigh in on public issues and offer social commentary. Indeed, opinion-based journalism and editorial content have long been seen as central to the journalistic role conception of providing a public forum for vigorous debate. This remains the case today.
Types of Opinion-Based Journalism
There are several types of opinion-based forms of journalism. The most common ones are editorials, op-eds, and columns. Another type of journalism that is sometimes associated with opinion-journalism is the news analysis.
Editorials
An editorial is an opinion piece written to persuade audiences to adopt a specific perspective or take a specific action in response to an issue. For example, an editorial about a U.S. Presidential election might encourage audiences to vote for a particular candidate, or even just simply to vote. Editorials present a series of key points intended to advance an overarching argument. Although editorials are intentionally subjective, they often include reported and verified facts that make a case for their argument, such as polling data and other statistics that indicate the favorability of the position the editorial writer is arguing for. This factual basis is sometimes drawn from the editorial writer’s original reporting, but it is more often drawn from information first unearthed through the outlet’s objective news coverage.
Although editorials are often written by a single author, the decision about which side of an issue an outlet will favor in its editorial coverage is a group decision. Outlets that publish editorials usually feature an editorial board comprised mostly of different section editors and managers, who vote on an issue before the editorial is assigned to a board member for writing. When the editorial is published, it comes to represent the collective perspective of a outlet’s editorial board — and through them, of the outlet itself. Editorials are usually published anonymously (without a byline) to maintain the perception that they represent the views of the editorial branch of the outlet rather than an individual journalist or editor. In the case of a newspaper or online news site, editorials usually appear on the Editorial Page or in the Opinion section of the publication. This separation is intended to make clear to readers that this content is opinion-based and should not be confused with the reported, fact-based content that appears elsewhere in the news product.
Op-Eds
The term "op-ed" is short for "opposite of the editorial page." Like an editorial, an op-ed is a subjective opinion piece produced for the purpose of persuading its audiences to adopt a point of view or action in response to a topic for which there are multiple sides. Unlike an editorial, an op-ed generally represents the opposite side of an issue than what the editorial already took. For example, an op-ed may contend that a climate change bill supported by an outlet in an editorial is too costly and burdensome to businesses. Additionally, opposing op-eds may be featured in instances where the organization has not published an editorial.
Op-eds are generally written by a freelance or guest writer who is not employed by or associated with the outlet. This includes elected officials, political candidates, academics, and public intellectuals. They are distinguished as such through their bylines, which clearly identify the author and their affiliation.
Columns
Columns are opinion-based pieces that are broader in nature than either editorials or op-eds. While they are written from the author’s point of view, and often include first-person language, they are not limited to advocating for a particular action or point of view. Columns can tackle any number of subjects through a variety of different lenses, as long as they present a personal experience or perspective related to the topic they cover. A columnist could, for example, share their experience as a soldier abroad, advocate for the adoption of gender-inclusive bathrooms, tell a story about adopting their first dog, or relate any number of first-person experiences or opinions.
Journalistic outlets sometimes employ recurring columnists dedicated to specific beats, such as film criticism, sports, fashion, and domestic advice. They may also employ a columnist who opines or reflects on a different topic each week. For example, such a columnist might relay their thoughts on legalizing a drug one week and their experience helping their eldest child move in to a college the next.
Additionally, outlets may feature editorial cartoons by a professional cartoonist (or license cartoons from different cartoonists). Editorial cartoons have proven to be particularly influential at different points in U.S. history, often by lampooning powerful individuals and capturing public sentiment in a humorous but striking manner. Several journalistic outlets also regularly reserve space for user-generated opinion content, such as letters to the editor (or, more recently, tweets and posts from audience members).
News Analyses
News analyses are pieces of journalism that aim to place news events or developments (e.g., the proposal of major legislation by a political party) within a broader context. Rather than focusing on the latest details about the event or development, the primary objective of these pieces is to situate the event or development within a broader history or trend. Put another way, news analyses aim to combat information overload by synthesizing the existing coverage and describing how it fits into a bigger puzzle. This involves describing relevant background, historical details, and both supporting and contradicting factual information.
News analyses are typically written by journalists (especially beat reporters), and not traditional opinion writers. While these pieces are not intended to convey the author’s explicit opinions, the act of synthesizing and contextualizing the information involves a higher degree of interpretation than so-called 'straight' news stories. As such, news analyses are often clearly labeled as analyses, though they may appear alongside typical news stories (and not on dedicated opinion sections).
Key Takeaways
• Despite its modern relationship with objectivity and neutrality, U.S. journalism has maintained a role for subjective opinion pieces. Namely, they’re vehicles through which opinion journalists, experts, and members of the community can weigh in on a public issue.
• Opinion journalism includes editorials, op-eds, and columns, as well as editorial cartoons and user-generated opinion pieces like letters to the editor. Such journalism usually aims to persuade readers (though they must still draw upon a factual foundation to be opinion journalism). Additionally, journalists may produce news analyses that aim to contextualize more episodic news stories.
• Opinion pieces usually appear in the Editorial Page or Opinion section of a news product. This separation is intended to make clear to readers that this content is opinion-based and should not be confused with the reported, fact-based content that appears elsewhere in the product. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/08%3A_Preparing_a_News_Story/8.02%3A_Opinion-Based_Journalism.txt |
Introduction
One of the most important — and consistently underrated — skills a journalist must have is the ability to find and pitch compelling story ideas. This is an advanced journalistic skill that takes time and instincts to develop. Journalists who have good story ideas quickly distinguish themselves from newsroom peers who do not. While editors might suggest or assign story ideas to a reporter when the reporter is beginning their journalistic career, that reporter will be expected to eventually find and develop their own story ideas.
When it comes to finding story ideas, journalists benefit from the fact that they are human beings with their own lives and interests and often exist within the same cultures and places as their sources and audiences. By sharing some of the same experiences and reality as the people who consume their work, journalists develop instincts over time about the communities they cover and serve. They come to understand what those people value, what interests them, and what their information needs are. And, the more they understand their audience, the better their story ideas will be.
Identifying Story Ideas
It is not uncommon for aspiring journalists to wonder: Where do story ideas come from?
The answer is, for good and bad, that story ideas come from absolutely everywhere. Journalists develop story ideas through a huge variety of means and sources. However, most of these methods are a result of following one’s curiosity and establishing relationships with key people and topics. Journalists also use their professional instincts and their shared understanding of journalistic news values to decide when a story idea is a good one that will serve the needs and wants of the communities they cover. Indeed, part of what defines many journalists' sense of professional identity is the 'sixth sense' they develop about knowing how to find (and then report) a good news story.
Such a sixth sense takes time to develop, though. Here are a few tips for helping aspiring journalists find good journalistic story ideas.
Encourage Your Curiosity
Ask questions. Ask more questions. And then when you’re done, ask a few more questions.
Don’t be afraid to unleash your curiosity, even when you’re in social situations outside of your professional life. If you see an interesting flyer on a wall outside your favorite coffee shop, check it out. If you notice a hole in a story your friend just told you, ask about it. If you don’t understand how a process works, find out.
Some of the best story ideas arise organically from reporters noticing holes, gaps, or problems in the world around them and then following up on those gaps. If you have questions, there’s a good chance other people out there do, too. Don’t be afraid to ask questions and doggedly pursue answers. Your future audiences will be glad you did.
Keep Your Ears Open
Always listen to the people around you: in real life, on social media, and through your own news consumption. By keeping your ears open, engaging with the people and world around you and learning new things, you will become exposed to new ideas and information that could help you find story ideas (in addition to becoming a more well-rounded person). A potential story idea could come from a stranger’s post in a Facebook group you belong to, from an overheard conversation at the grocery store, or from an anecdote a friend shares at a party. Over time, you will hone your instincts and become more quick and comfortable recognizing story ideas in even the most unexpected places.
Develop a Niche
Another good way to develop story ideas over time is to dedicate yourself, in part, to a specific topic or community. If you like music, do you have a favorite genre? If you follow local politics, is there a specific movement or topic you find to be under-served? If you like sports, is there a specific team or fandom that you follow?
Going deep on a particular person, topic, or beat can help you familiarize yourself with (and develop relationships with) the key stakeholders pertaining to that beat. Once you have identified a niche, continue to follow it and learn more about it. For example, you might follow a hashtag related to that topic, join a Facebook group about that topic, go to a lecture or reading about that topic, read books about that topic, or go to a performance about that topic. By becoming an expert on that beat, you can ensure that you are able to stay on top of the latest trends and questions, and that you are sufficiently informed to write something insightful about it.
Consume Journalism
This cannot be overstated: consume journalism! (This is doubly true if you cover a beat. See what other journalists are covering, and how they are covering it.) Consuming journalism will not only help you become more knowledgeable of current events but it will also help you become a more versatile news producer. For example, it can help you learn about different journalistic story structures and stylistic norms.
You can also get great story ideas from consuming journalism. For example, you may come across an interesting story that focuses on the national level, leaving the local angle wide open for you to report on. You may also find that you have some questions after consuming a news piece. Focus your reporting on answering those questions or addressing gaps in the story. (Again, chances are other people will have similar questions.) Oftentimes, an existing news story offers the needed spark for a follow-up that extends or builds upon existing coverage of a topic or issue.
Trust your instincts. Chances are that if you are interested by an idea, your audience (whom you’ll come to know over time as a journalist) will be interested as well. Once you have identified a story idea, think about the news values your idea might fulfill and how the idea might inform and interest audiences. Use that information to form the basis for the next step in the life cycle of a story idea: pitching it to your editor.
Key Takeaways
• While editors may assign story ideas to a journalist during the early stages of the journalist’s career, that journalist will be expected to find and develop their own story ideas over time.
• Ideas can come from many places. You are surrounded by them. Some helpful strategies are to encourage your curiosity, keep your ears open, develop a niche, and consume lots of journalism.
• Trust your instincts. If you are interested by an idea, there is a good chance that there is an audience out there for it. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/08%3A_Preparing_a_News_Story/8.03%3A_Story_Ideas.txt |
Introduction
In 2017, the Collins Dictionary selected "fake news" as its word of the year. This was a nod to the popularization of the term in the United States during that time, and to broader concerns that the U.S. was entering a "post-truth" or "post-fact" era where inaccurate information was overloading the system, disrupting everything from journalism to business to politics.
However, the term "fake news" is highly problematic. First, its common use is highly imprecise: It covers a spectrum from simple and accidental mistakes to negligent behavior to planned and strategic manipulation. Second, the term carries a particular cultural meaning that was intentionally crafted to discredit journalistic outlets — regardless of how broadly (and imprecisely) the term is applied.
Scholars and linguists alike have thus cautioned against using the term "fake news," and to instead draw upon more-specific terms to cover the associated issues. Chief among these are "misinformation" and "disinformation," which similarly comment on the (in)accuracy of information while being cognizant of the intent (or underlying motivations) of the communicator. While intent can be difficult to ascertain, the distinction is nevertheless useful in separating sloppy and accidental work from bad-faith efforts designed to confuse audiences, all the while carrying less of the cultural baggage connected to the term "fake news."
Misinformation
Misinformation refers to information whose inaccuracy is unintentional. As media scholar Caroline Jack notes, journalists (and people in general) often make mistakes in the course of reporting new information. This may result from the journalist’s lack of understanding of a topic to their misinterpretation of a source’s claim (or failure to independently verify it) to their inability to disentangle conflicting information.
In all of these cases, the journalist may have made a simple error or been naive. At worst, they were negligent in not double-checking some information they opted to publish. However, the key for categorizing something as misinformation is that the journalist did not intend to deceive but simply made an error. Ideally, and under most journalistic codes of ethics, such errors will be quickly and clearly corrected.
An illustrative example of this was when the Chicago Daily Tribune famously misreported in an early edition that Governor Thomas Dewey had beat incumbent President Harry Truman in the 1948 U.S. presidential election. The deadline for the early edition forced the newspaper to be printed before many states had reported results from their polling places. The Tribune therefore relied on the conventional wisdom of the day — many polls indicated Dewey would win by a wide margin — and the assessment of one of its veteran political analysts, and boldly proclaimed Dewey’s victory. When the Tribune realized that the race was far closer than anticipated, it changed the headline of the late evening edition to reflect the closeness of the race. (By that point, however, more than 150,000 copies of the paper had already been printed with the erroneous headline.) Truman eventually won with a narrow margin, leading to much embarrassment for the Tribune.
More recently, major journalistic outlets have erroneously misidentified the perpetrators of attacks. For example, the New York Post famously featured, on a large cover photo and story, two individuals that were said to be the duo behind the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. The assertion, which came out of a crowdsourced investigation led by online sleuths on Reddit, turned out to be false. The Post also played a role in unintentionally promoting false rumors by retweeting claims that the New York Stock Exchange trading floor had been flooded during Hurricane Sandy in 2012. While these examples should not be simply excused as inconsequential mistakes — they can and do cause real-world harm to both the subjects of a story and to audiences — it is crucial to distinguish that they are not malicious errors designed to sow confusion. They were instances of sloppy journalism.
As these examples also show, misinformation is most often produced during periods of unfolding crisis or fast-moving developments. Journalistic outlets have a duty to keep people informed, especially when their safety or well-being may be placed at risk (e.g., as news about a bombing begins to break). They thus face pressure to report and publish quickly, which increases the likelihood of making errors. This is doubly true when they compete for audience attention during those news-breaking stages, and are thus incentivized to "scoop" competing outlets by being the first to report a story.
Disinformation
Disinformation refers to information that is deliberately false or misleading. In these cases, the would-be journalist (and, more often, communicators operating outside of the journalism industry) are not simply making errors in the heat of the moment. Instead, they are seeking to sow confusion or promote a particular narrative that they know to be untrue (or, at best, only partly true).
For example, in the aforementioned case of news organizations misinforming the public about the New York Stock Exchange trading floor being flooded, the false information was deliberately seeded by individuals doing it "for the lulz." Put another way, those individuals had the intent to sow confusion — the confusion was their source of amusement — and they thus sought to disinform others by leveraging the naivete of some journalists (who were then retweeted by other journalists who trusted them, creating a cascade).
There are far more malicious examples of disinformation, however. For example, in September 2014, a number of sock puppet (fake) Twitter accounts began systematically spreading false reports about an explosion and toxic fume hazard at a chemical manufacturing plant in Louisiana. The coordinated effort also included stories appearing in spoofed (fake) versions of local news websites, fabricated YouTube videos, and even text messages that were sent to some local residents. No explosions had actually taken place, though. Researchers later traced those efforts to a state actor: a Russia-backed organization called the Internet Research Agency. Many intelligence services have identified the Internet Research Agency as being behind a number of efforts to destabilize U.S. politics by flooding social media with disinformation.
Disinformation is not limited to complete fabrications that lack any factual basis, though. It also includes the notion of enrichment, wherein information is selectively (and, again, intentionally) added or omitted in order to alter the meaning of a message. This may include intentionally decontextualizing information — which is a separate matter from failing to offer full context due to space constraints — as well as intentionally casting information in a misleading (or unfair) light. Enrichment is more commonly found in disinformation produced by pseudo-journalistic outlets (especially highly partisan ones) than complete fabrications because it is easier for those would-be journalists to deny intent.
Discrediting Journalism
The term "fake news" is thus designed to lump together both intentional and unintentional errors in order to discredit the institution of journalism. Put another way, it is designed to blur lines in order to more easily ascribe malicious intent to journalists — and especially those who publish information that is critical of the accuser.
While the term may seem new to popular communication (or at least newly rediscovered in it), the denouncing of media and journalism through derogatory language is part of a long-standing strategy observed both within and beyond the United States. Allegations that the press are liars have been used as a political device by numerous leaders (especially in autocratic regimes) to silence oppositional and independent voices. Indeed, the very inception of the press was marked by allegations from political and religious leaders that 'the public' should not be allowed to publish unfiltered information and opinion, and that 'the public' would only be harmed by lower barriers to publication. Newspapers in particular were often charged as being full of lies, bias, and distortion — or, more simply, as being vehicles for "fake news."
However, the resurgence of the term is of particular concern to free press advocates who have observed important social consequences. Legally, the popularization of the term is credited with facilitating the passing of so-called "fake news" laws that give autocratic and pseudo-democratic states more power in regulating news media. Politically, the term is credited with increasing polarization and the fragmentation of audiences, which may now gather in echo chambers to avoid what it considers "fake news." Socially, it has resulted in more acts of violence against journalists by regular citizens. This last change has been so pronounced even in the United States that global organizations like Reporters Without Borders have begun tracking domestic attacks against U.S. journalists.
Additionally, the term "fake news" is today applied in a wide array of contexts — many of which do not involve journalism at all. For example, it is not uncommon to see the term used to marginalize dissenting opinions, as with a political candidate who might charge their opponent with promoting "fake news" when they simply assert that their health care policy is better. It is even sometimes used in day-to-day disagreements between friends, like when one asserts that their preferred team is better. ("That’s fake news!") Scholars have argued that the term has been deliberately seeded in such a wide array of contexts in order to equate any form of inconvenient information with journalism and, in turn, make it easier to discredit journalism via the rhetorical device of "fake news."
Seeding Mass Confusion
The strong resurgence of the term in recent years has been led largely (but not exclusively) by conservative commentators. It has been used most vociferously (and effectively) by former U.S. President Donald Trump who, in 2018, awarded what he called the "fake news award" to traditional U.S. media outlets.
Trump’s repeated claims that major news outlets lied about numerous aspects of his political and personal lives even as he made a range of demonstrably false claims at an unprecedented rate (for a high-ranking elected leader) has been linked to the notion of gaslighting. As media scholar Caroline Jack argues, this rhetorical and psychological strategy relies on the intentional orchestration of deceptions and biased narrations to not only confuse individuals but further distort audiences' trust in their own perceptions and memories. The term "gaslighting" is also not new — it has been traced to a 1938 theatrical play — but it is useful in conceptualizing attempts by political actors to use misdirection, denial, and disinformation to help sow confusion and undermine trust in institutions.
More broadly, the use of systematic campaigns to confuse the public and undermine trust in institutions has occurred multiple times throughout history and across different international contexts. (These are different from propaganda, which is a more common effort to strategically use information to increase trust in institutions or build support for (or against) a cause.) For example, the former Soviet Union used the term dezinformatsiya to conceptualize coordinated state efforts to disseminate false or misleading information to journalistic media (among other forms of media) in targeted countries or regions. This was just one of their activnye meropriyatiya, or 'active measures,' employed by the state to strategically undermine and disrupt governance by opposing nation-states while strengthening the positions of allies. These measures included spreading disinformation through multiple channels (e.g., through fake grassroots campaigns, a practice also known as astroturfing) to widen existing domestic rifts, stoke existing tensions, and complicate international relations.
More recently, scholars have used the term xuanchuan (a nod to an existing Chinese term) to describe the use of coordinated posts on social media to flood conversational spaces with a mix of positive messages, negative messages, and attempts to change the subject as part of a broader misdirection strategy. Under this approach, the goal is not to simply promote false information but rather to overwhelm the system with information, making it harder for individuals to come across certain kinds of information. For example, analysts have pointed to China’s so-called "50 Cent Army" (or "50 Cent Party") — groups of online commentators thought to number in the millions who are regularly employed by Chinese authorities — as an example of the mobilization of large groups to systematically promote echo chambers, hijack hashtags, and steer public discourse away from sensitive topics.
It is important to note that although they can be useful in capturing specific approaches to seeding mass confusion, terms like 'dezinformatsiya' and 'xuanchuan' can also promote negative stereotypes and limit conversation. For example, there are also related non-state efforts to disrupt specific social campaigns, as when K-Pop fans banded together to hijack hashtags used to coordinate white supremacist activity. These terms should thus be used with care due to the cultural associations they elicit. Easier and cheaper access to powerful computers and high-speed internet connections have made it easier for individuals and small teams around the world to automate the production and amplification of disinformation in digital environments.
The resurgence of the term "fake news" and high-profile, coordinated disinformation campaigns have helped promote a rise in civic and governmental attempts to counter online misinformation and disinformation. In particular, several fact-checking organizations have emerged in recent years. These organizations aim to authenticate statements made by institutional sources (e.g., elected leaders), debunk social media hoaxes, and assess the legitimacy of particular information sources. However, several scholars have found that such interventions have made little headway in combating large-scale disinformation campaigns or restoring trust in journalistic institutions. Thus, journalistic outlets are still seeking effective solutions to countering disinformation, all the while struggling to adapt to a fast-paced environment that makes it easier for them to produce misinformation themselves.
Key Takeaways
• "Fake news" is a highly problematic term that was crafted with the intention of discrediting journalism and blurring the lines between professional news products and general information. Its popularization has been credited with reducing trust in journalism and increasing violence against journalists.
• The terms "misinformation" and "disinformation" help to capture the range of inaccurate information in an accessible way. Misinformation refers to information whose inaccuracy is unintentional (e.g., getting some information wrong during a breaking news event). Disinformation refers to information that is deliberately false or misleading (e.g., an individual fabricating a statement or altering the meaning of a statement by intentionally omitting information in a selective way).
• Coordinated campaigns to disinform audiences have been credited with promoting polarization, stoking domestic tensions, and undermining trust in a range of democratic processes. Such campaigns have been enacted by both state and non-state actors. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/08%3A_Preparing_a_News_Story/8.04%3A_Misinformation_and_Disinformation.txt |
Introduction
The term 'news source' refers to any person, organization, document, or object that provides information to journalists. This may include the spokesperson for an international aid group, an academic, or a regular citizen who witnessed an event. It may also include press releases, court filings, reports published by interest groups, or datasets produced by government agencies.
Sources are crucial to journalism for several reasons. First, journalists cannot observe everything first-hand. For example, they may be asked to write a story about an individual killed by an on-duty police officer, even though the journalist did not witness the shooting. As such, the journalist must seek out individuals who may have seen the shooting and triangulate their accounts to approximate the truth about what happened. Second, journalists lack expertise in certain matters, and they must therefore speak with an expert source (e.g., a climate scientist) in order to better inform news audiences. Third, sources are sometimes the center of a story, as with the head of a government agency who is alleged to have engaged in corrupt acts and should be given a chance to respond to the allegations.
However, the relationship is not unidirectional. Sources also need journalists. First, sources often depend on journalists to spread their views. Without the support of international media, for example, a climatologist’s research findings may not receive a great deal of attention or impact policymakers around the globe. Second, sources gain legitimacy by being featured in respected news media. For example, a rebel leader in Kyrgyzstan may be seen as important (and possibly legitimate) if they’re deemed worthy of being profiled by The New York Times. And, third, sources often have agendas of their own and seek to promote them by gaining media attention. For example, the head of an agency may play up international tensions for a news story in order to secure more funding for their agency.
Sourcing is particularly important because some scholars have argued that what a source is quoted as saying can be even more important than what the journalist writes. That is, news audiences may view the source as being more knowledgeable than the journalist, and thus view the quote as more authoritative than the surrounding context offered by the journalist. (Conversely, audiences may also view the source as more self-interested, especially if they already have low trust in that kind of source.) Moreover, even when they are not quoted, sources often influence how journalists think about a development and consequently produce news about it.
Sourcing, Power, and Authority
Given that both journalists and sources often have something to gain and lose in their exchanges, the practice of sourcing can also be thought about as an exchange of power. The journalist-source relationship can be adversarial as well as mutually beneficial. For example, a journalist may benefit from having frequent access to a high-ranking official, who in turn benefits from having a sympathetic ear during times of distress. Conversely, a journalist may receive public acclaim for producing a story that details a previous source’s dishonesty.
This negotiation of power is further implicated by notions of reputation and authority. Journalists are more likely to receive access to sources and cooperation from them if the journalist (or the organization they work for) is perceived to be prestigious, or if they have access to an audience of interest to the source. For example, a highly partisan commentator on YouTube may get an exclusive interview with a high-profile politician because the politician is trying to increase their outreach with younger members of their base. There is considerable inequity in who is able to draw on specific information sources, and often in ways that favor high-profile, mainstream journalistic outlets or news media with desirable niche audiences.
In a similar vein, sources are themselves more likely to be selected by journalists if they are located prominently within a power structure. Put another way, the closer a source is to the locus of power, the more likely it is that a journalist will believe that they are worthy of being interviewed. This is because cultures of journalism often treat those with power as being particularly worthy of attention (given their ability to influence society or some development), and because their position of power is often seen as an indicator of some measure of 'legitimacy' (at minimum to some group of people).
Scholars have found that individuals who occupy positions of authority are more likely to have their versions of 'truth' be more readily accepted both by journalists and news audiences. Conversely, those who are seen or treated as 'outsiders' or 'underdogs' are typically not taken as seriously. For example, journalists have historically been more deferential to a police officer’s account of an officer-involved shooting than the victim’s.
Growing polarization has challenged this, however, especially when it comes to political actors. In such cases, powerful individuals are simultaneously more likely to have their version of 'truth' readily accepted by one group and readily rejected by another. Nevertheless, the apparent existence of a hierarchy of credibility points to a journalistic bias to be more deferential to institutional sources like police officers, military commanders, and other government officials — even in cases where journalists do not fully trust them.
While deference to sources in positions of power (or produced by people or organizations in positions of power) is a common finding across countries, scholars have also found that journalistic trust in institutional structures can vary considerably across countries. For example, journalists in some countries (e.g., Estonia and the United Arab Emirates) express a relatively high degree of trust in the police, while those in others (e.g., Argentina and Tanzania) express low trust. Journalists in the U.S. tend to have relatively low levels of trust in the institutions they cover. Put another way, most U.S. journalists approach claims with a healthy skepticism, even if they’re coming from powerful institutions like the U.S. government or the military.
Congruence and Availability
Sourcing practices aren’t defined solely by power structures, though. Journalists and their sources are human beings, and they are thus subject to a range of human biases.
One particularly important bias is homophily, or the tendency of individuals to associate and bond with people who are similar to them. In the context of journalist-source relations, it produces a phenomenon wherein journalists are more likely to interview people who share their characteristics. Put another way, male journalists are more likely to interview male sources while female journalists are more likely to interview female sources. Similarly, journalists of color are more likely to interview sources of color, and so on.
There is less and less-clear evidence about how this phenomenon impacts how sources respond to journalists — that is, if it impacts their willingness to speak to a journalist who does not share their characteristics. However, there is enough evidence from psychology and sociology to presume that sources would be less willing to open up to someone who appears to be a stranger. This, in turn, raises important concerns about the historic over-representation of white, male journalists both domestically (in the case of the U.S.) and internationally (as foreign correspondents reporting on developments around the globe).
Another important consideration has to do with the simple availability of sources. Reporters typically operate on deadlines, be it a fixed deadline in the case of traditional media or a continuous, ASAP deadline in the case of many online media. Because of this deadline pressure, journalists are drawn to sources who are predictable and responsive.
Put another way, journalists will often turn to sources who respond often and quickly. They maintain address books with recurring sources, which in turn increases the likelihood of the same sources being interviewed. This is especially the case for public information officers or press agents, or public relations professionals whose job it is to respond to media requests and whose training allows them to promote perspectives favorable to their employer.
The growing resource constraints and inequities within journalism has thus resulted in an even greater reliance on sources who are readily available, since journalists continue to be pressed to do more work with fewer resources (and the same, if not quicker, time restrictions). That, in turn, benefits official and privileged sources who have the resources to respond often, quickly, and with a well-managed message. Indeed, empirical studies of news coverage — both domestic and international — routinely find an over-representation of government sources and spokespeople.
Key Takeaways
• News sources refer to people, organizations, documents, or objects that provide information to journalists. This may include a spokesperson or a report produced by an agency.
• News sourcing involves exchanges of power, with both journalists and sources having something at stake. Additionally, both journalists and sources are more likely to be interacted with if they are located in high places within their respective power structures.
• Journalists are more likely to interview sources who share important visible characteristics with them. Additionally, sources who are more readily accessible are usually more likely to be interviewed by journalists. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/09%3A_Sourcing_and_Verifying_Information/9.01%3A_News_Sources.txt |
Introduction
Every journalistic story includes information from a variety of different sources. It is thus important to consider how a source will contribute to particular elements of a story, and how that source might fit within a mix of multiple sources to make that story well-rounded. This requires the journalist to ask themselves: How can this source’s experience or knowledge be used to improve the story or the storytelling? What will one source bring to the table that another cannot? What perspectives are missing from the story?
In order to address these questions, the journalist must have a general sense of the objective of their news story. For example, the journalist may have a story in mind that addresses a new initiative proposed by a mayor to reduce carbon emissions. The journalist may thus surmise that they need to interview: (1) the mayor, who is leading the initiative; (2) a scientist who studies carbon emissions and can comment on whether the initiative is likely to have a meaningful impact on the city’s emissions; and (3) stakeholders from impacted groups, such as local businesses that may be impacted by new regulations or advocacy groups that are pushing for emissions reductions.
Once the journalist has identified the right kinds of sources and source mix, they will need to do some research to find the right individuals. This requires actively searching the internet, calling experts and asking for recommendations, and tapping into social media. It is important to recall that journalists must avoid potential conflicts of interest, whether real or perceived. Put another way, a journalist should not interview someone with whom they have a personal relationship (e.g., a friend or even their lawyer) or with whom there are intersecting interests (e.g., a company in which they own substantial stock). Sources should be able to offer independent insight and not feel any pressure due to their relationship with the journalist.
News Sources and Expertise
Sources are often featured in news stories because they have some form of expertise that is of relevance to the story. Expertise simply refers to skill or knowledge in a particular area.
Although "expertise" is sometimes thought about as a special form of knowledge — something that only exceptional individuals can possess — it turns out that most people are actually experts of some kind. For example, I am an expert on the intersection of journalism and technology as a result of my extensive academic study in that area. However, I am also an expert on what it is like to watch the Arsenal football team over the past decade, seeing as I’ve rarely missed a game. I’m also an expert on what my neighborhood sounds like at night, seeing as I’ve regularly slept there for the past few years.
While I may be an expert on those three things, I am certainly not an expert on many other things. For example, my fashion sense is limited at best, and I would certainly have little to offer a journalist producing a story about the latest fashion trends. Similarly, while I am certainly knowledgeable about what it is like to watch soccer, my expertise on how to dribble effectively in a game is lacking (by many accounts).
This way of thinking helps journalists recognize that expertise is neither universal nor something only held by a certain kind of person (i.e., someone with a specific background or education). Rather, expertise is contingent on the subject matter at hand and may be possessed by a range of different potential sources.
Thinking About the Source Mix
News stories tend to have multiple sources, and they typically draw upon multiple forms of expertise as well as expertise in different areas. Thus, it is helpful to think about the main purpose of the story and the mix of sources necessary to flesh out that purpose.
For example, in 2019, the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica Illinois collaborated on an investigative story titled "The Quiet Rooms" that examined the disciplinary practice of secluding (and isolating) unruly students in public schools around Illinois. The story was rooted in a comprehensive analysis of a database of reports about incidents that resulted in a child being sent into an isolation room. However, in order to answer the questions of 'why' (does this happen?), 'how' (does this get overlooked?), and 'what' (is the impact of these practices?), the story also drew upon sources with expertise that the database cannot offer. It sourced information from scientific experts who study educational practices and could assess the effectiveness of tactics like social seclusion. It included information from advocates who have expertise on the prevalence of the issue and the challenges to addressing it. It sourced information from school district officials, who have expertise in the day-to-day activities of running a school system and dealing with an array of disciplinary issues. And, it included quotes from schoolchildren who experienced seclusion, and thus have expertise in what it feels like to be isolated.
In short, that story was able to paint a very comprehensive picture of the practice of seclusion in Illinois because it drew on multiple sources, each of whom could contribute something different to a story. While the number of sources for that story was exceptional (ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune spoke with more than 120 sources), the emphasis on seeking out a diversified mix of sources is common to both in-depth investigative journalism and day-to-day general assignment reporting.
When writing a story, journalists must thus think about the central question(s) they are aiming to address with their story. Then, they should seek out the sources that have the expertise necessary to address each of those questions from different vantage points.
Throughout this process, the journalist should frequently ask themselves: Why is this person qualified to answer this question? Perhaps, it is because they have extensively studied that phenomenon. Perhaps, it is because they hold a position that makes them the ultimate decision-making authority. Perhaps, it is because they have lived experience with that issue.
Additionally, journalists often strive to offer contrasting opinions in their stories in order to introduce competing ideas (and reduce the impacts of the journalist’s own biases on the story). Thus, journalists rarely settle for a single source in any one area. Instead, they typically talk to many. (Oftentimes, sources are interviewed but never included in the story because a different source can articulate a point better.) Put another way, good journalists challenge themselves to actively seek out a diversity of voices, perspectives, and identities. They seek out individuals with different backgrounds, life experiences, and areas of expertise.
Following a strategy of interviewing people who can offer different perspectives can help produce a more well-rounded story. However, journalists should take care to avoid false balance — or the portrayal of opposing viewpoints as equally legitimate, even when one is more grounded in evidence or better corroborated by other trustworthy sources. (For example, journalists should not seek out a climate change denier simply to offer an alternative — and discredited — perspective.) Indeed, journalists sometimes end up promoting misinformation in the search for balance, which effectively goes against their purpose as journalists.
Sourcing is ultimately a highly consequential act, but by focusing on the expertise of individual sources and incorporating a diverse mix of sources, journalists can produce better, more informative stories.
Key Takeaways
• Journalistic stories tend to incorporate the expertise and perspectives of multiple sources. It is important to consider what each source contributes to different aspects of the story, and how that source fits into a broader source mix.
• Expertise simply refers to skill or knowledge in a particular area. Expertise comes from many things, such as extensive schooling and practice as well as lived experience within a context. However, expertise is contingent on the subject matter at hand; an individual may be an expert on one thing but not many others.
• Journalists should strive to draw on multiple forms of expertise as well as expertise in different areas when writing their stories. In particular, they should seek out contrasting opinions — while being careful to not fall into the trap of false balance — and a diversity of voices. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/09%3A_Sourcing_and_Verifying_Information/9.02%3A_Identifying_Appropriate_Sources.txt |
Introduction
When a journalist has identified a few potential sources for the story they are reporting, the next step is to reach out to those sources to request an interview. When journalists request an interview from a source, they are requesting the source’s time: time away from their work, their families, and their hobbies or responsibilities. Thus, it is important that journalists approach sources thoughtfully and with a clear objective. The former increases the likelihood that the source will agree to give you their time; the latter helps ensure that you use their time thoughtfully.
Here is some advice for effectively contacting sources and securing a contribution to your story.
The Initial Contact
You can request an interview with a potential source in a variety of different ways. The primary ways are in person, over the phone, and via email.
Regardless of how you reach out, always be polite and professional and include all of the essential information that a source would need to know about you and your story. In a friendly and polite phone call or email, briefly introduce yourself, the topic of your story, and the angle of your interview. Give the interview source your name and title, and tell them about the outlet you are reporting for. If you are writing for a publication or for a class project, make that clear. Explain whether the eventual story will be published, and if so, where. (It is good to assume that all stories will eventually be published. Even if you are just doing a class project, you might stumble into a great story that interests local, regional, and national media. You might be surprised by how often that happens.)
Then, give the source an overview of your story and the topic of the interview you hope to conduct with them. Provide them with your best estimate of the amount of their time that you are asking for. (This should be based on the amount of information you are hoping to get from this interview, as well as how many questions you plan to ask this source. Some interviews are much longer, or shorter, than others.) Be sure to let your source know how you intend to conduct the interview: in person, over the phone, over video chat, and so on. It is helpful to give them options instead of dictating the medium.
It is usually best to interview sources in person because doing so helps you get to know the source a bit better, pick up on body language and other non-verbal cues, and foster a stronger relationship with the source. When an in-person interview is not possible, perhaps because you and the source live thousands of miles apart, a video or phone interview is an appropriate substitution. Email interviews are almost never a good method for interviewing a source, in large part because communicating via email makes follow-up questions difficult and allows interview sources to practice or prepare canned responses. Put another way, use email as a last resort for conducting the interview.
Once you have made all of this information clear, try to schedule the interview. Provide a time frame by which you hope to speak to this source, and suggest a few potential dates and times for your interview. Be flexible with timing, though. Because you are asking for your source’s time, it is always best to be open-ended with your own schedule to accommodate theirs. Finally, politely thank the source for their time and provide multiple ways for them to contact you with a response, such as your phone number and email address.
If you are contacting a source via email, the tone of your entire email should be respectful and professional. Call your source by their name or title, depending on their profession. Use professional language, and avoid slang. Do not be overly personal. If you send an email request, it is crucial that you offer a clear and concise subject line, such as "Media Request: Interview for a story about climate change." Remember that you are asking this person for the favor of their time, and you must craft an email that makes clear how their time will be used and why they should give you that time. With emails in particular, try to keep them as short as possible while including all of these crucial details. A long email may seem intimidating (especially on a busy day) and is thus more likely to be ignored.
Finally, your interview request is just that: a request. Sources might respond to your request to ask for more information or detail about the interview. If they do so, share that with them. But an interview request is not an interview itself. If a source asks you to provide them with a list of the interview questions that you plan to ask, or if they ask you for a draft of the story you are planning to write, always say no. It is poor practice to allow sources prior review of your journalism. It also complicates your reporting process, as sources may seek to tweak or edit aspects of your draft, or adjust their own answers based on what you have written. Allowing your source to review a list of interview questions before the interview provides the source an opportunity to practice their responses, create memorized answers, or prepare a way to avoid answering your questions. If your source requests these things, it is best to just say no and move on to someone else.
The Value of Persistence
Ideally, your interview sources will be happy to speak with you, but this isn’t always the case. Some sources may be nervous about being interviewed and reluctant to accept an interview request. Your sources may also be busy or difficult to get in touch with in the first place. Just because they did not immediately respond to your request for an interview does not mean that you should give up on interviewing them.
To be a strong journalist is to be a persistent one. You might have to reach out to a potential source multiple times in order to get a response to your interview request, and you should do so politely and creatively. Instead of simply sending the same request over and over (and potentially annoy your source and make them even less likely to participate), try contacting that source through different mediums (e.g., voicemail, email, text message, and in person). Use all of the contact methods you have available, such as both their work email address and a personal email address. Explain to this source why it is important that you speak with them, and why you selected them as a key interview source. If this explanation doesn’t motivate the source to say yes, try again with a different angle. Remember that you chose this source because they can provide important information or perspective to your story. Keep in mind that you are doing this to serve your audience, so don’t be afraid to be politely persistent.
At the same time, don’t rely too heavily on a single source. Always have back-up sources in mind, such as a second expert whose research, while perhaps not as closely tied to the story as your first-choice expert, is still relevant to a story you intend to write. If your first-choice sources don’t respond in a timely fashion, start reaching out to your back-up sources even as you continue to reach out to the first-choice sources. Waiting too long for your ideal response can cause you to miss your deadline.
A Note About Respect
Before you reach out to a potential source, do your research on that person, their experience, and their expertise. Get to know everything you can about them and what makes that person relevant to your story. Apply that knowledge to your interview request, and be respectful to your source throughout the entire interview process. Sources can tell when you have done your homework, and they invariably respond in a more positive and helpful way when you know a bit about them.
The way you arrange and conduct an interview has an impact on the results of that interview. If you are rude or unprofessional, or if you clearly did not do your research, your sources may become uncomfortable with you, limit the amount of information they share with you, abruptly end an interview, or refuse to speak to you again. Additionally, it is helpful to think about each interview source as a potentially recurring source of information that you might return to throughout your journalistic career. Treat them in a way that fosters a long-term professional relationship.
Key Takeaways
• When requesting an interview, briefly introduce yourself, your outlet, your story, and the medium and time estimate for your interview. Be clear, direct, succinct, and professional.
• Sometimes, sources are busy, tough to contact, or averse to doing interviews. Be persistent, and follow up creatively and politely to explain why a source is key to your reporting.
• Do your homework. Before you ever reach out to a potential source, learn what you can about that person and what makes them relevant to your story. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/09%3A_Sourcing_and_Verifying_Information/9.03%3A_Contacting_Sources_and_Arranging_Interviews.txt |
Introduction
When a journalist has identified an appropriate interview source and scheduled the interview, the next step is to prepare their interview questions.
The best interview questions are often simple, clear, and well-informed. Think of your interview as a two-way street: Although the journalist should be in control of the interview, its content, and its aims, the journalist and their source will need to get to know about each other, and perhaps even to trust each other, over the course of the interview process. A journalistic interview should feature a well-structured but flexible series of questions in which both the journalist and their source play equally important roles.
Here are some tips to help you craft strong interview questions that can elicit useful information for a news story.
Do Your Homework
Before you interview a source, you should always research them, their experience, and their expertise.
Start with a simple Google search, and then continue with a more strategic search based on the information you need for your story. For example, if you were interviewing me, a professor of journalism, you might begin by reading my faculty biography on the UMass website and skimming my course descriptions and published research on my personal website. If I have conducted a study that is relevant to the story, you might even read through its Abstract, or summary. You may even want to look through my public social media accounts and search for recent interviews I have given. If I’m the centerpiece of your story, you might even talk to other people who know me before speaking to me.
There are several reasons why it’s useful to research someone before talking to them. First, you want to make sure this potential source is the right person to interview for your story. Second, you want to prepare yourself for interviewing them. Researching a source will help you develop interview questions that are well-informed and specific — and much stronger than the vague, general questions that you could ask anyone. This research will also help you to use your interview time more strategically by avoiding questions that are easily answered through cursory research, as well as questions that your source may have been asked many times already. Finally, your source will notice, based on your questions, that you did your homework. Sources always appreciate that and are consequently more likely offer you both more of their time and better responses.
Ask Clear Questions
As you begin to write interview questions, ask yourself: Is this question easy to understand? Could I answer it?
Chances are that if you have to re-read a question to understand it, your source won’t have an easy time with that question either. The strongest interview questions have a clear focus on one specific topic, and they are phrased with simple, easy-to-understand wording. Interview questions should also be short and direct. They should be something this particular source can answer based on their own expertise, experience, and/or position.
Avoid asking your source to speak for an entire group or population, rather than answering for themselves. For example, it would not be fruitful to ask me, a single journalism professor, a question like: "Are all journalism professors socially awkward?" (In addition to being rude, that question asks me to make a generalized statement about a big group of people that I am not qualified to answer.)
Don’t ask your sources compound, or double-barreled, questions, either. These are confusing and long questions that usually pack two or more questions into one, such as: "Do you support building a new elementary school and increasing teachers' salaries?" Compound questions can be tricky for sources, who will usually only remember to answer one branch of the question. Instead, break these questions out into multiple, simplified and focused questions, such as: "Do you support building a new elementary school?" and "Do you support increasing teachers' salaries?"
Ask Open-Ended Questions
There are two main types of questions that you’ll ask your sources: open-ended questions and close-ended questions.
Open-ended questions are those that invite a source to elaborate on their response. For example, you might ask your source: "Why do you support the Minnesota Vikings?" In order to respond to that question, a source will usually feel the need to construct full sentences that establish and explain their perspective. Open-ended questions thus tend to generate more complete and more thoughtful responses.
On the other hand are close-ended questions, such as yes-or-no questions. Close-ended questions compel sources to respond with short, undetailed responses (such as a simple "yes" or "no"). For example, a yes-or-no question might simply ask, "Do you support the Minnesota Vikings?" A source could answer that by just saying, "yes," which is neither very informative nor a good quote. That question might be okay to set up an open-ended follow-up, such as the aforementioned "Why do you support them?" question. However, they’re usually insufficient on their own.
Similarly, you will often want to avoid leading questions, or questions that lead a source toward a specific response. Leading questions can cue sources to answer in the specific way that they believe the interviewer wants them to. This thus influences them to mirror your thinking instead of contributing their own. An example of a leading question might be: "Do you agree that the Minnesota Vikings are the best team in the NFL?" If you are a Green Bay Packers fan, you might no longer feel comfortable being interviewed because you may start to worry about how you might be depicted in the story. There are times, though, when a leading question can be used as a signal to your source. For example, to illustrate that you understand their pain after they’ve described a harrowing incident, you may ask: "That must have felt awful. What was running through your mind when you received such terrible news?" However, those instances where a leading question is appropriate are relatively uncommon.
Order Your Questions
Although you might write your list of interview questions down in the order in which you think of them, take some time after brainstorming those questions to put them in the best order in which to ask them.
It is generally helpful to start with some simple, introductory questions that help to ease the source into the interview and make them comfortable with both you and the process. After that, group all questions that pertain to a specific topic or aspect of the story together, and complete an entire topic before transitioning to the next set of questions. Structure your interview in a way that guarantees you will get all the information you need while, ideally, sticking to the time estimate you provided for the interview.
If you have a particularly difficult or uncomfortable question, put it further down on your list — even if it breaches your topical organization. You don’t want that difficult question to be so low that you may run out of time before getting to it, but you also don’t want to risk the source abruptly ending an interview before you have gotten at least some useful information from them.
Be Flexible
Although you did your research and wrote a list of informed, clear, and well-organized questions, you may find that, during the interview, unanticipated questions start popping into your head.
Do not panic! These follow-up questions are natural, and they often provide some of the best information and quotes. Good follow-up questions usually request additional context or explanation and begin with "why" or "how." It is important to listen carefully when your source is talking so that you can catch and write down potential follow-up questions. You also need to be flexible enough to know when to introduce those follow-up questions. Often, it is best to do so immediately. However, sometimes, it makes sense to return to them a little later in the interview. It is thus useful to both record an interview and take notes while the source is responding. This way, you can write down follow-up questions and other key information without worrying about missing the exact phrasing for a quote.
If a source’s response does not fully answer the question you asked, don’t hesitate to ask that same question in a new way. Sometimes, the non-response is due to a misunderstanding of the question. Other times, it is because the initial question gave them room to wiggle out of a full response. Be persistent, and keep asking until you get a satisfactory answer.
Additionally, a source’s response might create a better opportunity to follow up with a question you intended to ask later in the interview. Thus, although you might have planned to ask a source about the Green Bay Packers with your fifth question, they may bring up the Packers in their answer to your second question. If that is the case, reorder your questions on the spot to keep a good flow for your interview. If they have fully addressed a question you intended to ask them later on, do not ask the question again. That tells the source you weren’t listening.
Ask for Clarity
One of the best parts of being a journalist is that you get to learn and produce stories about many different subjects. Journalists do this by researching new topics and interviewing expert sources about those topics. However, at the end of the day, it is the sources who are the foremost experts — not you.
If you find yourself confused or unsure about a key fact or piece of information during the course of your interview, always, always clarify that information with your source. Ask for an explanation or a simplification. One good way to do this is by summarizing a key point and asking your source if you got the information correct. For example, you might ask: "So, you are saying that if I need to clarify information during an interview, I should take some time to do that with the source. Is that correct?"
Nobody likes feeling dumb or revealing that they don’t fully understand something. But not fully understanding something is normal for journalists, especially when they are tackling new topics or digging deep into a particular topic. Sources will often appreciate your honesty and feel more confident that you will accurately portray their perspective if you ask for clarifications. Moreover, even in a pessimistic scenario, it is far better to look 'dumb' to one person than to the potentially large audiences who will come across your work (and who you would be misinforming as a result).
Ask the Concluding Question
Once you have asked all the questions you brainstormed — and all the follow-up and clarifying questions that arose during the course of the interview — try to end with a final open-ended question that allows your source to share anything else they think you ought to know about the topic. This gives the source a chance to bring up something you or they may have forgotten, or simply to contribute information that may be outside of the scope of your questions.
A couple of examples of this type of question are: "Is there anything you’d like to add?" and "Is there anything else I didn’t ask you about that is important for me to know?" Oftentimes, the source will say "no" but will nevertheless feel empowered (and thus end the interview on a good note). However, some of the best scoops and story ideas have come from giving sources a chance to tell the journalist information that the journalist didn’t even think to ask the source about.
Thank Your Source
By the end of your interview, the source will have shared something precious with you: their time. Thank them for it! This wraps up your exchange in a polite way and lets your sources know you appreciate their time, information, and perspective. This is also a good moment to ask the source for additional contact information, such as an email address or phone number at which you can reach the source should you need to ask a last-minute question or follow up in some manner.
If they were a central source in your story, or if they are the sort of person who does not often get interviewed, you may even opt to send them a copy of your story after it is published. This might make them feel even better about choosing to speak with you, and the extra attention might even make them more likely to respond to you in the future. There’s a decent chance another story will come around that requires you to speak to that source, so it is good to treat every source as a potentially recurring one.
Key Takeaways
• The best interview questions are simple, clear, and focused on one specific topic. Use open-ended questions to encourage your source to respond completely to your questions and perhaps to even go beyond your preconceptions.
• Follow-up and clarifying questions will arise during the course of your interview. Good follow-up questions usually request additional context or explanation and begin with "why" or "how." Be flexible in order to catch and write down potential follow-up questions as you listen to your source’s responses.
• Be polite yet persistent. If a source is not fully answering your question, ask that question again in a different way. Sometimes, they simply didn’t get the gist of the question the first time around.
• End your interview with an open-ended concluding question and thank the source. This gives your source an opportunity to share information about the topic that you might not have cued with your interview questions. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/09%3A_Sourcing_and_Verifying_Information/9.04%3A_Generating_Good_Interview_Questions.txt |
Introduction
Asking good questions is the most important part of a journalistic interview, but there’s much more to the art of the interview. Successful interviews often require a good amount of preparation and etiquette behind the scenes. Journalists who take the time to select a good interview setting, remember to check their equipment, and know how to use silence to their advantage tend to elicit better interviews.
Here are some things to consider as you prepare for and conduct your journalistic interviews.
Select a Good Interview Setting
A good interview setting can make a big difference to your source’s comfort level and the quality of your interview. If you are conducting an in-person interview, select a comfortable, quiet interview setting that is private enough for your source to feel comfortable talking openly. Avoid background noises, such as coffee machines brewing or cars honking, and steer clear high-foot-traffic places such as playgrounds or malls. Your setting should also be a place accessible to both you and your source and in which you can use whatever equipment you need to conduct your interview. (For example, if you need to plug in a device to a power source during the interview, don’t meet at a public park.)
Consider asking your source to suggest an interview location where they feel comfortable. They may suggest their office because it is convenient for them, but they may also prefer to go elsewhere where they can speak more privately. Don’t be afraid to politely request small changes, such as turning off background music or moving a pet to another room. That will reduce distractions and increase the quality of your recording, should you choose to make one.
Check Your Equipment
As a journalist, you are in charge of making sure your interview goes smoothly. This starts by ensuring you look the part — so dress for the occasion. Often, it also means making sure your technology is your friend. Before you begin (or leave for) an interview, make sure that you have everything you need — your notepad, pen, recording device, interview questions, and so on — and that everything is in good working order. Are your devices fully charged? Did you pack the charging cable for your phone or recorder? Is your recorder or phone app set up with your preferred settings? Do you have a back-up battery? If you are video recording the interview, are the camera settings set to the right defaults?
Don’t start an interview until you are ready. Many journalists have lost important details because they forgot to toggle a setting on their recorder, or had to fumble their way through an interview because they forgot their notes in the office. Taking the time to prepare and double-check your equipment will thus keep you from embarrassing yourself or losing access to information during an interview. (In fact, some junior journalists will keep a pre-interview checklist to make sure they don’t forget anything.)
Make Your Sources Comfortable
Sources may get nervous when they are being interviewed — especially when that interview is being recorded. (Many journalists don’t like being interviewed themselves!)
Take a minute or two at the start of an interview to make your sources more comfortable with the interview process. Re-introduce yourself and the topic of the interview. Walk them through the trajectory of your interview questions, briefly mentioning the different topics you plan to touch on over the course of the interview. Explain how your recording equipment works. Start with simpler questions that are easy for your source to answer. If it’s helpful, consider starting with a creative practice question such as, "What did you eat for breakfast?" to set the source at ease. Or, if you had a funny or interesting thing happen to you that morning, you can share that anecdote to humanize yourself and make the source feel more at ease.
Establish the Attribution Parameters
Journalists and their sources should negotiate a clear understanding of what may be quoted and how the source may be identified in a story. This is called attribution, or the descriptor the journalist uses to identify the source of a quote or piece of information featured in a story. There are four main levels of attribution for journalistic interviews: on-the-record, on background, on deep background, and off-the-record.
On-the-record means that you can freely quote or reference anything the source says and attribute it directly to them by name and title. You should try to keep as much of the interview on-the-record as you can because it allows audiences to see or hear the source’s exact words. Complete identification also allows audiences to have a better sense of where a source get their expertise from, as well as the potential biases they’re likely to have.
On background (also called 'not for attribution') means that you may quote the source directly but you may not attribute the statements to the source by name. Usually, journalists will provide a general description that gives audiences a sense of the source’s position but makes it difficult to positively identify them. An example of such a description is: "according to a senior military officer with direct knowledge of the program." This level also includes quoted statements that have no attribution, such as: "according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity."
On deep background means that you may not quote a source directly or identify them in any way. An example of such a description is: "The Times has learned that … ." This is a seldom-used level of attribution, and is usually reserved for sensitive affairs.
Finally, off-the-record is a fuzzy term that often means a different thing to different sources. Usually, it is used to refer to an on-background arrangement, where the information can be used but not be attributed (i.e., an anonymous quote). However, the term is also often used to describe information that journalists cannot use in their story or directly reference in conversations with other sources. For example, a source may tell you, off-the-record, that a state actor hacked the servers handling the e-mails for a political party. While you cannot publish that information right away, you can start chasing other leads. For example, you might want to ping an Information Technology administrator who works with that political party and see if you can get them to bring up the hack. Additionally, even if you can’t publish the off-the-record information, the information may prove useful for understanding a different story (e.g., why party officials suddenly proposed new legislation pertaining to cyber security).
Once an interview has begun, your source is speaking on-the-record unless you and they have agreed in advance that the interview should be carried under a different level of attribution. Put another way, the 'default' mode is on-the-record. However, it is good practice to be clear about the level of attribution you intend to abide by.
Sources may ask to change the level of attribution at different points of the interview. It is often okay to give the source the opportunity to go on-background or off-the-record at any point. However, if the source says something particularly interesting, try to come back to it in an on-the-record exchange. It is often helpful to explain to the source why it is important for your audiences to know that information, and who shared it. (Moreover, it is possible that the source will start to trust you more as you demonstrate your aptitude as an interviewer.)
Ask for Permission to Record
Recording an interview is generally regarded as a best practice because it allows journalists to accurately transcribe full quotes and to return to the interview to check some details after the fact. (For example, was a key phrase expressed in a sarcastic tone? Or, what was the context around a particular quote again?) It also helps provide corroborating evidence for the journalist’s account, especially for stories in which conflict is a key news value.
However, in many states, such as Massachusetts, you are legally required to gain the source’s consent before you can start recording the exchange. (Asking for permission is a good, ethical practice in every state.) So, before you begin an interview, ask your source for permission to record it — either through audio or video, depending on the medium through which you plan to tell your story. Sources will typically agree to be recorded, especially if you explain to them that the purpose of the recording is to make sure you’re quoting them accurately.
If you can, try to take interview notes even if there is a recording. Recordings sometimes fail and the notes prove essential. Additionally, you often don’t have time to listen to an entire recording again before publishing a story. Notes help highlight the key points from an interview, and can be essential to keeping your head straight when you’re conducting multiple interviews in a short span of time. When your source says something that you anticipate you’ll quote, note the rough timestamp of the recording so you can quickly return to it when it’s time to write.
Pay Attention to Your Source
Strong interviews involve a good deal of preparation, and it can be tempting to look over your questions and interview notes during the interview itself. Try not to get too distracted.
Stay focused on your interview subject throughout the interview process, and engage with them and their answers. Make direct eye contact, and provide clear non-verbal cues to show your source that you are paying attention. For example, when they make a key point, you might nod or even give a thumbs-up if the situation warrants it. If they share a humorous story, you might smile. If they’re describing a difficult time in their life, you might frown. By using your facial expressions and body language to indicate that you are following and understanding what your source is saying, you are showing them that you are engaged and encouraging them to keep going.
Avoid using verbal cues, such as, "mmm-hmmm" or "gotcha," though. Speaking out loud might accidentally interrupt your source’s train of thought or create an interference in your audio recording that will make it harder for you to understand it later on. (This is especially true if you intend to publish a portion of that recording.)
Also, remember: You are here to get the source’s expertise and perspective, not to share your own. Avoid interrupting your source unless it is absolutely necessary. And, don’t interject your own opinions or editorialize with your own thoughts. Doing so uses time you could be dedicating to gathering new information. It may also influence the source to agree with you or provide a response they believe you would like. Again, the interview should not be about you.
Stay in Control
As the journalist, you should be in control of the focus, content, and direction of an interview.
Don’t allow your source to take control of an interview, either accidentally on purpose, by changing the subject, going off topic, asking you questions, or dedicating too much time to a particular topic. As needed, politely redirect the interview to the next key topic or return to a skipped-over topic. Although you want to avoid interrupting your sources, you may occasionally need to do so in order to regain control of an interview. Key phrases that might help you redirect an interview include: "I’d like to return to X," "I want to make sure we fully discuss Y," and "Your response has me thinking about Z." (Remember, sources often have their own agendas and reasons for speaking with you, and they may thus try to take control of the interview to maximize their interests. Don’t let them succeed.)
Use Silence
One of the most valuable tools a journalistic interviewer has is silence.
When a conversation lapses and the speakers are silent, people generally feel nervous and are compelled to start talking again in order to break the silence. Use that habit to your advantage. If a source doesn’t answer your question, or if they answer a question too briefly, don’t immediately continue on to the next question. Stay silent for a bit to encourage your source to continue speaking or elaborate on an answer. (If silence makes you feel uncomfortable, start counting to eight in your head when the feeling of discomfort sets in.)
Check, Check, and Double-Check
When you reach the end of your interview, double-check your questions and notes to make sure asked everything you needed to. It is okay to politely ask for a moment to do that. Before you leave the premises, check your recording itself. Did the recording capture the entire interview? Is the audio quality good?
It is important to do double-check everything because you may not be able to interview that source again before your deadline. Thus, you might be saving yourself a headache by just taking an extra couple of minutes to make sure everything is as you expect them to be.
Finally, never leave an interview without asking your source to provide critical attribution information. This includes the spelling and pronunciation of their name, their full professional title (or other descriptive information about their credentials, in the context of the story), and any contact information you need to get in touch with that person again. At the end of the interview, consider asking your source to recommend additional sources that might provide additional information for this story or topic, such as another knowledgeable person or a relevant document.
Key Takeaways
• Before starting an interview, make sure you are looking professional and that you are prepared. Check to make sure you have everything you need, such as notepad and back-up batteries, and verify that all of your equipment is working properly.
• Select a quiet interview location that makes both you and your source comfortable. Avoid background noises and highly trafficked areas where other people and sounds could interrupt your interview or distract the source.
• Pay attention to your source throughout the entire interview process. To show that you are engaged and on the same page as your subject, use non-verbal cues such as body language and facial expressions.
• Stay in control of the interview, and focus on the source. Avoid editorializing or sharing your own perspective and opinions, which could influence an interview subject to share thoughts that simply mirror your own. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/09%3A_Sourcing_and_Verifying_Information/9.05%3A_Conducting_Interviews.txt |
Introduction
According to former journalists Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, "the essence of journalism is a discipline of verification." As such, verification is absolutely central to journalism — or, at the very least, 'good' journalism.
Verification refers to the act of establishing or testing the truth or correctness of a fact, theory, statement, etc., by means of special investigation or comparison of data. Put another way, it is the act of seeking out corroborating evidence that would give us greater confidence that something is in fact true.
The Value of Verification
Verification is necessary to ensure that journalists get what happened down correctly. Truth ultimately demands accuracy, and the process of verification can serve as a means for sorting through different perceived realities by identifying inaccuracies and approximating truth through corroboration.
Within newsrooms, it is not uncommon to hear the cliché, "If your mother says she loves you, check it out." This isn’t just because journalists have a great degree of self-loathing and significant trust issues. It’s because skepticism lies at the heart of the journalistic cultures in many places, including the U.S. Journalists understand that sources often have agendas, and thus a purpose for speaking to a journalist (i.e., to get favorable coverage for something they care about). Even if the source is not acting in a self-interested way, the source might simply misremember a piece of information or recall seeing something that never actually happened. Even documents might have mistakes in them that a journalist will not want to repeat in their reporting.
In a selfish way, verification is also important because journalists trade on their social currency. Put another way, journalists who are seen as being credible are more likely to have their work taken seriously, and sources will be more likely to divulge information to credible journalists. A big part of establishing that credibility is demonstrating the ability to consistently and rigorously vet information.
There is no single way to verify information, but here are some helpful strategies and tools that you can master to quickly evaluate the quality and veracity of different information.
Interrogate Your 'Facts'
One strategy is to commit to interrogating all of your 'facts' as you would a suspect. Those 'facts' may have come from your own research or from something a source said.
Start by jotting down all of the assertions and factual information you might include in your story. Then, ask yourself: How do we know this fact? Why is this assertion true? What are the assumptions underlying this statement? At the heart of your interrogation should be the question: Why should the reader, viewer, or listener believe this?
The goal of your interrogation should be to triangulate information, or find multiple sources that say or show the same thing (or at least highly similar things). This might involve asking multiple people questions about the same thing and seeing if the information they give you is consistent. For example, if three people describe an incident in the same way, you can have greater confidence that the description captures the truth of what happened.
Your interrogation should focus on getting as close as possible to the primary (original) sources of information. For example, if a spokesperson for the police department says that crime dropped by five percent, ask them for a copy of the data. If a source tells you the bar across the street is owned by an anti-alcohol advocate, pull the property record for the bar and research the owner. In general, presume that any single source is wrong and make it your job to check if they might actually be right.
Use Websites and Tools
The single most useful general tool for verifying information is a search engine. Modern journalists must become masters at knowing which search terms to use and how to make effective use of the 'advanced search' functionality of most search engines. For example, if a journalist was trying to determine if I still work at UMass, they could use the advanced search functionality in Google (or DuckDuckGo, if you like your privacy!) to limit results to the "umass.edu" domain. Alternatively, if they’re looking for any results about a journalism professor with my name, they could wrap my name in quotation marks ("Rodrigo Zamith") to denote that the terms "Rodrigo" and "Zamith" should appear alongside each other (and in that order), and then add "journalism" as the end (i.e., search for '"Rodrigo Zamith" journalism').
For verifying identities, the websites AnyWho and Spokeo are useful tools that allow you to look up a person’s name, age, and address based on public records. They also offer additional information through their paid features.
For verifying pictures that you might have come across on social media, the websites TinEye and Google Image Search are very helpful. They allow you to upload an image and the sites then show the many web pages where that image has appeared. This is especially helpful when a picture is alleged to represent a recent event — an assertion that can be easily debunked if it appeared online prior to the event. Moreover, the website FotoForensics and the program JPEGSnoop can help you use computer algorithms to detect whether an image has been altered by tools like Photoshop.
For verifying whether something actually happened at a particular location, it can be useful to double-check details from the photo with satellite imagery or a simple Google Maps search. For example, if you come across tweets saying a police officer was shot at a White Castle in Boston, you could easily debunk that by searching if White Castle has any locations in Boston. (They don’t, and that’s okay.) Similarly, Google Maps' street view can sometimes be used to double-check details about a setting. You could even check if the weather conditions in a photo are corroborated by weather records about the location where the event allegedly took place.
Finally, fact-checking websites like Snopes can be immensely useful when a rumor starts to pick up speed. Such websites will often quickly identify and debunk misinformation, disinformation, and simple hoaxes spreading on the web. Quite often, a new rumor (and supposedly corroborating evidence) is just a rehash of a previously debunked piece of misinformation or disinformation.
Bookmark Reliable Information Sources
Local, state, and federal governments are major producers of factual information, as are academic institutions, non-profit interest groups, and supranational governmental bodies (e.g., the United Nations). Familiarizing yourself with their websites and the kinds of information those institutions produce can be a useful time-saver.
For example, if you are looking to double-check unemployment statistics in the United States, a good first stop would be the Bureau of Labor Statistics' website, which compiles monthly unemployment reports. If you want to double-check crime rates in the United States, a good first stop would be the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting program (or, for more recent local information, a local police agency’s website). If you want to double-check whether the United States has a higher per-capita death rate than Brazil for an infectious disease, a good first stop would be the World Health Organization’s website.
There are many useful directories for finding the right websites for certain kinds of information — so many that I cannot possibly list them all here. However, the key is come up with an effective system for bookmarking useful sources of information and organizing them in a way that allows you to quickly find the right bookmarks. For example, many journalists will use tags in conjunction with their bookmarks. That way, if they’re ever looking to double-check any 'health' information, they can quickly find the right subset of websites. To that end, it is helpful to master your preferred browser’s bookmaking functionality or to use advanced bookmark managers (e.g., Raindrop and Memex).
Keep an Accuracy Checklist
Once you have finished writing your article, it is also helpful to use an accuracy checklist. For example, your accuracy checklist may involve double-checking:
• The spelling for all names, companies, titles, and place names that are featured in the story.
• All of the statistics featured in the story, taking special care to ensure you are using the right scale (e.g., "million" vs. "billion").
• All references to times, distances, and dates.
• All of the quotations in the story, ensuring that they match any recordings you may have of those statements.
• All arguments or narratives that depend on a fact, ensuring that they are logically consistent with that fact.
To apply that checklist rigorously, it can be helpful to print a copy of the story (e.g., article or voice-over script), go through every sentence, and circle every fact or assertion in it. If you can attribute all those red circles to an authoritative source or to multiple sources, then you can feel good about filing your story.
Key Takeaways
• Verification refers to the act of establishing or testing the truth or correctness of a fact, theory, statement, etc., by means of special investigation or comparison of data. It is an essential component of 'good' journalism.
• Verification helps protect a journalist’s credibility, which is a key form of social currency for journalists.
• There is no single way to engage in verification but there are a number of resources that can help you verify information quickly. Moreover, it is helpful to learn best practices like keeping an accuracy checklist so that, over time, verifying information can become second nature. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/09%3A_Sourcing_and_Verifying_Information/9.06%3A_Verifying_Information.txt |
Introduction
The term lead (also spelled as 'lede') refers to the first paragraph of a journalistic story, or first two paragraphs, in the case of an extended lead. In the case of a broadcast newscast, the term can be used to refer to either the first story of the newscast (opening segment) or to the way the individual broadcast story begins.
Leads carry the critical responsibilities of drawing in audiences' attention and interest while informing them of the key elements of a story, and effectively 'leading' audiences into the rest of an article. Both of these goals are equally important.
Leads are particularly instrumental in giving news consumers a brief glimpse into the story before they have to commit fully to reading it, listening to it, or watching it. Put another way, a lead should make your audiences either want to continue reading beyond the first paragraph or feel sufficiently informed that they’ll get the gist of the story even if they move on before reaching the conclusion.
The 5 W’s and H
The typical news lead aims to first and foremost inform news audiences. It does this by including the most essential information about the story right at the beginning, namely by addressing the so-called "5 W’s and H" of a story. These are the essential questions journalists must answer about any topic: Who? What? When? Where? Why? And, of course, How?
For example, a journalist might make clear in the first paragraph of a story that Candidate X (who) won an election (what) in Amherst (where) last night (when) because 67 percent of voters cast their ballots for them (why).
This kind of lead is called a summary lead. It is highly descriptive and is a hallmark of so-called "hard news" stories written in a "straight news" style. Audiences will often encounter these in breaking news coverage or in stories written by newswire services.
The Nut Graf
News leads are typically short (two to three sentences in length) and get to the point of an article quickly so as not to lose the audience’s attention. Because of this short length, it is sometimes impossible to answer all 5 W’s and H in a single lead paragraph — especially if the lead is crafted to draw the audience in.
When that is the case, journalists generally provide the second-most important information, or answer the critical questions they could not address in the lead, in the nut graf (also spelled "nut graph" or "nutgraph"). The nut graf is usually the second paragraph of an article, or the paragraph immediately following an extended lead.
The responsibility of a nut graf is to contextualize the most important facts of an article and provide audiences with a clear understanding of that article’s angle. (The angle is the lens through the journalist approaches the central issue or topic examined in the story. For example, when a journalist decides to write a story about a new town zoning ordinance, they could focus on the potential impact of the change on the town’s 'character,' or on the individuals who stand to gain or lose most from the change.) The nut graf tells audiences why the story is important and timely. It helps explain where the story is coming from, where it is going, and what is at stake.
This traditional news combination of a strong lead and a clear nut graf right at the beginning of a news story follows the inverted pyramid style of newswriting. Under that style, journalists organize news stories so that they begin with the most essential or important information at the top, and continue with successively less important facts and context.
Other Types of Leads
The aforementioned approach, which packs information quickly at the very beginning of a story with a no-nonsense writing style, reflects just one kind of introduction to a journalistic story. There are several other kinds of leads, especially in stories produced by non-traditional news outlets; longer, in-depth (long-form) stories; and in certain genres of journalism (e.g., Arts & Culture journalism).
Anecdotal Lead
One particularly common alternative is the anecdotal lead. This is a type of lead in which a journalist begins a story with an anecdote, or illustrative story, to depict a scene or event that guides audiences into the broader context. For example, while covering that same local election, a reporter writing an anecdotal lead might choose to describe the moment Candidate X learned they had won the election — for example, while on the phone with their partner in a room full of exuberant supporters who were about to be showered in red, white, and blue balloons. A similar variant involves starting the story with a powerful quote or a startling statement that immediately grabs the audience’s attention.
Analysis Lead
In an analysis lead, a journalist synthesizes and analyzes important information in a more contextual introduction to a story. This type of lead helps put current events into perspective for audiences. Using the same local election story as an example, a reporter writing an analysis lead might choose to begin the story with a focus on Candidate X’s legislative priorities and how their election has the potential to change the city and impact its citizens in the coming years.
The Blind Lead
With a blind lead, the journalist sets a scene or tells a story without immediately making clear the Who or What of a story, in order to build tension, establish a tone, or pique audience interest. In the aforementioned example, the story might begin with details about the supporters' sense of euphoria and surprise before going on to introduce Candidate X.
Selecting a Lead
There are several more types of leads, though. Notably, different types of leads pair better with different topics, and even different tones (e.g., serious, humorous, melancholic, and so on). So, after reporting all the necessary information to produce a good piece of journalism, you’ll need to consider what type of lead is the best fit for it.
No matter what type of lead you choose to begin your story, you must inform audiences and interest them in your larger story. As journalist Chip Scanlan put it: "An effective lead makes a promise to the reader or viewer: I have something important, something interesting, to tell you. A good lead beckons and invites. It informs, attracts, and entices."
When deciding how to start your story, take stock of what its strongest element is. This may be a strong anecdote that gives a face to your story and establishes a connection with the audience. Or, it might be an eye-popping statistic that shocks the audience and makes them want to read on. Or, if you are producing a shorter news brief or breaking news story, the strongest element may simply be a succinct summary of what happened.
Example: Worker’s Compensation
For example, in 2015, journalists from ProPublica and NPR found that people living in different U.S. states could receive drastically different worker’s compensation benefits for the same injuries. They crunched some more numbers, talked to several experts and victims, and wrote a story titled, "How Much Is Your Arm Worth? Depends On Where You Work."
Using data from different states, the journalists were able to assign a maximum dollar amount to a number of different body parts. There was a fair bit of data behind the story, and it is easy to imagine a lead that simply pointed to the disparity.
However, these journalists had a different idea. They chose to lead with extended anecdotes involving two men: They were of similar age, lived just 75 miles apart, were married to a spouse and had two kids, and had lost a portion of their left arm in a machinery accident at work in an industrial plant. However, the fourth paragraph hits us with a major discrepancy: One of those men received just \$45,000 in workers' compensation for the loss of his arm. The other was awarded benefits that could surpass \$740,000 over his lifetime. Then, in the fifth paragraph, we finally get to the nut graf: These experiences illustrate the vast gaps in the workers' comp benefits offered by different states. The rest of the story goes on to describe other differences in workers' comp benefits across states, and the reasons for them.
What ProPublica does well here is to suck the reader in with a story about two similar people who were forced into two very different paths when they had comparable problems. The strength of their anecdotes, and in particular the discrepancy in their outcomes, outweighed any other potential opener.
Example: Refugees in Europe
As a contrast, consider a 2016 story from The Guardian titled, "Quarter of child refugees arriving in EU traveled without parents." In that case, the strongest element in the story is the observation that almost 100,000 child refugees who arrived in Europe the previous year came without their parents.
This is a staggering figure whose magnitude is likely to shock the audience. It is thus an apt choice to serve as the centerpiece to a summary lead: "A quarter of all child refugees who arrived in Europe last year — almost 100,000 under-18s — traveled without parents or guardians and are now 'geographically orphaned,' presenting a huge challenge to authorities in their adopted countries."
From there, the story goes on to highlight other interesting bits of data from Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union. While that story is also a prime candidate for a strong, compelling anecdote, it is quite possible that the journalist was unable to speak to a child refugee before their deadline. Thus, the statistic was likely the strongest element the journalist had to work with — and so they led with it.
Ultimately, it is crucial that you think strategically about your lead and its goals. Use that short space as an opportunity to draw in audiences, and avoid things that could distract or turn them away, such as clichéd language, rambling sentences, irrelevant or unimportant information, or direct questions. The best leads are succinct and introduce audiences either to new information, a captivating incident, or a striking statistic. And, a successful lead will linger in the minds of audiences long after they have consumed it.
Key Takeaways
• The most common type of journalism lead — the summary lead — addresses the classic "5 W’s and H" of journalism: Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? It is often paired with a nut graf, which contextualizes the most important facts of a news story and provides audiences with a clear understanding of that story’s angle.
• There are other leads beyond the summary lead. These include the anecdotal lead, the analysis lead, and the blind lead. Different types of leads pair better with certain topics and the desired tone of writing.
• Regardless of which lead you choose, the goal is to quickly inform audiences and interest them in your larger story. Audiences who are not engaged by a lead will often not go beyond it. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/10%3A_Creating_Journalistic_Content/10.01%3A_Leads_and_Nut_Grafs.txt |
Introduction
Although news stories are sometimes demeaned as being formulaic, that doesn’t have to be the case. Journalists are sometimes allowed to exercise a considerable amount of creativity in their writing. In fact, this is increasingly becoming the case as journalistic outlets find themselves in an ever more competitive information environment and fighting for audiences' attention. Put another way, strict, traditional forms of journalistic writing are becoming more flexible, and in some instances have given way to more inventive and engaging forms.
One way in which journalists can express that creative license is in developing a story structure, or the structural framework that underlies the order and manner in which information and/or a narrative is presented to audiences. Before doing so, however, it is helpful for the journalist to first take stock of the pieces (i.e., information and anecdotes) they have. Then, they can proceed to seeing how those pieces fit together best.
Below is some advice for how you can organize your pieces and select an appropriate story structure for them.
Taking Stock of the Pieces
Before you start writing a news story, take some time to revisit all of your interview notes in order to refresh your memory. If you notice any gaps in your notes, fill them in as best you can. If those gaps are especially important, conduct supplemental interviews with individuals who can address the gaps.
Second, try to categorize the information in your notes. Start by filling in the 5 W’s (Who, What, When, Where, and Why) and H (How) of the story. However, you can also start to categorize the information into themes that could potentially stand as distinct subsections of a story. For example, in the case of a story about police shootings, the themes might include: "Police Training", "Community Anger," "Police Feeling Unsupported," and "Legislative Responses Being Considered."
Third, start to match your quotes with your factual information. In an ideal scenario, every major fact in the story should have a corroborating or exemplifying quote — though this is seldom the case in practice. Quotes are sometimes the most powerful parts of a story, and most news stories include a quote after every few grafs (paragraphs).
Fourth, prioritize the information. Which facts are most newsworthy? Which quotes are most interesting? Use a system to denote which categories of information, and what information within each category, are most important. It can be helpful to color-code the information in order to make it easier to drop information into a story and to have a better sense of what can be cut later on.
Finally, write a quick statement that you feel best encapsulates the story. You can imagine this exercise as how you would tell the story to a friend during a short elevator ride. This can serve as the basis for either your lead or nut graf.
Once you are ready to start writing, you’ll want to select a story structure that helps you tell your story in a compelling and informative way. This will make the actual writing process much easier and help you produce a story that flows well (and is thus more enjoyable to consume).
Different Story Structures
The most common story structure in U.S. journalism is the "inverted pyramid." However, it is not always the best choice, and it is generally best reserved for breaking news stories and short- to regular-length "straight news" stories. Feature stories, investigative stories, and most long-form pieces of journalism are more likely to use alternative structures that allow the journalist to intersperse anecdotes, facts, and quantitative information in more interesting ways.
Common journalistic story structures include the inverted pyramid, the martini glass, the kebab, the accordion, and the pyramid.
The Inverted Pyramid
The inverted pyramid is characterized by having the most important, substantial, and interesting information at the beginning of the story. Then, with each successive paragraph, the information becomes less important or relevant. The final few paragraphs of the story will typically include background information or other general context.
For example, an inverted pyramid story might begin with the following lead: Members of an Amherst church (who) wrote a letter to the Select Board Monday (when) arguing that a marijuana dispensary (what) under construction on Belchertown Road (where) will compromise safety in the neighborhood and represents an attack on their religious values (why). The next couple of paragraphs might detail the objection, and the paragraphs after that might describe the dispensary’s position and perhaps any crime mitigation efforts they plan to support. Then, the tail end of the story might cover when the business license was issued and provide some context about the number of dispensaries in the region.
The key advantage of this structure is that it condenses information efficiently and allows the audience to get the key points of a story even if they stop reading after the first few paragraphs. However, this structure can get rather repetitive and dull, and that may result in the story failing to stand out among its competitors.
The Martini Glass
A related structure is the "martini glass." Like the inverted pyramid, the martini glass will begin with the most important, substantial, and interesting information at the top — often through the use of a summary lead.
However, once the lead and nut graf have been presented, the story will transition to a chronological format, with the most recent information being followed by continually less recent information. As with the inverted pyramid, the story would then end with some general or contextual information, or a good "kicker" (a quote or anecdote that effectively encapsulates the story or wraps it up in an aesthetically or emotionally pleasing way).
This structure works best for a sequential news event, such as a crime or disaster story where the journalist needs to explain what happened from beginning to end. However, the temporal approach can be limiting, especially if the issue is multifaceted.
The Kebab
Feature stories will often use a more creative structure like the "kebab" (or the "circle"). This structure typically begins with an anecdote about someone who is affected by a trend, issue, or event. Then, it quickly transitions to the nut graf, which describes either the five W’s and H or summarizes the broader phenomenon.
Following the nut graf, the structure continues by adding detailed analyses of different aspects of the trend, issue, or event. These are the 'meat' parts of the kebab, with each aspect representing a different piece of meat, and the journalist moving quickly from one piece to the next. The kebab ends with a closing anecdote, often about the same person featured in the lead, effectively bringing the story "full circle."
This structure works best when the journalist has access to an illustrative anecdote that aptly encapsulates the big takeaway from a story.
The Accordion
A remix of the kebab is the "accordion" structure. Like the kebab, the structure begins with a strong anecdote or quote that represents the main topic of a story and quickly transitions to a nut graf.
However, unlike the kebab, this structure follows a 'zooming in' and 'zooming out' pattern that uses a compelling central figure (or small cast) to illustrate multiple aspects of a story throughout the story. In the 'zooming in' phases, the journalist uses different anecdotes from the central figure (e.g., aspects of their experience with the issue) to illustrate and personalize an aspect of the story. In the 'zooming out' phases, the journalist contextualizes the experience by focusing on the 'big picture,' or how representative the anecdote is, often by incorporating side characters (e.g., subject experts). This structure will typically end in similar fashion to the kebab, with a closing anecdote from the central character.
This structure is especially useful when the journalist has a compelling central character that can effectively encapsulate the issue through their lived experience. It can also work when the journalist has a cadre of characters who collectively encapsulate the issue through their lived experiences, as the journalist can insert a different character during each 'zooming in' phase.
The accordion structure is also particularly useful for data-driven stories, as it makes it easy for the journalist to oscillate between data analysis and anecdote, thereby keeping the reader well-informed and engaged.
The Pyramid
A less common storytelling structure in journalism is the "pyramid." It is, as you may have guessed, roughly the opposite of the inverted pyramid structure.
This structure, which is more often used in long-form feature writing or journalistic non-fiction books, builds up to the most interesting information. It is more akin to storytelling in a novel, where information of increasing importance is revealed as the narrative develops in order to build up tension and conflict. It is only near the end that the reader is exposed to the full depth and breadth of the story, which serves as a form of (or immediate antecedent to) resolution.
Selecting a Structure
No one story structure is inherently better than another. However, structures like the inverted pyramid are better suited for shorter or breaking news stories. By contrast, structures like the accordion are better suited to longer stories with compelling characters.
When selecting your story structure, try to be mindful of the purpose of your story (e.g., to quickly inform or to entertain), the amount of space you have to work with (e.g., a shorter story is usually better suited to a simple structure), the range of themes you have (e.g., a story with many themes may require a kebab-like structure), and the quality and appeal of the evidence and experiences you have uncovered through your reporting (e.g., several captivating anecdotes may benefit from a more creative structure). Moreover, you’ll generally want to be aware of your target outlet’s writing style in order to produce content that is aligned with those audiences' expectations.
Key Takeaways
• Before you start writing, take stock of the information you have. This will help you organize your information thoughtfully and subsequently select an appropriate story structure.
• Common journalistic story structures include the inverted pyramid, the martini glass, the kebab, the accordion, and the pyramid.
• When selecting your story structure, try to be mindful of the purpose of your story, the amount of space you have to work with, and the quality and appeal of the evidence and experiences you have uncovered through your reporting. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/10%3A_Creating_Journalistic_Content/10.02%3A_Story_Structures.txt |
Introduction
Good quotes are essential to turning a story from being good to being great. They play an important role in breaking up the journalist’s writing, transitioning from one fact or sub-issue to the next, giving authoritative heft to a story, and conveying the richness of the human experience. Put another way, quotes are useful in both substantive and stylistic ways.
However, quotes are also a representation of the individuals featured in a story. They must thus be conveyed accurately and clearly. This can present a challenge as journalists simply lack the space to fully quote everything their sources said during the course of interviewing several people. And, even if they had the space, fully quoting everyone would surely result in a story that is an incoherent mess.
Quoting sources in a story thus involves a process of selection and placement, and often requires journalists to move between direct quotes and paraphrased statements.
Below are some tips to help you choose who and what to quote, and to successfully employ quoting and attribution styles that are commonly used in U.S. journalism.
Direct Quotes
Direct quotes are statements that reflect the exact words used by the source. They are always placed in between quotation marks to make clear that they are the source’s words, and not the journalist’s.
Direct quotes are most useful for conveying emotions, opinions, and personal experiences. Quoting dry, basic facts (or descriptions that you can easily observe with your own eyes) is generally neither interesting nor a good use of space (as you can typically convey those facts more succinctly yourself). Instead, listen for quotes that tell you how people feel or think about the subject. An ideal quote will exemplify or elaborate upon a fact.
When using direct quotes, it is important that you change things as little as possible. Most interviewees are able to express themselves coherently — especially since many public figures and experts now receive media training — so you typically only have to 'tidy up' a quote.
Tidying up typically involves largely mechanical tasks like removing 'ums' and 'ers' or correcting a tense (e.g., using "have" when the correct syntax calls for "had"). However, you should never change the meaning of a quote. It is not your job as a journalist to make an interviewee sound "smarter" — nor should you try to make them sound "dumber." Your job as a journalist is to accurately convey the source’s intended meaning (as best you can).
What journalists can do, however, is patch quotes. Patching allows you to link one sentence from an interview with another sentence from earlier or later on in that interview. This is particularly useful if you have an inexperienced interviewee or a fast thinker who jumps around a lot during an interview. For example, consider the following portion of a hypothetical interview: "Arsenal are one of the most storied clubs in England. I mean, last weekend was a pretty poor showing, but they’re typically quite good. Still, they remain the only English team to complete a top-flight season undefeated. And, they have won 13 top-flight titles, which is pretty darn impressive."
We could easily patch that interview segment by writing: "Arsenal are one of the most storied clubs in England," Zamith said. "They remain the only English team to complete a top-flight season undefeated."
Patching is critical for ensuring good flow for a story, and journalists therefore frequently use that technique. Direct quotes are typically between one and three sentences in length. Unless they are particularly compelling, longer quotes will often slow down a story.
Here are a few other things to keep in mind when quoting a source:
• Every quote should be clearly attributed so audiences know exactly who said what.
• When you quote a person for the first time, introduce them. The introduction typically includes the person’s full name and title. For example, in the aforementioned quote, you might write: "said Rodrigo Zamith, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts Amherst."
• With subsequent quotes, use the source’s last name. If there are two sources with the same last name in the story, use their full name.
• If there are several paragraphs between a source’s previous quote and their next one, remind the audience of the source’s qualifications. For example, you might later write, "said Zamith, the journalism professor."
• It is perfectly fine to use the word "said" repeatedly in your story to transition between the quote and the attribution. This is a neutral term that does not ascribe motivations that you cannot ascertain to your source. Most publications will stick to the past tense (as the interview already took place), though "says" is permissible at some outlets.
• You should typically use the "[NAME] said" construction when quoting sources. However, you may invert this when an explanatory clause (or attribution) is added. Here’s an example of such an inversion: "said Zamith, who has watched nearly every game over the past decade."
• Single or multi-sentence quotes are usually given their own paragraph in a story. This helps draw attention to the quote. Partial quotes (i.e., a sentence fragment) or short quotes may be incorporated into a paragraph containing the journalist’s own words.
• When using multi-sentence quotes, insert the attribution after the first sentence. Do not add it to the very end of a multi-sentence quote.
• In feature writing, you may break up a single sentence into multiple segments for effect. For example: "Last weekend was a poor showing," Zamith said, shaking his head. "They’re typically quite good."
• In the United States, punctuation (e.g., commas and periods) typically appears within the quotation marks.
Paraphrased Statements
Journalistic stories also make frequent use of paraphrased statements, which are sometimes also called indirect quotes. These refer to statements attributed to a source that are conveyed through the journalist’s choice of words.
For example, rather dedicating space to an extended quote, you might simply write: According to Zamith, Arsenal have won 13 top-flight titles in England.
Paraphrased statements are important for adding authority and connective tissue to a story. They allow you to attribute a range of information — which adds heft to your story by highlighting that the information is not just your opinion or feeling — and make it easier to introduce transitions to the story by interchanging your words with those of your sources. They are also useful when a source clearly intends to express a specific idea but does so in a clumsy way. In such an instance, you are not simply helping the source look "smarter"; you are helping the audience more easily understand the point.
Paraphrased statements are particularly useful for conveying purely factual information since facts, in isolation, are typically not very exciting and can be conveyed succinctly. If there’s nothing unusual, interesting, or newsworthy about the exact wording of a statement, it is typically better expressed via paraphrasing.
For example, consider the following quote: "The new Journalism building will house eight lab spaces and two lecture halls," Zamith said. "These classrooms will offer seating capacity for 480 students. It will open next fall."
There is nothing particularly interesting about that expression. Instead, it would be better to paraphrase it as: Zamith said the new building, due to open next fall, will seat up to 480 students across eight lab spaces and two lecture halls.
Because the journalist has greater control over the word choice of a paraphrased statement, it is even more crucial that they take care to accurately capture the source’s meaning and intent. For example, a source may intentionally use the word "good" to refer to an above-average instance of something. By using the word "great" or "outstanding" in the paraphrasing, the journalist may end up conveying a greater sense of pleasure than the source actually feels. It is thus wise to stick closely to the source’s language, even when paraphrasing.
Similarly, journalists should be careful with the attribution terms they use. For example, the word "claims" can raise undue skepticism about a statement. Instead, it is best to use the following neutral descriptors: "said," "stated," "according to," and "added."
The LQTQ Format
One structural approach to newswriting that highlights the value of quotes is the LQTQ Format, with the acronym standing for Lead-Quote-Transition-Quote.
The approach begins with a strong lead (e.g., an anecdotal lead or a summary lead) that conveys the essence of the story or hooks audiences in.
Then, in the second full paragraph, important information not found in the lead is offered to help further contextualize the story (i.e., the nut graf). This second paragraph ends with a transition or set-up for the first extended quote in the story.
The third paragraph consists of a direct quote that helps to illustrate or elaborate upon the information provided in that second paragraph. As this is the generally the first direct quote, it typically includes complete attribution information for the source.
Subsequent paragraphs follow the Transition-Quote model. For example, the fourth and fifth paragraphs become linked thusly: The fourth paragraph introduces the next major fact or important piece of information, all the while transitioning the previous direct quote to the next direct quote — which comprises the fifth paragraph. That subsequent quote should elaborate on the transition, offer an expert opinion, or illustrate the issue via an individual’s experience or emotion. Transitions may include paraphrased statements (by the same source or a different one), original facts uncovered by the journalist, or contextual information.
A transition does not have to be a single paragraph in length; it can cover two and even three paragraphs. The idea is that direct quotes are appearing frequently in the story, ensuring that audiences are able to regularly hear from someone other than the journalist.
This process continues until the end, with the story concluding with a kicker quote that aptly encapsulates the story, points to what is to come, or otherwise leaves the audience with a satisfying conclusion. (Don’t just summarize the story in the concluding paragraph. Your audience will have just consumed the story, so they don’t need to be reminded of it. Try to end it with something interesting instead.)
Choosing Who and What to Quote
Journalists will frequently speak with far more sources than they end up quoting or paraphrasing. Put another way, it is perfectly fine to speak with a source and not quote them in the story. If another source is able to express something in a more informative or compelling way, refer only to that other source. (However, it can be helpful to include multiple sources to illustrate that a particular opinion or belief is shared.) Similarly, if your source says something that is inaccurate or offensive, you can choose to omit that information or exclude the source altogether (so as to not misinform your audience). In short, be selective with what and who you quote.
You should also be mindful of the source’s authoritativeness on a particular subject matter. For example, a quote from a company’s CEO will typically carry more weight than a quote from that company’s media spokesperson. (Keep in mind, though, that many quotes in press releases are effectively written by spokespeople.) In general, you should seek to attribute information to the most authoritative sources you were able to interview.
Moreover, if your story angle changes over the course of reporting it, you should simply drop the now-superfluous material. While quotes can be highly useful, they can also be detrimental when used improperly (or overused). There are better uses for space than a tangential quote. (Journalists are often temped to include a particularly juicy quote in a story even though there’s no apparent place for it. Resist that temptation and keep your story focused.)
Finally, as a rule of thumb, journalists should paraphrase dry facts, but directly quote emotions, opinions, and newsworthy expressions voiced by sources. As suggested by the LQTQ Format, direct quotes should be placed throughout the story — generally, at least after every few paragraphs — regardless of the story structure.
Key Takeaways
• Quoting sources in a story involves a process of selection and placement, and often requires journalists to move between direct quotes and paraphrased statements.
• Direct quotes are statements that reflect the exact words used by the source. Paraphrased statements are those that are attributed to a source but are conveyed through the journalist’s choice of words. Try to include a direct quote after every few paragraphs, and use paraphrasing to help with transitions.
• It is perfectly fine to speak with a source and not quote them in the story. Try to attribute information to the most authoritative and interesting sources you interviewed. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/10%3A_Creating_Journalistic_Content/10.03%3A_Quotes_and_Attribution.txt |
Introduction
Journalists frequently use quantitative information in their stories. This includes statistics they find in reports produced by non-profit organizations, industry groups, and research centers, as well as data analyses that the journalist may have conducted themselves.
Such quantitative information can be highly useful to lend a news story greater authority, especially as numbers and statistics are often associated with being more neutral and objective than anecdotes and expertise. (This mythology is highly problematic, though. Quantitative information often has its own biases. For example, decisions about what to quantify about a phenomenon and how to measure it are still made by human beings. The measured information thus takes on some of its creator’s biases.)
In general, journalists are known to struggle with some core numeracy skills, such as calculating a percent change, differentiating a mean from a median, and determining a per capita rate. They are more likely yet to struggle with many applied statistical concepts, such as interpreting a margin of error or statistical significance (e.g., a p value). Journalists should not report quantitative information they do not understand, as that increases the likelihood they will misinform their audiences. Put another way, either seek out clarification in those cases, or omit your interpretation from the writing.
These struggles are compounded when it comes to the general public, which has, on average, even less training in numeracy. The average news consumer will not be familiar with statistical terminology and generally needs help to make sense of quantitative information (and, especially, to connect results from different statistical analyses).
Thus, knowing how to conduct (or even just interpret) quantitative analyses is only half the battle for a journalist. The second half is making such information comprehensible for a non-specialized audience.
Here are a few tips for effectively integrating quantitative information.
Focusing on What Matters
One key thing journalists bring to the table in the journalism-data relationship is the ability to identify what is most interesting about some dataset or analysis.
Datasets will often include many different variables about a large number of units of observation. Therefore, they can contain a large amount of interesting data points and trends. A scientific or industry report may similarly detail several findings of note. However, a journalist rarely has the space in a short story or broadcast segment to go into all of those potential findings.
Instead, your task as a journalist is to narrow things down to just a few results, relationships, or values that are especially interesting. Put another way, focus on just a few things and enrich them with detail, anecdotes, and context.
For example, the most interesting thing in a government report about crime in a city might be the increase in a few particular types of crimes. Rather than detailing the levels of all types of crime, focus just on the crimes that have increased at a disproportionate rate. (Conversely, maybe the story is that crime has generally remained flat over that period of time. If that’s the more important or representative story, focus on that.)
Alternatively, perhaps the most interesting thing in a dataset about crime is a single outlier. That is, maybe regional crime has stayed flat, with the exception of one particular city, which has seen a shocking increase in crime. How far is that outlier from the average? Why might that be the case? What is so unique about that outlier?
In deciding "what matters," it is crucial that you keep your audience in mind. You may encounter a report or dataset that includes data for schools all around the country, but your audience will likely care most about how their local schools are faring. It might make sense to just focus on those few local schools, and perhaps even on just a few different measures that you consider to be most important in representing how those schools are faring.
Simplify Language and Analyses
When a journalist produces a regular news story for a typical outlet, they are usually producing it for someone with little more than a high-school education. The journalist will thus typically use short, declarative sentences and avoid jargon or esoteric language. Incorporating quantitative information into a story is no different. Chances are your audience will know little about regression analyses, or even fully understand what a statistical correlation entails.
Your job as a journalist is thus to simplify, simplify, and simplify in order to make sure your story can be understood by most adults. You can do this by including examples throughout the story to make the quantitative information easier to comprehend. For example, a massive devaluation of a foreign currency can sometimes be expressed in a more comprehensible way by describing how many hours a person would have to work at a minimum wage job in that foreign place in order to afford a cheese pizza or a cup of coffee.
Additionally, you should only include the methodological and statistical details that are essential to understanding a story, and express those details in an accessible way — even if it comes at some expense to precision. If you want to include the nitty-gritty details, it is often best to include it as a sidebar or as a companion (separate) methodological piece.
The only caveat here is if you are producing content for an outlet that has a numerically savvy audience that expects greater depth. This includes niche outlets that cater to experts (e.g., doctors) or particularly knowledgeable audiences (e.g., baseball junkies). Then, you can talk about the more complex details of particular analyses and methods, and use jargon those audiences are likely to understand.
Interrogate the Causes or Implications
Journalism is more than presenting facts — or, in this case, numbers. It is about helping individuals make sense of some phenomenon by showing them how the dots are connected.
When producing your story, ask yourself: How does this story help the audience better understand the issue? What does your reporting add to what’s already out there?
You can make your story insightful by focusing on the causes behind a trend identified in an industry report, or by focusing on the implications of your original data analysis. What might be driving the identified phenomenon? How might that phenomenon of interest affect the audience, or the people living in their communities?
For example, if you come across data showing that sexual assault cases are becoming more frequent in a particular county, you can produce an important story. However, that story can be made more useful if you’re able to identify what might be behind that increase in sexual assault cases (e.g., there were budget cuts at many police departments in that county that year). Similarly, you could perhaps use the report to point to existing resources and services for helping people deal with sexual assault, or connect it to a bill that might be under consideration that would change the funding for counseling or violence prevention programs.
Use Examples Throughout
Numbers can feel rather abstract and faceless, and staring at a bunch of them can make even the most ardent data lover’s eyes glaze after a while. Indeed, as a former ruler of the Soviet Union reportedly quipped once: "If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics."
Great stories tend put a human face to the quantitative information in order to make it more relatable. This means using anecdotes and direct quotations from people who were affected by some issue or have intimate knowledge of that issue. Such anecdotes and quotes not only help break up the most informational parts of a story but they create opportunities to forge emotional connections with an audience.
It can often helpful to zoom in and out of stories by interchanging anecdotes and quantitative insights, such as by using an 'accordion' story structure. Quantitative information is often best used to illustrate the big picture and the trends; but it is often the human stories that help make the journalism compelling.
It is important to note that examples will sometimes come at the expense of analytic depth due to space constraints. For example, in order to make room for an anecdote, the journalist may need to cut some of the quantitative insights. This is a judgment call but it is important for journalists to remind themselves of the old adage: sometimes, less is more.
Visualize Information
The use of quantitative information in a story often lends itself nicely to the inclusion of data visualizations and tables alongside the narrative. In fact, humans are much better at finding patterns, relationships, and making sense of a large number of data points when such information is presented visually. This is especially the case when there is a stark contrast between things, and the audience can be shocked by just taking a quick glance at two visuals that show a clear disparity.
Visuals should not simply duplicate prose, though. Instead, visuals should complement narratives. A common way to do this is to tell and show. Tell your audiences what you believe to be the most important take-away quantitative insights through your prose and show that point through a compelling anecdote in the narrative (and an accompanying data visualization that shows the relevant pattern).
If you are integrating quantitative information from an industry or research report, there’s a good chance a visualization already exists. However, that visualization may be too sophisticated for a general audience — it was likely designed with a specialized audience in mind — and you may thus need to recreate it in a more accessible (and, oftentimes, more aesthetically pleasing) way.
Visualizations can also be used as asides to a story, via the use of sidebars and the like. Such spaces are reserved for information that is important and relevant, but that might be too tangential (and thus disruptive) to include in the middle of a story. Additionally, visuals and tables can be useful tools for opening up a dataset to audiences and allowing them to draw their own inferences. This can be accomplished by either creating an online front-end for the dataset (e.g., a searchable database) or by creating an interactive visualization that allows someone to explore all of the data points. Such aides allow you to have a highly-focused story, but still permit the audience to identify new relationships or story angles on their own.
Focus, Simplify, Interrogate, Exemplify, and Visualize
The most compelling and comprehensible stories tend to employ all of the above tactics. Put another way, these tactics shouldn’t be thought about in isolation but rather be employed in an integrated way. Try to focus on just a few things, simplify the information, make it insightful by connecting the dots, increase the relatability by including a human face, and take advantage of visual aides to express information.
Doing all of these things at once can prove to be a challenge to journalists, but it is a challenge that gets easier with time. However, even doing just a few of these things will go a long way to producing a story infused with quantitative information that general audiences can both learn from and enjoy.
Key Takeaways
• Journalists and audiences alike struggle with numeracy skills. Journalists should not report quantitative information that they do not understand, as they risk misinforming their audiences.
• While you may have access to a range of quantitative information in a report or dataset, your story will likely only end up focusing on a small subset of that information — namely, the most important or interesting findings. Oftentimes, less is more.
• When integrating quantitative information, be sure to simplify it, connect the dots for the audience, seek human faces to exemplify it, and consider the use of visual aides. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/10%3A_Creating_Journalistic_Content/10.04%3A_Integrating_Quantitative_Information.txt |
Introduction
If you have ever heard the journalistic quip, "If it bleeds, it leads," you know that news headlines and stories are often dominated by negative stories about topics like violence, crime, and corruption. After all, professional journalists' system of news values tends to prioritize stories that deviate from the norm, and that deviation regularly comes in the form of violations (e.g., murders or kickback schemes). Moreover, news audiences are attracted to negative news across many beats. For example, when it comes to politics, people are more likely to click on negative news headlines. In fact, scholars have long documented a "negativity bias," through which people pay more attention and devote more mental effort to consuming negative information.
However, negative news can have a draining impact on audiences. People regularly complain about negativity in journalism, and often report negativity as a key reason for news avoidance. (This is despite the fact they are more likely to consume negative stories when they do consume news.) Moreover, such news can leave audiences feeling powerless or hopeless, which in turn can lead to their withdrawal from democratic processes and discussions about civic affairs.
To combat this, some journalists have sought to re-calibrate journalism toward a solutions-oriented approach. Through solutions journalism, reporters cover a wide variety of social issues facing citizens in a way that hones in on and emphasizes the potential responses, or solutions, to those issues. The resulting stories aim to provide deeply reported, in-depth information about a particular issue and make clear to audiences what possible means of solving that issue have been, or may be, applied.
Solutions journalism advocates believe that pairing problems with their potential responses in rigorous, evidence-based reporting helps provide audiences with a more complete and dynamic understanding of the issues that shape and influence their communities. Moreover, advocates believe that it can empower citizens by helping them clearly see how they might take part in combating those issues or being part of 'positive' change. In short, solutions journalists seek to make their audiences more informed and efficacious citizens.
Solutions Journalism in Practice
Solutions journalism stories cover a variety of social ills and injustices, but they are united by their shared focus on a solution’s effectiveness, limitations, and resulting lessons. For example, reporters have applied solutions journalism practices to cover how teachers were improving classroom discipline practices; how Los Angeles community leaders were fostering more inclusive activism; how New York social justice experts were opening doors for prison reform; how a range of communities were working to reduce violent crimes; and how medical leaders were improving access to health care. As evidenced by these examples, solutions journalism is ideally suited for local news because it is easier to connect audiences to concrete resources within their communities to address problems they likely encounter locally.
According to the Solutions Journalism Network, solutions journalists tend to engage in four critical acts when producing journalism:
1. They center the story on a response (or potential solution) to an important issue, and they cover that response clearly by providing all the critical information and detail that audiences need to know in order to understand how the response works (or doesn’t).
2. In covering a response, they emphasize its actual effectiveness (or lack thereof), rather than what the response was intended to achieve. Clarifying the response’s effectiveness requires providing audiences with understandable evidence.
3. They make audiences aware of the response’s potential limitations and break down the boundaries and scope of that response to the problem.
4. Finally, solutions journalists include insights about the problem that is illuminated by a response in a way that can be useful to their audiences and seekers of alternative (or follow-up) solutions.
Another way of remembering these four key acts is to remind oneself to tell the "WHOLE story" through this mnemonic device:
• W — What response does the story address?
• H — How does the response work?
• O — Offer insight.
• L — Include limitations.
• E — Evidence of impact.
Solutions-oriented stories are thus not merely stories about a problem that end with a quick paragraph about ways people are thinking of solving that problem. The would-be solution(s) are the very core of the story. Notably, the solution(s) don’t have to be a perfect or even largely effective responses to an issue. Occasionally, the response might be ineffective or only partially effective. However, by sharing insights about the potential response, solutions journalism can help audiences learn from both failed and successful responses.
Although solutions journalism focuses on potential responses to systemic challenges — a strategy that can help to engage audiences who feel overwhelmed by typically negative news — such stories are not necessarily positive ("happy news") pieces. Instead, they find specific newsworthiness in the examination and coverage of solutions for the problems that citizens face, especially when those solutions arise outside of traditional social structures. Put another way, they are designed to offer a pathway forward, and thus a form of hope, for seemingly intractable issues.
Benefits to Solutions Journalism
Proponents of solutions journalism believe that this approach to news construction makes readers more engaged with news about issues facing their communities. Additionally, research suggests that people who consume solutions-oriented journalism are more likely to share the stories they read and seek out additional information about the problems being covered. Put another way, solutions journalism can advance both professional and economic objectives, as well-informed and highly motivated audiences can both partake in democratic processes and become more likely to consume an outlet’s future news products.
Unsurprisingly, a large number of mainstream and alternative journalistic outlets (e.g., The Boston Globe, The Seattle Times, and The Chicago Reporter) have adopted solutions journalism practices in their news coverage in recent years. Moreover, non-profit groups like the Solutions Journalism Network have helped to popularize the practice in recent years by offering educational resources and training for individual journalists, journalistic outlets, and journalism educators.
Key Takeaways
• Solutions journalism stories present responses to important social problems through evidence-based reporting that makes clear the extent of a response’s effectiveness, what its limitations are, and what insights can be gained from that response.
• Solutions journalism stories are driven by the need to engage and inform communities, not to give them "happy news." They are critical and detailed examinations of a potential solution, not soft news pieces glorifying a social actor or problem response.
• Research shows that solutions-oriented journalism can engage readers, make them more informed, increase their likelihood of sharing news, and drive them to seek out additional information about the issue being covered. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/10%3A_Creating_Journalistic_Content/10.05%3A_Solutions_Journalism.txt |
Introduction
The term "social media" refers to platforms that allow users to create a public profile, develop lists of connections (e.g., friends), traverse those connections by viewing others' profiles and public messages, and add short posts of their own to the network (which may include text, images, videos, and links to things like news stories).
While those platforms were not designed with journalism in mind, they became an important part of journalism starting in the 2010s and are now routinely factored into journalistic work. Journalists use social media to gauge public interest and sentiment, keep tabs on the competition, identify story ideas, find and verify sources, and promote and distribute their work. It has become so central to many journalists' day-to-day activities that many journalistic outlets now have social media policies to guide journalists on how to appropriately use social media (and deal with some of the challenges it introduces).
Social Media and Newsgathering
While journalists have long looked to their friends and peers for story ideas and validation, they now increasingly turn to social media for those things. Journalists listen to the general public primarily through the use of hashtags and indicators of popularity (e.g., trending topics on Twitter). They also engage directly with particular members of the public by replying to social media messages they come across and through replies to comments they receive themselves.
While journalists have been critiqued for employing a pack mentality well before the popularization of social media, researchers have repeatedly found that journalists interact primarily with other journalists on social media. This has led to critiques that social media has intensified professional insularity. That is, they may be increasingly operating within echo chambers of their own. Additionally, it is now easier for journalists to see what their peers are up to (and which behaviors are being socially rewarded among their peer group), and follow the pack leaders (i.e., the most influential journalists). This is driven, at least in part, by a desire to reduce professional uncertainty. For example, journalists often look to signals from their peers to validate their belief that the topic for their story (or story idea) is indeed newsworthy.
News consumers and journalists are not the only people on social media, though. The sources that journalists frequently turn to may use social media themselves (and often do so in strategic ways). Journalists, especially those who work a consistent beat, develop extensive lists of sources that they follow closely on social media. They not only read the sources' posts to learn new information for a story but also selectively disseminate (e.g., retweet) the juiciest information, such as an injury update from a star basketball player herself. In doing so, journalists who are active on social media take on an additional role: that of a curator of online information. Researchers have also found that journalists routinely turn to social media for "person on the street" reactions, often embedding tweets and Instagram posts in their stories as examples of the public’s reaction to a development. This is, in many ways, a continuation of traditional journalistic practice that simply leverages a new tool.
Nearly all major news events today are live-tweeted or live-blogged in some capacity. Those terms refer to a relatively new practice of constantly posting short bits of developing information on a social media stream in real time during a news event, such as a press conference. That practice has become so ingrained for some journalists that they now take notes in the form of short social media updates (e.g., tweets).
Most U.S. journalists today use Facebook and Twitter to conduct research for their stories. Journalists also use these platforms to request help in verifying information, such as by asking native speakers to help translate information, having locals visit the site where an incident allegedly took place, or having experts double-check complex or specialized information. For example, David Fahrenthold, a reporter for The Washington Post, won a Pulitzer Prize for his Twitter-assisted coverage of Donald Trump’s claims of charitable givings. Fahrenthold periodically posted on Twitter lists of dozens of charities he intended to contact, and solicited help from his followers for finding people who could confirm or deny that Trump had donated to those organizations. After four months of work and countless tips from his followers, Fahrenthold found only one charity confirming that Trump personally donated to them over an eight-year period.
Personal Branding
Social media have become central to journalists' growing efforts to develop personal brands. As journalists have become more entrepreneurial — driven in part by economic uncertainty within the journalism industry — they have used their social media profiles as billboards for their work. This does not simply mean posting their stories on social media. It also means highlighting their credentials, training, and expertise in order to appear more authoritative.
Audiences don’t just crave professional, authoritative work, though. They also value authenticity and connection. To that end, journalists now increasingly mix professional and personal information as part of their personal branding efforts — part of a phenomenon called context collapse. For example, many journalists will offer more commentary online than they do in their news stories. Additionally, journalists may post pictures of personal activities, such as attending a sporting event as a fan or playing with their dog. As audiences feel a stronger sense of connection with particular journalists, they become more loyal followers. That, in turn, increases the journalist’s perceived value and reach, which can be translated into better job offers and higher salary — or just greater potential impact for their work.
The blending of personal and professional affairs on social media has presented challenges to both individual journalists and their employers. While some journalistic outlets require their journalists to maintain a presence on social media (and some even stipulate a minimum number of social media posts and interactions per week), they also frequently employ social media guidelines that limit what those journalists can do on those platforms. This often puts journalists in a bind. If they act too professional or scripted, their personal brand may suffer from a perceived lack of authenticity. However, if they are too lax and casual, they risk being disciplined by their employer.
Attempts to build a following on social media can also backfire for journalists. An attempt at humor may be ill-received, for example, resulting in intense backlash from followers. Additionally, the pseudo-permanence of online postings means that commentary from years earlier — such as criticism of a source or public official — can come back to haunt a journalist, or be used as a weapon by critics to discredit that journalist. This is the case not only for journalists who specialize in objective journalism but also professional columnists and editors at lifestyle-oriented outlets. For example, in 2021, Alexi McCammond was forced to resign as editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue shortly after being promoted to the position when flippant tweets posted a decade earlier that espoused offensive stereotypes about Asian people resurfaced online.
Journalistic Ethics on Social Media
Can journalists advocate for social justice causes on social media? Can they use hashtags to participate in protest movements? Can they publicly admonish or defend alleged wrongdoers? The answers to these kinds of questions often depends on the journalistic outlet the journalist works for and the specific issue in question.
For example, The New York Times' in-house social media guidelines includes this cautionary clause: "Social media presents potential risks for The Times. If our journalists are perceived as biased or if they engage in editorializing on social media, that can undercut the credibility of the entire newsroom." The Washington Post's social media policy includes a more direct prohibition: "Post journalists must refrain from writing, tweeting or posting anything — including photographs or video — that could objectively be perceived as reflecting political, racial, sexist, religious or other bias or favoritism." While these guidelines are not always strictly enforced, they do shape journalistic behaviors.
Journalistic social media guidelines aren’t always explicit, though. The reality of social media interactions today leaves plenty of room for interpretation (and accidental violation) of different journalistic norms, many of which have changed considerably in recent years. This includes the ways in which journalists share details about their reporting or how they should engage with audiences who critique their work. For example, social media often serve as the primary sites of toxic digital attacks against journalists (especially female journalists and journalists of color) and their sources. That online harassment can have severe consequences for their emotional and mental health. Social media can also tempt journalists to get sucked into online arguments with users who disagree with them, resulting in unproductive and alienating debates. In short, journalists today must navigate an ethical landscape that is arguably more complex than in previous times.
Key Takeaways
• Social media are now routinely factored into news production. Journalists use social media to gauge public interest and sentiment, keep tabs on the competition, identify story ideas, find and verify sources, and promote and distribute their work.
• Social media have enabled a new role for many journalists: that of a curator of online information. Many of today’s news events are live-tweeted or live-blogged in some capacity.
• Social media have become central to journalists' growing efforts to develop personal brands. This often results in clashes with those journalists' employers, who advocate more professional social media use via their social media guidelines. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/11%3A_Future_of_Journalism/11.01%3A_Social_Media_and_News_Production.txt |
Introduction
According to a 2021 survey by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 42% of Americans say they use social media as a source of news. (A separate survey by the Pew Research Center pegged that figure at 53%.) Additionally, 31% of Americans surveyed by the Reuters Institute reported sharing news through social media, messaging apps, or e-mail. Those numbers have grown considerably since 2013, when 27% of the population reported using social media as a source of news. These increases have occurred despite the fact that most Americans claim they have much lower levels of trust in the news they encounter on social media (especially when compared to traditional media, such as local TV news).
The rise of news consumption on social media has had a major economic impact on the journalism industry and has had broader impacts on audiences' knowledge about public affairs. In considering such impacts, it is important to remember that social media is just a tool — one that is capable of advancing both positive and negative developments. Some undesirable changes to journalism and society are directly attributable to the rise of social media, such as changes to the technical infrastructures that govern the flows of information. However, many undesirable changes attributed to the rise of social media are actually symptomatic of other developments within society, such as the devaluing of expertise and declining trust in institutions.
Nevertheless, it is evident that journalists and journalistic outlets today must contend with news consumption and distribution patterns that are configured in no small part by social media.
News Knowledge and Content Moderation
According to a 2020 survey by the Pew Research Center, 74% of U.S. adults use YouTube, 68% use Facebook, 40% use Instagram, 25% use Twitter, and 15% use Reddit. Many of their users regularly consume news on those platforms — in the cases of Facebook and Reddit, more than half of users reported regularly getting news on those platforms. Social media are thus crucial platforms for linking news producers with news consumers.
However, researchers have also found that relying on social media as a dominant source of news can have a negative influence on one’s knowledge and media literacy. For example, the Pew Research Center found that people who received their political news primarily from social media had lower levels of knowledge about COVID-19 and were more likely to be exposed to false information. This is particularly concerning as Pew also found, in a separate study, that nearly half of Americans said they were getting at least some news or information about COVID-19 vaccines from social media.
The apparent paradox imbued in the fact that large numbers of people get news from social media even as they find it to be an untrustworthy source of information has also led to a shift in attitudes toward the governance of news information flows. According to a 2021 survey by the Pew Research Center, nearly half of U.S. adults said that the government should restrict false information online, even if it means that people lose some freedom to access or publish content. (There was even greater support for having tech companies serve as the moderators.) This is not a uniquely American attitude. Elsewhere in the world, several authoritative regimes have passed so-called "fake news" laws that grant their governments greater powers to restrict the publishing of information. In many instances, such laws have been used primarily to punish critical journalism.
The partisan divide that complicates news consumption in the United States also appears on social media. In the Pew survey, support for having the U.S. government restrict false information online was sharply divided among partisan lines, with those who self-identify as Democrats being more than twice as likely to support the restriction of false information as Republicans. In a separate study, the Pew Research Center found that 64% of Republicans believed that tech companies prioritize liberal viewpoints while just 28% of Democrats thought so. These beliefs, in turn, impact the extent to which individuals trust the news content they casually encounter on those platforms, especially if that content is not consistent with an individual’s preconceptions.
Platform Dependency
In order to remain relevant in the information ecosystem, journalistic outlets must seek out audiences where they are. This has resulted in growing platform dependency, a phenomenon wherein journalistic outlets come to depend on platforms like social media (and thus place themselves at their whims) in order to gain exposure to news audiences. When those platforms make changes to their sites, the impacts can be significant — especially for journalistic outlets whose revenue models depend on audience engagement and advertisements.
For example, in 2015, Facebook decided to prioritize videos in the algorithms it uses to curate the personalized News Feed users see on the site. Many journalistic outlets subsequently invested heavily in bolstering their video teams in order to produce more video content. (This is sometimes called the "pivot to video" era.) Those investments sometimes required laying off significant numbers of long-time journalists and editors who were not well-versed in multimedia journalism. Later, however, it was discovered that Facebook dramatically overstated the success of videos posted on its platform. The company soon tweaked the algorithms once more to prioritize other signals instead (e.g., the number of reactions to a post). The journalistic outlets who pivoted toward video were forced to pivot back, firing many of the multimedia producers they had recently hired.
As this example illustrates, the fates of news content, journalists, and journalistic outlets can depend on just a few large, commercial social media platforms. With one tweak of their algorithms, an organization’s content may become largely invisible to the platform’s user base. This becomes especially problematic as more people congregate on fewer, larger platforms (resulting in a network effect, where the value of the platform increases as more people participate on it). The consolidation of massive audiences on those few platforms results in news organizations depending on referrals from those networks.
Platformization, or the rise of platforms as the dominant infrastructural and economic model of the contemporary online environment, also presents a brand problem for journalistic outlets. Researchers have found that users tend to associate the news content they come across with the platform, and not the journalistic outlet. Thus, not only are journalistic outlets losing distributional control, they are also losing recognition.
Spreadable News
The sharing of news content is not a new social phenomenon. People have long described the news they heard on the radio or saw on TV to a work colleague over lunch, or even cut out and shared newspaper stories of note with friends and loved ones. However, in the online environment, it is much easier to share news content — often by simply clicking a button, whether on a platform (e.g., "retweet") or on the story itself (e.g., "share").
The term spreadable media has been coined to describe how participatory culture accelerates the distribution of media content. Today’s news consumption is often incidental, meaning that people frequently encounter news as part of their constant connection with social media, and not because they were actively looking for news. Put another way, even if their primary intention for accessing social media was to connect with friends, they may encounter a number of news products from different sources along the way. The consequence of this is that news consumption today is increasingly about exercising sociability — and part of that is by sharing content that people find to be interesting or relevant.
Moreover, the proliferation of social media has resulted in a user-centered distribution model. Only a relatively small share of the stories published by The New York Times that users encounter on Facebook originate from the Times' Facebook page. Instead, the vast majority of those stories — and a large portion of external traffic driven to the Times' website — comes from users who voluntarily shared the story (often with some commentary). Thus, journalistic outlets are not only becoming increasingly dependent on platforms, they are also becoming more dependent on users who are willing to share the outlet’s work.
There are many reasons why users choose to share. These range from having genuine interest in a story to promoting an identity marker, such as their intellect (e.g., high-brow think pieces) or political ideology (e.g., a story about partisan corruption). In order to get users to serve as willing sharers, journalistic outlets must find ways to appeal to those users. This might include, for example, writing a more provocative headline, including an emotional cover image, or even producing more opinionated content.
Thus, as some scholars have argued, while speed and quality used to be considered the twin pillars of good journalism, sociability has become a third pillar. It is no longer sufficient to be first and comprehensive; now, journalists must also produce journalism in a form that is capable of spreading effectively. Put another way, today’s journalism must be both findable and shareable to succeed in a user-centered distribution model. This means both tweaking news products to optimize shareability (e.g., using salient keywords in the headline) and seeking out key nodes of content distribution (e.g., influencers) to help promote a story after it has been published.
Key Takeaways
• Nearly half of all Americans now consume news on social media, with much of it occurring on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.
• People who consume news primarily through social media tend to have lower levels of knowledge about some issues. There is also growing appetite among Americans for greater moderation of false information on social media.
• Journalistic outlets have become increasingly dependent on social media in recent years due to changes in digital infrastructures and news consumption habits.
• Audiences now lie at the heart of news distribution, and journalists must be even more attentive than before to the shareability of their products. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/11%3A_Future_of_Journalism/11.02%3A_Social_Media_and_News_Distribution.txt |
Introduction
According to media scholar Nicholas Diakopoulos, "computational journalism" refers to the application of computing and computational thinking to the activities of journalism (e.g., newsgathering), all while upholding core values of journalism (e.g., accuracy). As such, computational journalism isn’t just about the technology; it is also a way of approaching the practice of journalism.
As a way of thinking, computational journalism is rooted in the idea of translating the messy world into organized (structured) information schemas. For example, the many attributes (aspects) of a murder incident can be indexed based on taxonomies and categories of people, entities, concepts, events, and locations (e.g., who the perpetrator was, what kind of weapon they used, and what sort of location the murder took place in). In a way, journalists have always done this in an informal way in order to produce things like the summary lead (5 Ws and H). However, computational journalism requires journalists to do it in a formal way, such as by storing each part of that information as a distinct item in a database.
A Brief History
Although computational journalism may seem like a novel thing, we can trace some of its informal origins to the 1800s. For example, the very first edition of The Manchester Guardian (May 5, 1821) offered a table listing the amount of patients at a local hospital who were inoculated against the cow pox, the amount who were released after surviving the disease, and the amount who died from it. It similarly offered other figures about the patients who were being treated for an accident as well as those being held in its 'lunatic asylum.' While no computers were used to compile that table — computers had not yet been invented — the Guardian journalists were already engaging in the form of thinking that powers computational journalism today.
The machine-aided form of journalism that is more typically associated with today’s computational journalism arguably began in 1952, when CBS News used a digital computer to predict the outcome of a presidential election by using partial results. By the 1960s, journalists like Phil Meyer of the Detroit Free Press and Clarence Jones of the Miami Herald were using computers to analyze things from survey data (e.g., to determine the underlying causes of the 1967 Detroit riot) to court records (to uncover bias in the criminal justice system in Dade County). By the 1980s, an array of different computational practices for gathering and analyzing news began to emerge, many of which were categorized into what was termed "computer-assisted reporting." Put another way, the logic used in computational journalism was being increasingly paired with the technology that is now associated with it.
As the Internet proliferated in the 1990s, journalistic practices became even more computationally oriented. In particular, journalistic outlets started investing more money in "digital" positions, resulting in new jobs and departments. This included the hiring of multi-person software development teams who could work with non-technically savvy journalists to produce computational journalism stories and develop computational journalism workflows. While such teams, processes, and products remained relatively small and had limited influence on the broader practice of journalism, they were important for seeding the changes to journalistic norms and logics that would accelerate in the coming years.
Computational Journalism in the 21st Century
By the late 2000s, new areas of specialization were emerging. These include automated journalism (having machines produce news content from data with limited human supervision), conversational journalism (communicating news via automated, dialogic interfaces like chat bots), data journalism (using data to report, analyze, write, and visualize stories), sensor journalism (using electronic sensors to collect and analyze new data for journalistic purposes), and structured journalism (publishing news as data).
While some of those specializations emerged relatively independently from one another, they are still centered on interpreting the world through data, and generally rely on computational processes to translate knowledge into data and data into knowledge. As such, they are fundamentally computational forms of journalism, regardless of the amount of technological wherewithal that is actually required.
Computational journalism also aims to blend logics and processes spanning multiple disciplines, such as journalism, computer science, information retrieval, and visual design. With regard to journalism, it involves a significant shift away from the traditional focus on nuance (in reporting), individualism (in subject or focus), and creativity (in writing). Instead, it orients itself toward standardization (in reporting), scale (in subject or focus), and efficiency (in writing). These differences in logics and approaches often make it difficult for editorial and technical actors to work together on computational journalism projects. In fact, researchers have found that when computational journalism projects fizzle or fail, it is often due to the philosophical and procedural differences among members of the team.
Nevertheless, computational forms of journalism have been used to produce highly impactful work in recent years, both in terms of journalistic content and new tools for producing journalism. Several computational journalists (who don’t always self-identify as such) have won prestigious awards for their computational journalism. For example, Jay Hancock and Elizabeth Lucas of Kaiser Health News won a Pulitzer Prize in 2020 for exposing predatory bill collection by the University of Virginia Health System, which had forced many low-income patients into bankruptcy. Hancock and Lucas worked together with an open data advocate to collect and analyze information about millions of civil court records in Virginia — far more than a human journalist could inspect manually. Their reporting resulted in the non-profit, state-run hospital changing its behavior.
On the software side, journalists have worked alongside software development teams to create technologies like DocumentCloud, an all-in-one platform designed to help journalists (and teams of journalists working across multiple journalistic outlets) to upload, organize, analyze, annotate, search, and embed documents. The project brings together existing tools from disciplines like computational linguistics into an interface that is accessible to many journalists. Similarly, MuckRock has made it easier for journalists to make several Freedom of Information Act requests at the same time, write news stories from them, and share the data with other journalists.
Computational journalism demands the same high ethical standards as traditional journalism to ensure that the process of gathering, analyzing, and disseminating information to the public is truthful, independent, and inclusive. However, computational forms of journalism do not always have a distinct code of ethics. This can be challenging as computational journalists tend to place a greater premium on transparency and openness than traditional journalists, which can introduce ethical tensions. For example, some computational journalists have been critiqued as being naive for posting unredacted datasets (that placed unwitting individuals at risk) or not reviewing automated stories (that included misinformation).
It is expected that computational journalism will only continue to grow in the coming years. For example, The New York Times launched a short program to teach its journalists data skills, and the outlet made that course open-source when publishing it online. And, journalistic outlets like BuzzFeed News, FiveThirtyEight, The Marshall Project, and The Washington Post sometimes post the code powering their computational journalism on the code-sharing platform GitHub in order to promote their craft. Moreover, as computers become more powerful and intelligent, automation is likely to become more commonplace — as will the tasks related to translating the natural world into structured data.
Key Takeaways
• Computational journalism covers both the application of computing and computational thinking to various journalistic activities, including information gathering, sensemaking, and information dissemination.
• Computational journalism is not an entirely new phenomenon, but it has developed intensely in recent years as new forms of journalism emerged.
• Computational journalism has been used to produce both award-winning journalistic work as well as impactful journalism-oriented technologies. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/11%3A_Future_of_Journalism/11.03%3A_Computational_Journalism.txt |
Introduction
According to researchers Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein, "artificial intelligence" (AI) refers to a system’s ability to correctly interpret external data, learn from those data, and apply those learnings to achieve specific goals through flexible adaptation.
As their definition suggests, the intelligence in AI is based on some form of "learning" that usually comes from data covering events or instances that occurred in the past. AI will then use that past learning and adapt to some related phenomenon in the present. And, it will then conduct itself in the present in a way that we would consider to be "intelligent" if that same task had been performed by a human being. Finally, AI generally continues to learn as the present becomes the past, and continues to adapt as the future becomes the present.
Artificial intelligence plays a hidden but significant role in our daily lives. When you type half a phrase into the Google search bar and Google suggests several ways you might finish it, a predictive algorithm is at play. When you look for flights online, an intelligent (well, not always) algorithm may try to guess your budget based on your browsing history and suggest a nearby hotel within that price range. When Facebook recommends tagging yourself in a photo because it recognizes your face, it’s because an intelligent algorithm has already analyzed your face many times. Moreover, we are increasingly seeing applications of AI in many different facets of journalism.
AI in Journalism
As with other segments of everyday life, artificial intelligence is no longer just some niche idea within the news industry. AI is already being used, in varying ways and to different extents, within every major stage of news production, from helping journalists find 'the story' to automating personalized distribution of news content.
Generating Story Ideas
Coming up with a unique and compelling story idea is one of the most creative parts of journalism. The world is filled with newsworthy events — each of which can be approached through a large array of story angles — but journalists only have the capacity to tackle a relatively small amount of them. Moreover, audiences have limited time and attention, and can only consume a sliver of the content that is already out there. To stand out, journalists must identify the most interesting and informative angles for the most interesting and important events. While AI still struggles to come up with unique and compelling ideas of its own (and is generally limited to phenomena that have been digitized and structured), it is nevertheless being used by journalists to manage information overload and to help them find 'the story' in large troves of documents.
For example, in 2016, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published a series of stories that examined sexual abuse of patients by their doctors. While a human journalist decided that this was an important story to explore — it would go on to be a Pulitzer Prize finalist — intelligent algorithms still played a major role in helping the journalist find what was most interesting and significant about the story. The algorithms reviewed a set of disciplinary documents that were manually identified (by a human) as involving sexual misconduct and learned about the sorts of words and phrases that were commonly used in such documents to describe sexual misconduct. (After all, there usually wasn’t a clear sentence in the disciplinary documents that read, "this person sexually abused someone.") That algorithm then applied that learning to more than 100,000 documents, which had not been reviewed by a human, and gave each document a probability that it involved a case of physician sexual misconduct. This helped point the journalists at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution toward doctors, clinics, and areas where that abuse was most prevalent or disproportionate.
As another example, in 2019, a whistleblower secretly leaked documents from a law firm in Mauritius to a group of investigative journalists. The documents provided a rare look at how multinational companies avoided paying taxes when they did business in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. There were more than 200,000 documents in that leak, with some of those documents being hundreds of pages long. To help journalists make sense of that information, the digital news outlet Quartz built a machine learning algorithm that helped journalists locate the most relevant portions of the most relevant documents. Specifically, when the journalist found a document of interest, the algorithm would analyze it and link the journalist to other documents in the leaked trove that had similar kinds of information or involved the same individuals and organizations.
Sourcing and Verifying Information
As journalists flesh out their story ideas, they frequently turn to different sources of information, from expert human sources to databases. When sourcing information, journalists typically look for the most authoritative source. That authority may come by virtue of someone’s position (like the CEO of a company), their area of expertise (like an academic who studies a very specific thing), or from someone’s proximity to a phenomenon (like a person who saw the car crash). However, there are often multiple sources who can speak with authority about some topic. For example, there are several academics who study police funding — and even though they’re all experts, each may bring a different perspective to the table.
News organizations are already using AI to help them not only identify potential sources but to correct systematic sourcing biases that may arise in the course of reporting. For example, in 2018, the Financial Times began using AI to review stories and warn journalists if they were relying too heavily on male sources. The Financial Times' technology was not particularly sophisticated; it mostly guessed the gender based on a person’s name and the use of pronouns. But it was enough to make a journalist reflect because several biases operate at a subconscious level — and having something prompt the journalist to reflect is sometimes enough to mitigate the worst effects. A more sophisticated technology produced by the Ryerson School of Journalism, JeRI, similarly aims to score the institutional power of sources by weighing factors including their placement in a story and frequency of attribution. This helps journalists see if some people, organizations, and locations are receiving too much attention.
The use of AI isn’t just limited to sourcing. It is also being used to help journalists both interview and make use of interviews. For example, United Robots, a Swedish tech company, offers technology that can automate the process of conducting (simple) interviews. In the case of a soccer match, the technology is able to analyze a game recap, identify potential questions for the winning and losing coaches, send those coaches text messages with the questions, and integrate the coaches' responses into the game recap. All of this can occur with limited human supervision. AI has also been used by journalists to parse interview transcripts (some of which are computer-generated) and identify the most interesting aspects of the interview, or to link a source’s present remarks with things they’ve said elsewhere in the past.
News organizations are also using AI to fact-check information, either by intelligently linking new stories and claims to existing, human-led fact-checks or by attempting to intelligently rate a claim by independently looking up information in knowledge bases. For example, Storyful, a company that specializes in fact-checking information on social media, partnered with Google in 2020 to create Source, a tool that automatically looks up an image’s public history (to ascertain its origin), checks it for artifacts suggestive of digital manipulation, and extracts and translates any text (e.g., from a meme). This helps journalists more quickly ascertain if an image is likely to be a hoax or part of a disinformation campaign.
Producing Stories
A great deal of newswriting is formulaic. The inverted pyramid remains the dominant narrative structure for breaking news, and journalists often adhere to, and repeat, certain sets of words, phrases, and syntax (e.g., "said" and "according to"). Unsurprisingly, AI is therefore already used by some leading news organizations (e.g., Bloomberg News in the United States, The Canadian Press in Canada, and Helsingin Sanomat in Finland) to produce tens of thousands of seemingly human-produced news stories each year with limited supervision.
For example, The Associated Press uses AI to review hundreds of thousands of public filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission and turn them into news stories. The process is largely automated. It begins by accessing the SEC’s system and downloading all new filings, such as a quarterly earnings report. It then translates a filing into a structured dataset, looking for expected markers like the company’s reported revenue for that quarter and trying to make sense of unstructured information (e.g., the company’s forecast for the next quarter or its expected threats). It then analyzes that filing, sometimes comparing it to previous data (e.g., the previous quarter’s revenue and forecast) to identify the most interesting data points. It then inserts those data points into one of many potential story templates previously written by human journalists. (You can think of these templates as a Mad Libs of sorts.) Finally, it publishes the story on The Associated Press' newswire. The entire process is largely unsupervised — after setting up the algorithm and writing the templates, the AP journalists can take their hands off the wheel.
AI is also used to personalize segments of human-produced stories, such as by localizing or rewriting portions of a human-crafted narrative to appeal to each individual user. For example, The New York Times has used AI to identify a reader’s location and personalize a human-produced story about air quality around the world by adding a computer-generated paragraph about the air quality in the reader’s location.
Additionally, journalistic outlets like the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) have used AI to summarize stories written by humans and machines alike, producing either bullet-point rundowns or shortened versions of those stories. Those summaries can serve as the basis for companion products, such as an auto-generated news roundup for a voice assistant like Amazon’s Alexa. The BBC has even experimented with automating the transformation of a text story into a multi-panel visual story that can be instantly shared on visually oriented platforms like Instagram.
AI is not just being used in text-oriented journalism, though. News organizations have experimented with using "deep fake" technology to automate broadcasts featuring both semi-human and entirely synthetic anchors. For example, Reuters has prototyped a fully automated sports news summary system that pairs automated game summaries with photographs of the key moments being described, all of which is presented by synthetic footage of a real news presenter (i.e., a "deep fake" based on pre-recorded footage of the presenter). Put another way, Reuters' technology is able to combine the words describing the event with relevant pictures, and present the package through a realistic-looking anchor. China’s Xinhua News Agency has prototyped similar technology that is able to operate outside the realm of sports and that uses an entirely computer-generated anchor.
These technologies represent advances on existing uses of AI in multimedia journalism. For example, AI is already frequently used to help editors 'tag' audiovisual content (e.g., label the people, objects, and locations in a picture) in order to help them more easily find relevant photos later on.
Distributing Stories
News consumers regularly engage with news distributed via intelligent algorithms. For example, when a person visits a news outlet’s website, they often encounter several widgets on the sides of the article that direct the person to other articles they might want to read next. Those recommendations may be tailored specifically to that person, based on the stories they have previously read on that outlet’s site, or even elsewhere on the Web. For example, if that person usually reads political news stories or watches videos about the Boston Celtics, the journalistic outlet’s algorithms may point the person toward more stories about politics or the Celtics.
Such recommendation algorithms are used by digitally native and legacy outlets alike. For example, even The New York Times, an organization that takes great pride in its journalistic expertise and editorial stewardship, has relinquished some of its agenda-setting power by adopting personalized distribution via the "For You" section of its app. Some organizations, including publications owned by Sweden’s Bonnier News Local, allow intelligent algorithms to take the lead in organizing the news content appearing on those publications' home pages, leaving human editors to play more of a supervisory role (i.e., to occasionally overrule the algorithm’s editorial decision-making).
More broadly, in an information ecosystem that is arguably oversupplied with content, there is an economic imperative for some news organizations to employ AI to intelligently distribute their products in tailored ways across platforms and to multiple market segments. This includes adapting their existing content to fit the expectations of different platforms, such as by creating a shorter automated news summary for TikTok than what might appear on YouTube. It also involves adapting promotional messages to take advantage of different platforms' technical affordances, such as by identifying trending hashtags and automatically applying the relevant ones to the journalistic outlet’s work.
Ethical and Legal Dilemmas
AI is not some neutral thing. AI is not only shaped by its creators but it shapes individual and collective human behaviors via the ways it is put to use. It is thus crucial to take stock of the fact that market-leading technologies at the intersection of AI and journalism are being developed by people and companies with backgrounds outside of journalism, and to wrestle with the positive and negative implications of that. For example, AI technologies are often benchmarked through notions of efficiency and scalability. This is a stark contrast to the ideals that shape understandings of 'quality' journalism.
AI technologies can also become highly biased: depending on how (and by whom) the AI is developed and what it is trained upon, it can adopt and replicate (at scale) a number of human flaws. For example, Amazon created an AI-based hiring tool that ended up disproportionately rejecting female applicants. A 2021 investigation by The Markup found that an algorithm used by a large government agency was more likely to suggest denying home loans to people of color than to White people with similar characteristics. That was just one of many investigations by The Markup, a non-profit data-driven journalistic outlet, that have repeatedly shown that 'color-blind' algorithms are anything but.
Within the context of journalism, AI can unintentionally reproduce problematic depictions and promote inaccurate stereotypes. For example, an automated story about a decrease in the number of immigrants entering the United States may automatically embed a stock photo of immigrants being detained by immigration authorities. That, in turn, might promote and perpetuate the association between immigration and criminality, simply because the algorithm has learned that previous stories about immigration tended to focus on elements of legality and crime. Journalists and their outlets must therefore remain mindful of how they are employing artificial intelligence, and how such applications may advance or detract from their mission to represent truth.
On the legal front, the United States legal landscape remains unclear about key considerations involving the applications of AI in public communication. For example, legal standards in the U.S. make it difficult to hold algorithms (and their creators) liable for libel, leaving unclear who can be held legally responsible for defamation when the communication is enacted by a machine. Moreover, even established case law is now being reexamined as AI proliferates. This includes safe-harbor provisions that have shielded operators of digital infrastructure (and portions of news websites) from certain liabilities.
AI and the Future of Journalism
The future of journalism will involve greater human-machine interaction. While humans will likely remain at the center of news production, the work they do and the ways they go about it will look different. This will invariably result in the downsizing of certain roles and aspects of the job, but it will also create new roles and possibilities — from developing new technologies to managing knowledge systems to specializing in new beats and formats.
At the same time, it is important to recognize that although the aforementioned applications of AI in journalism show promise, the technology is still limited in important ways. For example, although algorithms already produce hundreds of thousands of business and sports news stories, their applications remain largely limited to news briefs and game recaps. An algorithm would have a much harder time writing a story that gets at how a CEO’s sex scandal might affect their company, or produce a feature on why a player decided to sit out the season due to health concerns. Put another way, only a small amount of the news stories people regularly consume can be produced using the present AI technology, and those stories generally rely on either pre-existing data or phenomena that can be easily translated into structured data. And, products resulting from AI-led processes are usually relatively basic: they still use fairly simple expressions to convey information and can only offer surface-level analyses. They do not feature compelling leads or writerly panache, and they don’t win Pulitzers on their own.
Nevertheless, there is good reason for journalistic outlets to invest in AI, and good reason to believe such investments will only increase. Journalists and journalistic outlets that fail to adapt to this changing environment will find themselves at risk of falling behind competitors who are able to leverage AI to increase efficiencies, scale upward, and even improve the quality of their work. Algorithms can generate news stories far more quickly than human journalists, and they can be useful aides for creating the first documentation of an event. Put another way, they can free up human journalists to focus on the more meaningful follow-up stories and draw some attention to stories that might otherwise not receive any coverage (for lack of human resources).
However, it is not just news producers who must adapt. The future of journalism will also likely be filled with 'junk,' from misinformation and disinformation to more fundamental issues involving information overload resulting from an influx of automated communication. That, in turn, will require individuals to adapt their existing media literacies and seek out their own trusted, intelligent assistants to help separate signal from noise.
Key Takeaways
• Artificial intelligence refers to a system that is capable of learning from the past, adapting to the present, and acting in a way that would be considered "intelligent" if a human being did it.
• AI is today used in some fashion in every stage of news production, from coming up with story ideas to distributing news content.
• AI is not a neutral technology; it takes on values from its creators and the objects it is tasked to learn from. This introduces a number of ethical and legal dilemmas that journalistic actors must be mindful of.
• Humans will likely remain at the center of news production. However, the work they do and the ways they go about it will look different. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_American_Journalism_Handbook_-_Concepts_Issues_and_Skills_(Zamith)/11%3A_Future_of_Journalism/11.04%3A_Artificial_Intelligence_and_Automation.txt |
Heike Graf
© Heike Graf, CC BY 4.0 http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0096.01
This volume is situated at the intersection of communication, environment, and media. Communication here is not understood as the pure exchange of information, or as dialogue, but instead in a more general sense, as the core element that constitutes society. Without communicating about our environment, meaning here especially the non-human environment, we have no knowledge about dangers such as climate change, pollution, deforestation, etc., and therefore cannot react to them. German sociologist Niklas Luhmann expressed the importance of communication as follows: ‘Fish may die, or human beings swimming in lakes and rivers may cause illnesses, no more oil may come from the pumps, and average temperatures may rise or fall, but as long as this is not communicated it does not have any effect on society’ (Luhmann 1989, 28–29). In other words, the non-human environment, nature, and the climate, etc., can only be a subject of social concern when it is communicated. And ‘[e]verything that can be formulated linguistically can be communicated’ (Luhmann 1989, 16).
As the environment cannot speak itself or for itself, and, in the words of Robert Cox, ‘nature is silent’ (2013, 4), it has no possibility of communicating with society. The environment does not contain information or topics. It does not understand our speech, either. It cannot announce itself in terms of issues, saying, for example, that the climate will change. It can only irritate and disturb society by changing temperatures, melting glaciers, and so forth; disturbances which then receive public attention and become public and political concerns.
In this way, the non-human environment can be seen as an actor influencing communication in society, or in the words of Bruno Latour, as an agent of ‘our common geostory’ (2014, 3). How to tackle these disturbances is the subject of social communication, where someone ‘makes claims (in public) about them’ (Hansen 2010, 15) and, in other words, tells ‘stories’. Stories about ecological dangers and risks can be described as an attribution process, that is, as a construction of an observer (an individual person or a social system) about the ‘possibility of future damage’ (Luhmann 1990, 225). ‘The problem becomes for all of us in philosophy, science or literature, how do we tell such a story’ (Latour 2014, 3, my emphasis). Or, in the words of Luhmann: ‘the whole problem thereby becomes an internal problem of modern society’ (Luhmann 1996, 6).
Stories are told within a context; examining the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of these environmental stories demonstrates how contexts condition communication. These contexts affect what is said, written, and shown. Without these contexts, meaningful communication would not be possible. Still, even a carefully designed message cannot control its outcome, and therefore does not guarantee consensus or agreement with the message.
The message as a kind of constraint enacted by communication always makes different understandings possible (Luhmann 1996). One may, for instance, expect that the picture of a charismatic mega fauna has a greater emotional impact than the features of an insect. However, it depends on the observer, and on the context of the message being observed. If we apply constructivist theories, the act of understanding allows for different ways of proceeding, because understanding is not predetermined by the message but instead relates to the observer/person who perceives it. The observer constructs meaning on the basis of what he or she is able to see and feel. Or, in the words of Stuart Hall: ‘we give them [things] a meaning’ through a ‘framework of interpretation’ (Hall 1997, 3). The image as such does not contain ‘any fixed and unchanging meaning’ (Hall 1997, 3). Hence, it is not the image that determines the meaning production, but the observer. Here again, the observer perspective is crucial when analysing communication processes. How else would it be possible to explain that there are persons who are more fascinated by insects than by charismatic fauna? The picture creates some restrictive conditions, but cannot ultimately control how it is understood, and cannot control emotional responses. There is no causal link between the image and its effect (Bateson 1979).
We return to the relationship between the non-human environment and society by focusing on the concept of communication. This does not contradict indigenous approaches in which nature can only speak to those who listen, in order to know what is going on (e.g., Carbaugh 1999). Nature can, of course, be experienced by individuals as something with a voice. However, without further communicating what has been heard, nature stays in observers’ minds and cannot become a topic of social communication. What is central to this approach is that communication is understood as a social operation with at least two persons involved.
Therefore, society is ‘prevented’ from directly communicating with the environment, and can only communicate about it or ‘tell stories’, even if voices claim to speak for the environment. Epistemologically, a story of Gaia cannot be equated with nature. It is a story about nature. Consequently, there are as many stories as there are persons telling them.
The above-mentioned distinction between society and the non-human environment should not be confused with a hierarchal distinction that values one side over the other, as criticised in ecocritical studies (Urry 2011). It is not about a division that places society on one side and nature as the external environment on the other without any correlation. This distinction has to be understood as a cognitive one, which according to observation theories (Schutz 2011; von Foerster 1960/1984; Maturana and Varela 1987) means that our point of departure is communication. Observing means to make an indication in the context of a distinction. We claim, for instance, that this last winter was warmer than the winter before. We first distinguish winter from other seasons, and then indicate the winter side of the distinction. Observing as an operation means ‘using a distinction for indicating one side of the distinction and not the other’ (Luhmann 1993, 485). If we do not make any distinctions, we cannot claim anything. Consequently, making a distinction between humans and nature does not per se imply seeing nature as something subordinated or separated. According to observation theories, we cannot indicate the ‘human’ side of the distinction without keeping it distinct from something which is not ‘human’. So, every observation carries with it the other side of the distinction, meaning what is not indicated. Here, the notion of humans carries with it the notion of nature. The approach of drawing distinctions is seen as a basic, cognitive operation of communication as such.
This approach of phenomenology does not compete with ecocritics, as they have another point of departure. Ecocritics see the distinction between society and nature as a normative and hierarchical one. They already look at what kind of indications are made; they criticize ‘the colonial dominance of European philosophical traditions’ (Rust et al. 2016, 2) where the environment is seen as something to conquer. Humans have subdued and controlled the non-human environment for their own needs without considering the consequences. Human progress is seen in terms of society’s exploitation of nature (Urry 2011). Consequently, humans are divided from nature, a division that is questioned by ecocritics who say that society cannot exist without nature. Therefore, they demand ‘new frames of references and the ability to reframe familiar media frames’ (Rust et al. 2016, 5).
Here, the points of departure are on different levels, with the first one based on observers’ cognition and the latter on patterns of communication, e.g., on indications made by observers (European philosophers, media, activists etc.). By looking further at what kinds of claims are made, and at what kinds of distinctions they are based on, we can see how the relationship between humans and nature is constructed. This operation of analysis is also based on distinctions that can be either descriptive or normative. The consequence of this communicative approach is that it draws focus to the observer making claims about the environment, and prompts us to examine who this observer is: a theoretical perspective that relates to the phenomenologist Alfred Schutz (2011).
Resonance in News Media
Since the environment does not announce itself in the media, there has to be someone who can linguistically formulate environmental issues, and therefore begin communicating about them. Whatever we know about the environment, both non-human and human, we know from the (mass) media (Luhmann 1996, 4). Or more metaphorically, in the words of Mark Deuze: ‘Media are to us as water is to fish’ (2012, x). So, media play the central role in constructing and spreading communication about environmental issues in order for them to be recognised as public or political concerns.
Luhmann defines the relationship between the environment and society, as well as that between the environment and media, through the concept of resonance (Luhmann 1989). Strictly speaking, this concept is contrary to the traditional realist notion of media as a mirror of reality or to the notion of news media as ‘windows’ on the world (Hansen 2010, 17). It is similar to the lived-body and consciousness: our body has no direct communicative channel to our consciousness, telling us, for instance, what is wrong when it hurts. Instead it irritates us with feelings of pain, pressure, etc. (Luhmann 1989, 29).
This concept of resonance refers to constructivist approaches which claim that our picture of the world depends on who is doing the observing. If we look at media organisations as the observer, we claim that they can only observe what is going on in the environment on the basis of their internal operations, and this is related, for example, to issues of media logic (Altheide 2013).
Not everything can be said, written about, or spread through the media; selection must be made and based on a ‘very restricted resonance capacity’ (Luhmann 1989, 17) of each medium or even communication forum, finally resulting in a media-specific description of the natural environment. In the words of Latour: ‘[…] journalists are journalists, mere storytellers, just like novelists; you know how they are: they always feel obliged to add some action to what, in essence, should be devoid of any form of will, goal, target, or obsession. Even when they are interested in science and nature, they can’t help but add drama to what has no drama whatsoever’ (Latour 2014, 11).
Hence, the purpose of this volume is to investigate the ways in which the environment finds resonance in different communication forums, understood as observers in the sense described above. Of particular interest to us is to look at how different communication forums respond to the environment and therefore reveal their own conceptions, their own stories of ‘the’ environment by using different media devices and formats. Environmental concerns are packaged, narrated (Labov and Waletzky 1967), or framed (Entman 1993) according to the observers’ or group’s own operations. Understanding these contexts can assist in showing how specific environmental issues arise. In other words, this volume is about how humans engage with each other in the context of their own operations and the environment, including the media environment they are situated in. We assume that communication about nature affects the way we engage with the non-human environment.
If we look at how the environment finds resonance in traditional mass media, we discover a bulk of research. In this respect, most media research is about media coverage, that is, about how media portray the non-human environment (e.g., Hansen 1993; Lester 2010). The media introduce their own means of grasping natural events, and these events appear to them as information. Media observation of the environment is highly selective, and certain distinctions that can be described as having news value (novelty, proximity, scandals, norm violations, conflicts, quantities, etc.) guide the news production process (see e.g., Boykoff and Boykoff 2007).
We know from research that news media mainly create their own preferred meanings of environmental issues by tackling them as problems and dangers (e.g., Cox 2013; Foust and O’Shannon Murphy 2009). News coverage prefers conflict, and with the help of the rhetoric of fear or what Altheide calls ‘production of fear’ (Altheide 1997), we as media consumers learn that something is wrong with our environment and that we are faced with risks and dangers. For example, environmental stories are unlike other science stories, as they are mainly ‘marked by negativity’ (Einsiedel and Coughland 1993; Olausson 2009) and told in a ‘fear-generating’ manner. These stories are about an ‘uncontrollable nature’ that poses risks to people, made vivid by the use of attention-getting words and phrases such as ‘disastrous effects’, ‘increased mortality’, ‘diseases’, ‘treacherous bacteria’, ‘catastrophe’, and ‘accidents’. These ‘establish the negative and frightful context in which climate change is discursively constructed’ (Olausson 2009, 11). According to a survey of U.S. mainstream news media’s coverage of risk (Lundgren and McMakin, 2009), ‘mass media disproportionately focus on hazards that are catastrophic and violent in nature. […] Drama, symbolism, and identifiable victims, particularly children and celebrities, make risks more memorable’ (cit. in Cox 2013, 168). Global climate change, for instance, is covered as ‘something to collectively fear’, and if we do not behave in a climate-friendly way, ‘we should feel guilt’ (Höijer 2010, 727). In sum, the term environment itself is associated with problems in news media (Hansen 2010, 1). As a result, scholars complain that complex environmental issues are packaged as simplistic and dramatised (Cox 2013). What appears in the media as the reality of nature is simply the product of media production that emphasises certain things and de-emphasises others.
Fear-related communication can be understood as a principle of resonance (Luhmann 1989). Such communication states the worst and is therefore infused with morality in its explanations of what is good and bad for society and the non-human environment. Fear is an attractive and universal rhetoric when it comes to justifying moral judgments. It becomes almost a duty to worry about our natural environment; one can expect that others share our worries, and one has the right to demand changes (Luhmann 1989, 161).
This journalistic tactic nevertheless has an impact on our relationship to the environment. The massive amount of negative and problem-oriented news reports about our physical environment (air, water, food) promotes a sense of numerous crises and risks. The fear frame does not allow for arguments that any progress has been made concerning environmental issues. ‘As such news media can foster public anxiety about issues that scientists find less worrisome’ (Cox and Pezullio 2016, 167).
About this Volume
However, mass media organisations are not the only ones who communicate about the environment in public; there are also other actors. In this volume, humanities scholars and social scientists analyse the communication of different actors who more or less claim to create awareness of the non-human environment. This volume contains research on communities formed by environmental activists, including a grassroots organisation based in Argentina and two environmental NGOs in Uruguay who led protests against the construction of pulp mills on the banks of the Uruguay River and against monoculture forestry in their country (Melían). It also touches on the local people of Sápmi, the traditional area of settlement of the indigenous people of northern Europe, who have made their voices heard against the growing mining industry in northern Sweden (Cocq). This book also discusses activists from indigenous organisations that represent natural ecosystems from across the globe and seek to shape public opinion on the effects of climate change on indigenous lands (Roosvall and Tegelberg). This volume contains research on a mixture of non-traditional environmental groups: ‘ordinary’ people in Sweden and Germany who blog about their hobby, gardening, and argue for more or less ecological behaviour in the garden (Graf), and neo-Nazi environmentalists in Germany who use ecological engagement to increase their movements’ visibility and to project a positive image (Hurd and Werther).
Media
Generally, we have to admit that the communication forums examined are situated in a (post) modern media environment characterised by information overload (Andrejevic 2013) or by a surplus of meaning and ‘the culture of dealing with this surplus selectively’ (Baecker 2011, 5). These media-saturated contexts are especially challenging for marginalised groups who want to make their voices heard. We are particularly interested in how different types of communication media create different discursive fields and performances in a mediatised society. Or, in the words of Luhmann (Luhmann 1989), how the environment finds resonance and is communicated by different groups.
Media comes into play in different ways for all of the above-mentioned groups. Activists in Argentina and Uruguay used digital media, especially websites, newsletters, e-mails, and mobile phones, in their articulation, dissemination, and organisation of environmental protest actions (Melián). That was years ago: social media have now become the main means of harnessing attention for, e.g., the concerns of local people in the Sápmi area (Cocq). Blogging is used by ‘ordinary’ people in order to spread opinions and experiences regarding gardening (Graf). In addition to the face-to-face world of direct action, neo-Nazis spread their ecological messages via party websites and quarterly magazines (Hurd and Werther).
The use of different media as well the perspectives of the producers of information have an impact on a group and its organisation (see Bennett and Segerberg 2013) in addition to what is being communicated. This volume also includes a text focusing on activists working for indigenous perspectives on climate change. These activists reflect on the impact of the different media landscapes — national, mainstream, local, alternative, and non-/indigenous — that they are confronted with, and on how they develop strategies to overcome the marginalisation of their voices (Roosvall and Tegelberg). The activists speak of a national news ecology which rarely makes room for indigenous perspectives or knowledge of nature. Hence, indigenous people’s own media practices attempt to generate awareness of these issues in the public sphere, which, of course, influences the way their messages are framed. The mainstream media are still seen as the most powerful vehicle for increasing awareness and are, therefore, addressed accordingly. Mainstream media remain a powerful source of meaning production. In the case of a garden blogger, the growing number of TV programs and magazines on gardening affect how a garden is perceived and how it is communicated in the blog community. It has been considered common sense to prioritise sustainable gardening, to work towards increasing biodiversity, to attempt to conserve natural resources, etc. This may explain why communication about damaging the environment, by using chemicals for example, is almost absent (Graf).
Of course, the different media formats influence the ‘how’ and the ‘what’ of environmental communication. Various media employ more-or-less strict forms of how things can be said or visualised. Newspapers follow certain ritualised narrative forms. In social media, a blog group makes use of blog entries and replies by referring to traditional media; for instance, a video clip is based on narratives from motion pictures. Media converge and overlap, from the traditional newspaper to the social media forum of the Internet (Jenkins 2006). Digital formats can be easily shared by an audience that is, in our case, receptive to arguments about sustainability, environmental preservation, the traditional use of natural resources, and respect for the natural and cultural landscape as described by Coppélie Cocq.
We do not mean that these different media formats simply determine how the message is expressed, but instead see them as conditioning factors. To put it differently, media technologies condition what is possible in concrete media practices, that is, the construction of a message in some way. For instance, as Cocq notes, the format of a short video in participatory media requires a degree of message simplification if one wants to reach out. The same goes for the other communication forums. A website also demands simplification, as does a blog post. In other words, media formats generally enforce selectivity, which in turn leads to a reduction of complexity.
The reduction of complexity is also related to the imagined target group. If one wants to attract the mass media, one tries to adopt media logic. When one makes use of news values, for instance, by playing up a story’s sensationalism, then the aim is to receive attention from the mass media, a process described by Anna Roosvall and Matthew Tegelberg. If instead the target group is one’s own blog community or political community, one then follows the communicative rules and common understandings of this group to connect, as shown in both Heike Graf’s and Madeleine Hurd and Steffen Werther’s chapters.
Technological conditions also apply. Given the fact that smartphones were not available at the time of the protest actions against the construction of pulp mills in Latin America, activists did not exclusively use the Internet to organise the protest or directly disseminate information. As Virginia Melían notes, the dissemination of information had to be both digital and analogue to overcome the digital divide in this region. However, the Internet was extensively used for establishing an organisational infrastructure composed of different environmental groups, and was also a source for retrieving information and spreading alternative discourses which otherwise had difficulty entering the public sphere. Often, the content of emails and newsletters were printed out and distributed among people at meetings, and local radio stations also broadcast information about the protest.
The chapter by Roosvall and Tegelberg broadens our perspective by looking at ‘media ecology’ as bounded by nation states. ‘Ecology’ in this sense means the entire media technology landscape in which indigenous actors are situated. Since it is still dominated by mainstream media, which rarely make use of indigenous perspectives, especially when it comes to traditional ecological knowledge, indigenous actors have limited access to the types of communication required to reach a larger audience. Here, we can also speak of a form of media divide, in which indigenous actors are restricted to social media platforms to disseminate their own messages. The authors argue that this media imbalance requires a reshaping of the current media ecology to address climate change issues from a broader perspective, one which includes traditional ecological knowledge.
The way in which the non-human environment finds resonance in different communication forums relates not only to the non-human and media environment but also to the political environment. For example, in the case of the protest actions in Latin America, activists’ choice of arguments was greatly affected by the ruling left-wing coalition in Uruguay. These activists carefully selected their arguments to avoid being cut off from communication (Melían).
Does communication matter? Examining the impact of communication, and following the communicative approach detailed above, demonstrates that communication succeeds first of all when connections can be established, and then again when recipients take the communicated information as a premise for their own actions and meaning production. There are two cases in this volume where such impact can be noted. In the case of the resistance against mining companies in the Sápmi area, less than two years after the publication of the first YouTube videos discussed in the chapter, the topic has shifted from the periphery to the centre of the public debate (Cocq). The environmental protest actions on the banks of the Uruguay River, which took place between 2005 and 2009, are now considered turning points in the public and political awareness of environmental issues, due to increased mass media attention (Melían).
Frames of Communication
We are interested in exploring how different groups react to ecological issues, and how they package their messages: what kinds of topics or types of approaches are used to create awareness and receive attention in the present media environment? Themes have to be adjusted to the groups’ conditions of communicability. They are ‘framed’, meaning according to Robert Entman, ‘to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text’ (1993, 52). The examples included in our volume allow us to identify the following frames of communication.
Against the backdrop of a political situation in which environmental issues are downplayed and seen as luxury problems by political elites, environmental activists in Argentina and Uruguay initiated spectacular events in order to receive media attention (Melían). Information about their eye-catching actions was sent directly to mainstream media journalists via mobile phones, for instance, in order to interest them in covering the events. The news values selected here were those of oddity and drama. On activists’ websites, environmental concerns were framed as political and economic concerns by highlighting the risks of pulp mills, rather than as purely environmental issues. By making use of news values such as consequence and proximity through highlighting the risks, and by topically connecting the environment issue to ongoing political discourse, the actions attracted a high level of media attention. Using mostly the frames of danger and risk, these groups finally received attention from mainstream media as well as from politicians.
In the case of YouTube video clips produced by the activists aiming to direct national and international attention to the Sápmi area, the frames used are those of disrupted harmony, conflict, and uncertainty (Cocq). Images of indigenous people’s respect for the natural and cultural landscape are contrasted with images of devastation and destruction wrought by the mining industry. Proximity (as a news value) is also employed. The viewer is involved in the story by being asked ‘What is YOUR choice? Take a stand!’, and by being offered a solution to the conflict, namely ‘join the movement’. The mode of communication is borrowed from (advertising) media and is therefore familiar and recognisable in terms of language and framing. As a result, the mining boom on indigenous land has received greater attention in Swedish public debate.
The same goes for indigenous peoples’ voices in the ongoing debate over climate change. Their voices are barely heard in mainstream media, despite the population’s extensive experiences with environmental issues (Roosvall and Tegerberg). Their media practices consist of an active presence on social media platforms in order to document and share indigenous knowledge about nature. Since the impact of these alternative channels is limited, the activists also seek mainstream media attention by making use of media’s news values. For example, by selecting values of proximity and consequence, dangers relating to community health risks are highlighted. By engaging celebrities, their information is given prominence and novelty. The exoticism card is also played: at public events such as demonstrations and press gatherings, many indigenous activists wear traditional clothing in order to stand out and direct attention to cultural identity issues.
In the case of gardening blogs, ecological topics have to be adjusted to themes of garden life (Graf). This implies that if one wants to be part of this blogosphere and intends to trigger connecting communication in the form of comments and ‘likes’, one should include ecological concerns, such as global warming, as part of gardening issue content. For example, climate change as such is not discussed but, in relation to dryness, it can be connected to methods for keeping the soil moist for longer periods. In other words, communication is framed in such a way that blog entries are constantly coordinated with each other. These frames conform to the norms of the examined blogosphere with respect to subject matter and the manner of communication. The author concludes that gardening issues are characterised by frames of pleasure, enthusiasm, and mutual agreement. These blog networks establish a kind of feel-good atmosphere that stands in stark contrast to the apocalyptic rhetoric of the news media’s coverage of environmental issues.
In contrast to the above mentioned community, the online communication of neo-Nazis is ‘brisk and angry in tone’ (Hurd and Werther); environmentalism is placed within xenophobic arguments by propagating a German ‘biomass’ ideology as an ‘argument for territorial exclusiveness’. By highlighting distinctions of proximity and consequence, what is implied is that German landscapes are indissolubly connected to German culture, which is in danger from invasive human and animal immigrants. In line with this militant environmentalism, ecological messages are mainly framed as threats against the German people and culture. For example, genetically manipulated foods and low-wage food imports are presented as harming local production. Nature is integrated into the human condition primarily by using the rhetoric of fear as well as those of nostalgia and love. In the long run, ecological arguments work to gain acceptance for xenophobic ideologies in society. As this chapter shows, environmental communication can be marshalled to promote xenophobic ideas.
In sum, it is striking to note how necessary it is to adapt media logic, as in the selected frames of communication, to acquire public attention. This illustrates mediatisation theories (e.g., Hjarvard 2013), which claim that the logic of media institutions condition how messages are communicated. Journalistic news values are used, including negativity, oddity, proximity, consequence, and prominence. Conflicts are the focal points: environmentalists versus politicians and companies, indigenous knowledge versus mainstream knowledge, nature versus society, idyllic Heimat versus global capital, and so forth.
This volume also shows that the frequent use of the rhetorical strategies of fear and threats is not limited to news media communication, but also belongs to the common repertoire of rhetorical strategies employed by activists, environmentalists, and ideologists. By primarily using frames of danger and risk, their emphasis is placed on worst-case scenarios, which can evoke emotions of fear, anxiety, and anger. Environmental movements use these frames in order to influence attitudes and promote the adoption of environmentally-conscious roles, while political movements use them to attract supporters. However, if the aim is not to persuade people and merely to communicate about a hobby such as gardening, ecological issues are framed in a positive and enjoyable manner. If conflicts arise, they have to be addressed in an ironic tone in order to follow the normative rules of garden blog communication. In sum, the communication preferences, aims, contexts, etc. all condition the way in which things are said, written, and shown.
Even if we are all more or less worried about climate change or other ecological issues, communication forums base these issues on their own preferences and purposes. Some voices are more prominent in public than others. Indigenous people might view nature as sacred based on their traditional ecological knowledge. Activists base their environmental protests on the attempt to protect nature by preventing and stopping the exploitation of natural resources. Gardeners might label nature, the garden, as a commodity they can enjoy. Neo-Nazis might see nature as an idyll they are willing to fight for with militant xenophobia.
Here, we can isolate some of the fundamental problems of communication about ecological issues in society. We see different meanings about the non-human environment constructed in these cases. All the groups covered in this volume communicate in different ways when articulating the problem and elaborating on possible solutions. The non-human environment can be addressed from all conceivable angles. Nature is everywhere, but is observed differently. For example, when the Spanish slug invades gardens, the advice given is to kill them. When the mining industry devastates indigenous land, one is asked to join the protest movement. When the Heimat is changing, you have to stop immigration of all kinds.
We all refer to different things when we speak about the non-human environment as we approach the non-human environment from different angles. The news media treat ecological issues from the perspective of what is newsworthy or even entertaining. The tiny blog community looks at matters from the vantage of what is enjoyable. Politicians as well as activists approach the issues from the angle of power over decisions, while business and economic interests approach these issues from the point of view of economic value. And if we look at scholars, their point of departure is from what is scientifically verifiable (Luhmann 1989). These different perspectives (or communication systems) complicate successful communication about ecological issues, since we have to consider that every observation has structural limits. Such complication also applies to any kind of scientific observation of nature. Hence the problem of social communication as such, which is that of acquiring different kind of insights (Luhmann 1989).
Scholars claim that a ‘new vision’ (Corbett 2006, 307) able to combine all of the different insights is required to change human behaviour. On the one hand, theoretically, it would be difficult to establish a new vision, or a new morality, in a modern and highly-differentiated society that makes use of varied social systems and agendas in addressing environmental concerns. No one element, be it political or economic, can claim to represent society holistically. There is therefore no single counterpart to the non-human environment. However, the more differentiated a society is, the more likely it is to produce resonance and continue to develop (Luhmann 1989, 15). On the other hand, if we look at it empirically, it seems that in the public sphere the frequently used frame of fear and anxiety has led to a new style of morality in our society. This new style is based on a common interest in the alleviation of fear and anxiety; that is, so that people can live without either. The fear and anxiety frame is universal and, hence, can be used in all contexts. Moreover, the communication of fear and anxiety is always authentic; speaking of suffering from fear and anxiety ‘resists any kind of critique’ (Luhmann 1989, 128). No one who addresses the fear of climate change or, more concretely, the fear of genetically modified food appears in a negative light. Fear as such cannot be forbidden or falsified by scholars; it is just there. Hence, it cannot be contested in social communication. Communicating about the environment from this kind of emotional vantage point, it is unclear how the relationship between society and the non-human environment can be improved. Only the future can show whether fear and anxiety have been justified (Luhmann 1989). | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_Environment_in_the_Age_of_the_Internet_(Graf)/1.01%3A_Introduction.txt |
Virginia Melián
© Virginia Melián, CC BY 4.0 http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0096.02
During the last few decades, a growing awareness of the consequences of human activity on the environment and an intense debate about environmental risks and the threat posed by civilization have become evident in Western societies. This has been stressed by, for example, Ulrich Beck (1992) and Manuel Castells (2000). In Latin America, however, environmental concerns have remained barely visible. Civil society organisations and social movements struggle to bring to the fore their concerns about the risks that increasing pollution poses to the ecosystem and the life of local communities. Political elites generally downplay environmental concerns, arguing that these are ‘luxury problems’, typical of some industrialized countries but hardly relevant in the context of developing societies, since the latter must exploit their natural resources in order to provide social welfare for their citizens. Environmental norms are generally weak in the region. Lack of attention on part of the established political parties has contributed to a lack of mainstream, journalistic coverage, since the media give preference to issues prioritised by political and economic powers, rather than those that concern the civil society (as has been pointed out by Waisbord 2000; Hallin and Papathanassopoulos 2002; Fox and Waisbord 2002 and Rockwell and Janus 2003). For instance, a recent study on the space given to mobilisations in the main national newspapers of 17 Latin American countries reveals that less than 15% of the total number of protests covered between 2009 and 2010 were focused on environmental issues (Calderón 2012).
Despite scant media coverage, inadequate environmental policies, and a lack of political interest, recent protests organised by citizens’ groups and various NGOs based in different countries demonstrate that the continent is far from unconcerned about the environment. In several cases, civic engagement has been organised in response to industrial pollution that affects protected or untouched areas, citizens’ living conditions and the future of flora and fauna, as documented by Jussi Pakkasvirta (2008), Silvio Waisbord and Enrique Peruzzoti (2009) and Yanina Welp and Jonathan Wheatly (2012). In many cases, the citizens’ concern focuses on the exploitation of natural resources, often by polluting industries that move to the South to avoid stringent regulations in their countries of origin (FAO 2009, 77). This upsurge in civil society engagement, in general, occurs in the context of Latin America’s so-called third wave of democratisation, which is characterised by a significant increase in civic activity in post-authoritarian nations (Avritzer 2002, 3). The rising number of Latin-American environmental protests over the last few years, and the rapidly changing conditions of the continent’s media landscape caused by citizens’ increasing access to the Internet and mobile phones, raise questions about the role played by digital media in organisation and mobilisation, dissemination of information, formulation of arguments and facilitation of public debate.
In this chapter, I analyse how digital media were used for the formulation, dissemination and organisation of an environmental protest action against the construction of pulp mills on the banks of the Uruguay River and against monoculture forestry in Uruguay. Three different groups, one grassroots organisation based in Argentina and two environmental NGOs in Uruguay, led the protests from 2005 until 2009. Special focus is placed on the ways in which arguments behind the protest were formulated. This protest movement — and in particular the Argentinean grassroots group component — has been seen as a turning point in the historical trajectory of environmental movements, according to Waisbord and Peruzzotti (2009), both because of the large number of people involved and because of the media attention it managed to receive. The results presented here are based on my doctoral thesis, completed in September 2012 at Stockholm University.
This case study offers an opportunity to examine the interplay between digital media and environmental protest in a non-Western context. The organisations studied are based in countries that are comparable in terms of Internet usage and demographics. The period under consideration, 2005–2009, is likewise significant because it coincides with the initial expansion of digital media in these countries. The case also represents an historical turning point because levels of Internet and mobile phone access expanded greatly in Latin America during and after this period. Over the last years, the advancement of social media platforms and smart phones has made new kinds of digital media available. Young people organised in new constellations of spontaneous groups increasingly use several networking opportunities embedded in social media and smart phones (compared to newsletters, e-mail and SMS used initially). For instance, social media played a prominent role during the so called ‘Chilean Winter’, a protest organised by high school and college students, who demanded changes in the free-market policy governing education, energy and the environment (Valenzuela et al. 2012). This interaction between media and civic engagment has also been studied in societies within the region that do not have a strong mobilisation tradition (Welp and Wheatley 2012). The anti-corruption movement and the spontaneous mobilisation among middle class and young people against transportation costs and corruption in Brazil in July 2013 are likewise examples of social media being used extensively as a means of disseminating protest (Moseley and Layton 2013). It is worth noticing that Argentina, Uruguay, Chile and Brazil are among the Latin American countries with the greatest Internet usage. However, connectivity is not the sole determining factor shaping social media and protest in Latin America. An historical tradition of mobilisation and the experience protest may play a role where connectivity is low. The mobilisation against the construction of a cement plant at the border of the national park Los Haitises in the Dominican Republic is a case in point. In countries with low Internet access and weak mobilisation tradition, activists have made extensive use of social media in their protests, and have achieved significant results according to Welp and Wheatley (2012). The protest against pulp mills and forest monoculture in Uruguay and Argentina mainly involved middle class, middle-aged activists, some of them well experienced in traditional mobilisation strategies. This chapter sets out to investigate the role played by digital media as a means to disseminate information on environmental concerns publicly, and organise mobilisation in a region where the mere formulation of environmental concerns is problematic. In such a context, environmental mobilisation becomes a sort of balancing act between trying to capture media attention through spectacular physical mobilisations and negotiating public opinion around environmental themes. This case is not representative of all environmental movements in Latin America but it offers theoretical insights into the interplay between digital media and environmental protest in non-Western socio-economic and cultural settings.
Background
The last thirty years’ succession of democratically elected governments, with almost no interruptions through coups d’état, have provided the necessary political framework for strengthening civil society organisations and their initiatives in Latin America. Environmental movements, in particular, experienced a resurgence in the 1990s. These movements focused on finding solutions to specific problems, at a national or regional level, in coordination with governments, universities and research centres, and have therefore seen their legitimacy increased (Calderón 2012, 233). However, environmental concerns are often left off of the political agenda and ignored in mainstream media. Data from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and Internet World Stats (IWS) places Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and Chile among the most intensive users of the Internet in the region of the Southern Cone, in particular Argentina, Uruguay and Chile. General connectivity rates increased rapidly in the 2000s. Over 50% of the population in these countries had access to the Internet in 2010, compared to 30% in 2005 (Calderón 2012). About 100% of all Argentineans and Uruguayans had a mobile phone in 2008 (Bibolini and Baker 2009, 252).
One of the most significant environmental conflicts in recent years in Latin America, both in terms of the number of people involved, national, regional and international political repercussions, and the duration of mainstream media coverage, took place in connection with the establishment of two pulp mills by the Finnish-owned Metsä-Botnia (hereafter Botnia) and the Spanish-owned Empresa Nacional de Celulosa España (Ence). These pulp mills were to be established on the Uruguayan side of the Uruguay River, the geographical and political border between Argentina and Uruguay. The protest movement initially had three main driving groups: the Asamblea Ciudadana Ambiental de Gualeguayú (ACAG) — a grassroots organisation with its base in Argentina — and the environmental NGOs Grupo Guayubira and REDES Amigos de la Tierra, based in Uruguay. From 2005 to 2008, these organisations led the fight against the construction of pulp mills, at first in unison and later separately. The Uruguayan NGOs also protested against the cultivation of eucalyptus trees in Uruguay. This non-native, fast-growing tree provides raw material for the pulp industry.
The movement began to take shape in 2005, when 40,000 people from Argentina and Uruguay gathered to block the traffic on a bridge linking the two countries. The blockades and protests continued tenaciously until 2009 and one of the bridges was blockaded for two years, closed for both cargo and private traffic. The protest actions and the authorities’ difficulties in reaching an agreement on the location and control of the planned pulp mills severely disrupted diplomatic relations between Argentina and Uruguay. The diplomatic conflict was initially dealt with through bilateral negotiations, but when these failed, the countries’ governments sought international assistance to solve their differences. They entreated the Spanish king, Juan Carlos de Borbón to mediate between them, and appealed to the Regional Court of Justice of the Southern Common Market, Mercosur (formed at this point in time by a regional agreement between Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay), as well as to the International Court of Justice in The Hague. The International Court of Justice reached a verdict in 2010, which brought an end to the activists’ blockade. This eased the diplomatic tensions, though it did not completely silence dissent.
As a consequence of the intense protest actions, the Spanish plant was, in fact, never built. The Finnish plant was eventually built, but is now subject to stricter environmental monitoring than had been stipulated before the protests took place. The plant is now being monitored both formally, by the nations involved, and informally, by citizen groups. Today, the groups are still active, but no longer work in unison. Their main vehicles for dissent through online platforms, e.g. websites, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, rather than protests.
Digital Media and Protest
The field of media studies has set out to understand the rapid changes in the organisation of dissent that have come with the widespread availability of digital media. Of particular concern are those civil society actors who rely heavily on digital media when embarking on protest actions (Rodríguez et al. 2014). Many scholars have highlighted the synergies between the Internet and the non-hierarchical, flexible, identity-based, decentralised, autonomous and loosely structured networks of social movements (MacCaughey and Ayers 2003; van de Donk et al. 2004; de Jong et al. 2005; Leivrouw 2011). In addition, it has been stressed that the use of digital information technologies considerably increases activists’ chances of disseminating alternative discourses, as these groups might find it difficult or impossible to enter the public sphere through mainstream media (Coyer et al. 2007; Bailey et al. 2008; Atkinson 2010). Some argue that social media have provided new prospects for organising and have accelerated the dissemination of contentious politics among citizens and civil society organisations to a degree hitherto unimagined (Shirky 2011). Such capability has probably enhanced the activists’ chances of reaching the mainstream media globally (Cottle 2011). This has bearing on the dissemination of protests beyond regional and national territories.
At the same time, it has been argued that the logic of protest action itself is changing, which makes it necessary to look into the organisation of dissent in different ways. Analysing protests organised recently Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg (2011) advance the concept of ‘connective action’ as a way to distinguish the mobilisations basically driven from social media from ‘collective action’, where the role of established ations is more prominent. However, beyond the discussion on the distinction between collective and connective action, when it comes to the organisation of protest to achieve predefined goals, a pure instrumental role of media seems to be generally rejected as a standpoint (Carrol and Hackett 2006; Downing 2008; Treré 2012). This is because collective action is considered communicative per se, since social movements occupy a space defined by the participants’ mode of interaction and mode of engagement. In this ‘collective action space’ multiple communication strategies and technologies can be adapted as the situation demands (Bimber, Flanagin and Stohl 2012). It is then necessary to study the whole range of media practices, the relationships among them and the political, economic and cultural context in which they are embedded, in order to comprehend how media practices form part of the processes of organising protest actions.
On the other hand, less optimistic observers signal that the use of the Internet for communication among activists makes them easily traceable by governments that wish to hunt down and punish either individual activists or networks of people and organisations (Morozov 2011; Leistert 2013). This obviously influences the use of these digital technologies for the organisation of dissent and, in practice, reduces their potential impact on democratisation processes. Empirically, there is evidence that well-established, environmental NGOs make relatively little use of the Internet, even in the media-saturated contexts of some Western societies (Kenix 2007; Stein 2009; Waters et al. 2009). As these groups display low levels of information, mobilisation, interactivity both on their websites and social network pages, it may indicate that their organisational structures do not always make use of the Internet’s opportunities to the degree postulated and celebrated in some literature (Stein 2009) This is mainly the case for more or less established organisations in industrialised countries. More empirical research in media systems, like the Latin American one, is still necessary but some evidence suggests a similar trend (Melián 2012).
In this respect, the notion of ‘media practice’, as discussed by Nick Couldry (2004) is useful. This is the idea that the principles of media-oriented practices are generated in the social world. These are to be found in people’s understanding, not in researchers’ a priori conceptualisations. Because media also represent the social world, they inevitably mediate such practices. Thus media practices have direct consequences on how social norms are defined and ordered. This is not to say that all practices are mediated but that significant social practices are represented and sometimes organised through media. To put emphasis on media practices means to focus on the understanding of the principles whereby, and the mechanisms through which, these practices are ordered. Media practice theory helps scholars approach the kinds of tasks people are perform with media as well as what people say about media. For activists, actions are then weaved into a practice not just by explicit understandings, but also by the governance of shared rules and references, such as projects and beliefs. In this way, the conditions and limitations of activists’ media practices correspond to a shared framework that shows a deep sense of interconnectedness with the particular socio-cultural and political context studied. The aim here is to explore the ways activists within the movement in question used new digital media tools and formulated an environmental narrative against the backdrop of the particular mobilisation traditions and historical context of Latin America.
The Study
The study of social movements is generally complex, because these are fluid and flexible social configurations that are difficult to assess even in terms of duration (Melucci 1996). The study of digital media practices also poses difficulties because they are not easy to observe. Many studies of the media practices of social movements focus on one type of media, most often the movements’ websites such as in the work of Laura Stein (2011). Other scholars have focused on the movements’ posts on social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter as in the work of Bennet and Segerberg (2011). In a departure from this methodology we rely here on semi-structured interviews with all the activists in charge of communication tasks in the three main groups of the movement (9 in total), the groups’ homepages from 2005 to 2008 (a total of 190), and selected texts on these websites published during the same period (a total of 24). As far as the selection of activists interviewed is concerned, I focus entirely on those who were in charge of communication tasks. A representative sample of activists from each group would not have been ideal, as I am concerned with the communication practices of the groups involved in the movement rather than on such practices at the individual level. Because the interviews target those in charge of communication tasks, the perspective of many other activists involved in the groups are left out of the study. One reason for choosing this method is the difficulty of, in the case of the ACAG, identifying and interviewing activists within a loose network of individuals, and in the case of the NGOs, of interviewing people who did not actually work with communication tasks. Another factor is that the activists directly involved in communication tasks within the groups had greater influence within the movement when it came to determining and executing these tasks. This probably also gave these activists a wider perspective of the numerous aspects involved in the organisation and execution of these tasks.
David Silverman (2006) calls this approach ‘purposive sampling’ as the empirical material used aims at illuminating the specific media practices on which I focus. The use of interviews offers advantages because informants described practices that occurred in the recent past from their own perspectives. At the same time, this approach has limitations in the sense that informants provide the interviewer with a reconstruction of the practices. However, interviews were preferable to dependence on empirical material generated by participant observation, which would not have been possible in a study such as this one. I analyse the websites because they were the preferred online platform within this movement, and by homing in on some selected texts I perform the kind of deeper discourse analysis that better illuminates the importance of these websites to the movement.
Thematic analysis was the method selected to analyse the interviews as it enabled the organisation of material according to the themes informants dealt with while maintaining the theoretical framework of the study. This analytical strategy implies a ‘pattern matching’ technique where similar or alternative patterns regarding the theoretical points of departure are sought and analysed in the empirical materials with the goal of building an explanatory approach (Yin 2003).
To analyse the websites I adapted Malin Sveningsson, Mia Lövheim, and Magnus Bergquist’s (2003) model because it was suitable for mapping the structure of websites in accordance with their main functions. Furthermore, my discussion of selected texts from these web pages has been informed by Norman Fairclough’s (1995) model for discourse analysis, because this method facilitates the analysis of power relations as represented in the texts, which reflect the power relations in which the activists were immersed.
Camouflaged Arguments
In societies where environmental concerns rank low, activists make an effort to present their arguments in terms that may appeal to both the populace and mainstream media. One way of doing this, as shown by the analysis, is to transfer discursive tropes from themes that enjoy high status to themes that are considered less relevant. It is a way of packaging environmental concerns within more easily recognizable discursive frames, often those commonly used by mainstream news media. In this manner, a low-status subject matter can be associated with an issue that is considered very relevant in a particular socio-cultural context. It is a way of increasing the apparent importance of the matter dealt with. The process of representing a certain issue as associated with another frame of discourse is a process of transformation, which involves what might be termed discourse camouflage.
The organisation websites studied here functioned as platforms from which activists had the opportunity to formulate their concerns and claims. In Uruguay, in particular, websites were the sole platform where activists could voice their concerns, as mainstream media did not regularly make use of them as sources of information. The Argentinean mainstream media, on the other hand, used Argentinean and even Uruguayan activists as sources, mainly on the issue of the physical protests. The groups’ websites remain, then, the most important arena for activists to express arguments in their own terms.
The analysis of these websites shows that the activists' claims were not directly formulated in environmental terms but were, in fact, framed in terms of political and economic consequences, especially where these clains concerned the social impact of the pulp mills and of forest monoculture. These political and economic arguments were sometimes linked to concerns about health problems, but without further specification of what would be the tangible consequences for human health. Arguments relating specifically to the consequences of pulp mills and forest monoculture for soil, water, air, flora, and fauna were rarely used. The environmental impact of pulp mills and forest monoculture was not presented as a forceful argument. Furthermore, the very word ‘environment’ was often absent from the activists’ argumentation. The following are examples of how the activists’ discourse was instead informed by political and economic concerns:
[The blockade] will help to establish a common oppositional front to the negative effects that will be registered in tourism, sports fishing, apiculture and agriculture on both sides of the Uruguay River. (Published by REDES on 29 April, 2005)
It becomes evident for the world that the national policy of the state is determined by a multinational and that the government of Mr Tabaré Vázquez is on its knees before the interest of Botnia, giving away the sovereignty of Uruguayans. (Published by ACAG on 9 November, 2007)
Until when will our government officials continue exchanging our rich patrimony for small mirrors and colourful beads? (Published by Guayubira Group on 30 April, 2005)
The activists connected politics and protest on various levels. Firstly, the protest was linked discursively to contemporary national politics, and the relationship of this politics to global capital. This was the case, for instance, when it was repeatedly argued that support for the development of pulp mills and the forestry industry in the country was inconsistent with the political model that the ruling party defended before coming into power. The left coalition had traditionally opposed granting foreign capital benefits at the expense of natural resources. Approval for the construction of pulp mills, and thus the expansion of the forest model in practice, was seen as a hard retreat on the promised political positioning.
The discursive interconnection between the protest and political argumentations became evident at another level: historical references linked the present situation to the colonial past. A parallel was established between the colonial past and the current political situation, described as post-colonial. Comparisons were made between the welcoming attitude of native people towards the Spanish and contemporary governments’ willingness to allow transnational companies to operate in these countries. The protest was conceived through a frame of post-colonial relationships between local and regional governance and the economic power of global companies. Activists depicted the post-colonial condition as the reluctance of contemporary Latin-American governments, in this case, Uruguay, to remain in control of national policies and regulations. Accusations were made that the governments sacrificed national resources, such as land and water, in the name of globalisation and for the benefit of national finances.
Evidently, the argumentation from historical analogies and references to contemporary political activities implied a local or regional Spanish-speaking audience well versed both in the region's current affairs and is history. This indicates that it was never the intention of these activists to reach a more global audience. However, even though the various groups had similar lines of argumentation, and appealed to the same kind of reader, the ways in which their arguments were introduced and displayed on their websites varied greatly. While the Argentinean grassroots group mainly used slogans, short texts and visual elements, such as illustrations or pictures, to make their claims, the Uruguayan NGOs provided a wealth of texts of a reflective nature. This establishes a distinction between the ways in which different kinds of organisations arranged their online content. The use of slogans and short texts has been associated with loose formations that could be linked to the logic of connective action, while the use of long explanatory texts is more typical of established organisations within social movements. This case acted as confirmation. The grassroots organisation, which organised spontaneously in order to protest, preferred to communicate its discontent through the use of slogans and short texts. The environmental NGOs, active long before this protest and concerned with other contemporary issues, preferred to use longer and more in-depth texts to formulate their critique.
User-Generated Content and Mainstream Media
Websites were conceived as public space belonging to activists. They were the online representation of the activists’ goals and raison d’être during all the years the conflict lasted. This online record was also seen as a way of positioning the organisation among other actors within the public sphere. In the process of appropriating this space, activists made choices about whether or not to formulate their opinions and concerns, as this implied a public positioning that could be harmful for them. The relationship between the protest groups and the respective national mainstream media greatly shaped how the informants conceptualised the online content they created. Activists working for the NGOs felt the Uruguayan mainstream media had aligned their discourse with the government’s closing all doors to reach the public in this way. Thus, the online content produced by the Uruguayan NGOs was considered the only way to reach citizens with counteractive information. It provided space for alternative perspectives, which were perceived as otherwise excluded from journalistic coverage. The online content was viewed as ‘balanced’ because it included alternative sources that were never utilised by mainstream media. Informants did not argue that they represented an objective stance but that they contributed to objectivity by disclosing themes, arguments and voices otherwise excluded. They saw their online media presence, therefore, as a sort of balancing act, or at least intended it as such. Websites became the only venues for expressing dissent when the NGOs ceased supporting blockades as the main form of protest (blockades were only continued by the Argentinean grassroots group). Even though NGOs ceased supporting the blockades, these activists were not used as sources by mainstream media.
Constraints on the formulation of content related to contextual political issues did, however, blunt the counteractive character of the Uruguayan activists’ online output. The fact that Uruguay was ruled by a left-wing coalition greatly affected how they chose to express themselves. In practice, it determined the type of information that would be published on their websites, as well as the tone in which it was presented. Traditionally supportive of the ruling left coalition, the Uruguayan activists certainly used their websites to formulate public critiques, but they weighed their words carefully. In the beginning of the period under study, open criticism of the government was considered as nearly tantamount to political treason among these activists. Activists, aware of the nationalistic tone that had become associated with the issue of the construction of pulp mills in Uruguay, even in the mainstream media, were afraid of positioning themselves too clearly at the risk of becoming isolated on other issues. Later, when contesting views were practically banned from the mainstream news media, partly due to pressure exerted by the state, whose advertising was important to the economic survival of the media, the websites’ content became more radical, more openly oppositional to government policies.
ACAG informants, on the other hand, did not see their online publishing as the only way to reach out to the citizens. They felt they could easily contact both local and national mainstream media, at least on the issue of the actual blockades. Instead, Argentinean activists used the organisation’s website, e-mails and newsletters to present themselves, their protest actions and resolutions, or short pieces of information about future events or past incidents. They felt that by using their website in this manner, they controlled a ‘public space’ from which they could publish information they considered relevant at exactly the time they wished. As mentioned above, there were no attempts to formulate long and explicative counteractive accounts. Activists explained this in terms of the potential audience they could reach. They preferred to talk directly to journalists because they considered mainstream news media a far more effective means of reaching a large number of people. These activists were frequently journalistic sources on the issue of the physical mobilisations. However, they did not engage in explicative argumentations about the environmental consequences of the pulp and forest industries at any length, either with the journalists or on their website.
Networking beyond the Digital
Informants agreed that the Internet was used extensively as a means for engagement, for establishing a network that linked the different groups, other organisations and citizens in the region and beyond. Informants assessed the digital exchange as unique, firstly because it provided valuable insights, arguments and information, which were not to be found elsewhere, especially not in the mainstream media. Secondly, it was considered of key importance because it was the only possible way of divulging information generated by the groups of activists. This positioning coincides with the notion of ‘social movement media’ that include counter-information produced by voices often excluded from mainstream media (Downing 2008).
The use of the Internet for disseminating information, and for collecting insights about the forest industry from around the world, increased significantly during the studied period. For example, in 2005 the ACAG operated with a list of fifty e-mail addresses; by 2007 the number of addressees had had grown to two thousand, counting individuals, mainstream media and other environmental organisations or ‘asambleas’, 250 of these being activists from Gualeguaychú. Guayubira also increased the number of people listed during the period studied, and by 2009 they had 1000 contacts that they regularly kept informed about the state of the protest. In addition, lists of e-mail accounts of members of parliament and of mainstream media journalists were used for sending specific information about activist claims and activities.
Networking was rarely used for promoting participation on online campaigns. A small number of online campaigns, listed on one of the websites, show that this possibility was used only to a limited extent. Informants said that online campaigns were not considered the primary method of protest. Instead, e-mails and newsletters served as the means of disseminating information to generate awareness and offline engagement (from participation in meetings, workshops, conferences to attendance to the physical mobilisations). This is because of their multiplication effect in weaving online and offline networks. Often the exchange of information was initiated digitally, but was expanded through the generation of instances of information exchange that compensated for the existent digital divide. In praxis, the content of e-mails and newsletters sent by activists was printed out and discussed at meetings and workshops held among people with very limited access to e-mail. Local radio broadcasts informing people about the protest and the arguments behind it were also based on this material. This combination of digital and analogue media practices illustrates how a digital divide, still present in the region, was overcome to some degree.
Networking with organisations and individuals situated outside of the region was less frequent than networking within the region. When contacts were made with organisations or people outside of the region, it was for the purpose of exchanging information about the forest industry and about campaigns against pulp mills in other parts of the world. The environmental NGOs, which already had contact with global environmental organisations concerned with forest exploitation and/or pulp mills, made frequent use of these links. However, they did not seek their support to initiate digital mobilisations that could propagate beyond the region. Physical actions, which implied the participation of the local populace and regional organisations, were the preferred means of mobilisation. A strong mobilisation tradition, both in Argentina and Uruguay, may explain why these activists relied on proven ways of protesting, such as the blockade.
On the other hand, all the groups found global networking vital for meeting the enormous demand for information on pulp mill technology, forest industry development and environmental activism, information which was not to be found locally, particularly during the first years of the protest. The NGO informants had worked with the issue of monoculture of eucalyptus trees before, but they had hardly any knowledge of pulp mills. ACAG informants began reading about pulp mills and the forest industry when the movement first started. ‘We had a permanent exchange of information, advice and coordination locally and globally. Globally we were in contact with the WRM (World Rainforest Movement) and organisations in Spain regarding Ence, Finland regarding Botnia and in general with Portugal, and then regionally with Brazil, Argentina and Chile’ (Male, REDES). This contact was purely geared towards getting information about the industry. Also, web searches in general were judged to be of great importance when it came to understanding the consequences of pulp mills and forest monoculture. Some of the interviewees referred to web searches as magical and even nurturing. These searches, together with the information exchange with organisations in other regions, improved the activists’ understanding of forest industry and pulp mills, and helped them formulate their arguments. An example of how global discourses, via the Internet, influenced the movement’s formulations is a key slogan used by the ACAG, which reads, ‘Gualeguaychú does not give social license to Botnia’. One of the informants from the ACAG, during his Internet searches, became very interested in the notion of ‘social license’, which had been used in Canada. The term refers to how companies should strive to gain the support of the community that will be affected by their activities before actually initiating any changes. Fascinated with the idea, he spread the understanding of this notion within the ACAG. Soon after, the term was widely applied by the ACAG activists. In the years to come this slogan would be used on their websites, banners, stickers, and t-shirts.
Mobile Personal Engagement
Although activists had access to mobile phones during the whole period, it was not viewed as being crucial to the organisation of collective action among these informants. Mobile communication practices per se were not seen as something that could spark civic engagement. Informants assigned less importance to mobile phones than the Internet when it came to mobilisation and communication of collective action, and they did not consider mobile phones a fundamental medium of communication or intervention for grassroots movements and political activism as shown, for instance, by Manuel Castells (2009). Rather, they considered the mobile phone a means of person-to-person communication. Its private character, as perceived by informants, had to do with the range of imagined possibilities mobile communication granted for civic engagement in this context. Certainly, technology per se does not initiate dissent. The actualisation of the possibilities enabled by technologies within particular contexts, which create particular collective action spaces that host civic activities, is marked both by convention and innovation and depends on the surrounding conditions and the imagined (or unimagined) possibilities that attend them (Papacharissi 2010).
However, even though the mobile phones practices were associated with the private sphere, it became clear, as a result of the interviews, that in practice they had an important role in mobilisation. The ACAG activists used mobile phones when organising actual physical demonstrations, as these required detailed organisation before, during and after the event. Some activists had a system for distributing urgent messages by using mobile phones. Chains of text messages were agreed on for cases of emergency. When an activist had something urgent to communicate, he or she would send a text message to the activist who was next on a ready-made list, who would then send pass it on, and so on, until the circle was completed. This system assured that the message would be sent to all the people involved at a minimum cost for each individual. Text messages were primarily distributed through established personal networks. This is consistent with the findings of current research on the personal character of mobile phone communication (Villi 2011).
Accessibility was another defining feature of the activists’ mobile phone practices. The fact that the mobile phone was available regardless of time or place made it an important means of communicating among themselves and with journalists. Whether people were located in different cities and areas, or were performing blockades in the middle of the countryside, mobile phones were used to maintain active contact amongst the informants whenever needed. Mobile phones were used as windows onto the blockade actions, as a way of taking part from a distance. This possibility allowed informants to ‘be there’ even though the protests occurred in different locations, sometimes simultaneously, and often far apart. In this sense, activists were able to deploy spectacular physical demonstrations in isolated places, far from these countries’ capitals, while still staying in contact with each other and being aware of each other’s actions.
The accessibility provided by mobile phones was also utilised during extraordinary events. In such cases, mobile phones were used in order to rapidly distribute information through the personal networks of activists. These channels could then disseminate the information further, among the media as well. Mobile phones were able to accelerate the generation and dissemination of content (text and images) when extraordinary events associated with protest actions took place. However, at this time, mobile phone cameras were mainly put into use when these extraordinary circumstances had to be documented visually. It is important to remember that the use of pictures is linked to the technology. Mobile phones were not, at this time, smartphones. Accordingly, activists were not able to use the Internet as a cheap means for distributing pictures. They used the telephone line for sending images. The cost of sending these images (considerably more expensive than sending texts) limited the use of mobile phones among the informants, and gave pictures a special status. Something ‘important’ had to happen if a picture was to be distributed. The production of documentation for activists’ claims was considered such an occasion. Clearly this has changed with the introduction and popularisation of smartphones with Internet connections, which has created an enormous flow of images taken with mobile phones on social media. Pictures of a big stain in the river’s water were sent, for instance, to support activists’ claims of contamination of the river. Initially distributed by mobile phones to journalists and activists in charge of communications, these images were rapidly published on the websites and further distributed via e-mail, the cheapest option at this time. Images published on websites or distributed by e-mail often had contextualising captions to reinforce the message that the activists wanted to convey. Images captured by mobile phones were conceived as unique value generators, which added a sense of affirmation and importance.
The ability to stay in contact through mobile phones contributed to their sense of togetherness even when they were far apart. Mobile phones contributed, then, to a sense of belonging and comradeship among some of the informants. Informants saw receiving and sending text messages as important measures that helped them deal emotionally with drawbacks and failures. They could express feelings, provide support and receive encouragement. The act of writing and sending a text that would remain on someone else’s screen, or receiving a text that could be read several times afterwards, was viewed as a concrete way of providing and receiving the encouragement necessary for further engagement.
When a comrade was lying in hospital severely injured (during a protest) I received a text message with every step that was being taken by the doctors. I wrote back and asked them to come closer to him and tell him that I was there. (Woman, ACAG)
Another feature of the use of mobile phone was coupled to issues of personal safety. Maintaining a blockade of an international bridge in solitary places was not always a smooth process. People became angry, especially when the blockades were not permanent — causing delays in crossing the bridge and sometimes forcing people to wait hours before the activists would let them through. The mobile phone often provided a sense of personal safety. Informants participating in the blockades felt they were not ‘alone’ if they had their mobiles at hand. They felt they were always able to contact the police or other activists or the media from the middle of the countryside. The use of mobile phones meant, again, being in contact at a distance. It was a means of obtaining help in the case of an emergency. Under the circumstances, the help could not arrive immediately, but the mobile phone represented a sort of connection to somewhere else and someone else besides those involved in the actual situation. The connection was as real for the person calling as for the person listening to the conversation, or witnessing the message being sent or received.
Opportunities for Public Debate
Digital media offers increased opportunities for public debate on various online platforms. Whether people debate within like-minded groups or engage in discussions with those who represent other beliefs, public debate must be considered relevant for the promotion of awareness, which again may prompt or strengthen civic engagement. Accordingly, debate generally plays a positive role for democracy and for society (Dahlgren 2007). At this time and amongst these informants, online public debate was in fact not viewed as an opportunity to promote awareness and, in turn, the civic engagement of citizens. The informants did not recognise their websites, existing blogs or other online platforms as opportunities to promote a ‘serious’ debate on the issue. Rather they argued that ongoing discussions on these forums were focused mainly on the blockade as a means of protest, not on the benefits and disadvantages of the installation of pulp mills in Uruguay or the development of the forest industry in the country, which expanded forest monoculture in order to provide raw material for these plants. Nor did these informants perceive the discussions as a way of provoking a wide debate on the consequences of the construction of the pulp mills. Neither blogs nor online forums were viewed as places where one could engage in constructive public debate. Generally, online debates were perceived as serving the interests of the pulp mill companies and/or personal interests (people trying to gain points from governmental officials or the companies). They did not think the online discussions contributed to a meaningful exchange of opinions and arguments; rather, they saw these spaces in which some explicitly nationalistic points of views were formulated. The informants were aware of the existence of a blogosphere around the movement against the pulp mills but they did not actively engage in it. Some of the informants had made comments on these platforms on rare occasions, but had not engaged actively in these debates, nor with supporters or opponents. The existing online debate opportunities were seen as venues for radicalised and personal opinions, either defending or rejecting the blockade of the river in nationalistic terms.
The analysis of the NGOs’ websites shows that they were not actively used to promote public debate on the issue. Discussion forums were basically unavailable. Guayubira and REDES activists explicitly rejected and rarely even discussed having interactive features, according to the informants. They conceived their websites mainly as places to make their beliefs and arguments available to those who wanted to read them, but did not go so far as to initiate an online dialogue. Alternative interactive ways of promoting the participation of citizens were only available on the website of the grassroots group. Grassroots activists were more interested in opening up possibilities for public participation, but they did not explicitly conceive their websites as places to facilitate online dialogue, since participation was regulated. Still, the website of the grassroots organisation provided readers with some opportunity to share user-generated content in the form of pictures, videos and texts by submitting them to the Webmaster (far from full-fledged interactivity).
As on other issues, the grassroots movement and the NGOs differed in their conception of online public debate. NGO activists had an unspoken understanding that they were not to use blogs as a place for debate. They did not participate as individuals and only made comments, in cases when they felt compelled to answer a direct attack. ACAG members agreed that blogs were a hostile arena for debating the protest, but most of them had published comments on an individual basis from time to time — sometimes anonymously. The activists viewed anonymous participation positively, because it allowed them to abandon discussions in which the tone became too aggressive. When they gave their names, they felt compelled to continue participating in the discussion. Anonymity did not, however, promote meaningful debate. Informants reacted against what they perceived as outright aggressive comments, often expressed in nationalistic terms. Papacharissi has argued that certain forms of heated online exchange can be understood as expressions of keen interest and even as a necessary element when face-to-face communication does not exist (Papacharissi 2004). However, informants generally avoided heated exchanges, suggesting that fierce online arguments could be avoided if they sought out online platforms that reflected their own opinions.
Although awareness of various kinds of online public debates did not translate into active participation among informants, there were those who, at the time of the interviews (September 2009), had begun to question this inactivity, or at least to reflect on it. Some of the Uruguayan activists considered the need to start looking at social media such as Facebook and Twitter as means of disseminating the campaign, as these social networks were then becoming more popular. Some ACAG informants were not content with the limited interactivity on the website. They complained about missed opportunities for spreading protest action via social media. Some did not think it sufficed to publish comments, pictures, videos, illustrations, music, and documents sent by people via the website’s e-mail. They explained that this had not been possible due to, on the one hand, a lack of resources and, on the other, the particular character of the protest movement, as the movement defined itself through demonstrations, not online protests. Again, the fact that social media were becoming popular at this time, and that these activists were middle-aged, may explain their attitude to the use of various kinds of interactive, online platforms.
Civic Engagement and Media Practice
Activists’ Internet and mobile phone practices reflected how an understanding of the relationship between civic engagement and digital media depends upon factors such as type of organisation, age of activists involved, and their previous experience with more traditional forms of mobilisation, beyond access to digital technology. Although the activists interviewed had access to the Internet from the beginning of the period studied, and used it to formulate and disseminate their arguments in order to seek offline engagement, access new information and contact environmental organisations in other parts of the world, patterns of Internet-based media practices and understanding were nevertheless linked to factors such as type of organisation, age and the previous mobilisation experience.
Depending on the type of organisations activists viewed digital media use differently, either purely organisational versus personal in the case of NGOs activists, or as personal practice driven by the protest’s interest in the case of the grassroots activists. NGO activists viewed media practices as something belonging exclusively to the activities performed via the organisation. They made a clear distinction between their organisational and their personal digital media practices. NGO activists used the organisations’ channels to act in the name of the organisation. Personal digital media practices were not considered suitable for promoting the organisation’s activities or arguments. They separated them in this way:
The colleagues that worked more with the campaign had the task of representing REDES. This is an internal organisation issue. Even though I belong to REDES I cannot give personal opinions. (Man, REDES)
On the other hand, grassroots activists conceived media digital practices as something integral to both their participation in the ACAG and to their personal initiatives in relation to the movement. For instance, they all produced, post and re-post information on the movement, the protests and also on other environmental and social protests or organisations in the region. In addition, grassroots activists perceived digital media practices as something empowering, because it gave them the opportunity to contact individuals and organisations directly. Able to get in contact with journalists, experts and organisations grassroots activists felt they could make people or organisations accountable in regards to what they did or said on the media. Opportunities created by digital media gave them a sense of personal empowerment by giving them the chance to quiz experts, to make political officials and companies accountable for their decisions or arguments.
To those of us who are aware and have the time to devote to it, the Internet gives us the opportunity to act upon something. Not everybody does it but you can communicate directly with those who launch the news and demand that they prove what they are saying and if you do it by e-mail you know it’s written. (Man, ACAG)
The quality and political economy of Internet access also deem important, and even defining, for activists’ digital media practices. Access to the Internet either at work or at home and the speed of the connection were influential factors shaping the media practices of activists. The speed and cost of connections, not only among informants but also among people in general, shaped activists’ digital media practices. Text was preferable to images or videos. The use of images and videos was less significant and sporadic. Images and videos take more time to download and/or send than text, an important fact considering the varied quality and the high cost of the connections available. While the NGOs’ members had access to fast Internet connections at the office, members of the grassroots organisation had Internet access, of varying speed quality, and only at home. Often grassroots activists shared the connection with several neighbours in an informal arrangement that granted lower costs at the expense of speed. Only one of them had access to the organisation’s old computer installed in the organisation’s office, a room lent by the House of Culture in Gualeguaychú, part of the city’s municipality. The organisation’s e-mail account was organised via g-mail, from which, at that time, a maximum of 2000 e-mails could be sent per day. Slow connections and limited e-mail traffic played a role when one planned online mobilisations or the dissemination of information in general. When it came to mobilisation, other forms of communication (posters, car stickers, and face-to-face encounters) were also used to invite people to participate in the protest actions.
The type of organisation, either an established NGO or a grassroots movement, influenced the structure, content and strategy of their of activists’ digital media practices. Communication roles were performed and organised in different ways. NGOs had established criteria and greater resources (people, time, money) for the communication activities, including the digital output. The grassroots organisation relied mainly on voluntary work, and on individual decisions rather than on centrally structured group criteria when it comes to their communication activities. Each of the groups had one or two people in charge of communication: a full-time worker in the case of REDES and ACAG (their only paid position) and a part-time worker at Guayubira. While the NGO activists considered communication with the outside a collaborative effort, which should be communicated via the spokesperson of the organisation, the ‘asamblea’ had a more flexible view. Grassroots activists could, via the Internet or by mobile phone, communicate individually with mainstream media and other connected individuals. Their communications did not have to be coordinated with the rest of the organisation.
Another important factor was the age of the interviewed activists, which played a role in the kind of media practices that were perceived as appropriate and valuable for civic engagement activities. In a discussion of the new social movement for curbing climate change, for example, Castells notes: ‘Besides Indymedia, numerous hack labs, temporary or stable, populated the movement and used the superior technological savvy of the new generation to build and advantage in the communication battle against their elders in the mainstream media’ (Castells 2009, 344). In a more empirically based discussion of activists as interpretive communities, Rauch interviewed snowball-selected activists. She found that for the most part they were in their late teens and early twenties (Rauch 2007).
The average age of the activists involved in communication tasks in this movement was 41, with the youngest being 25 and the oldest being 57. Moreover, in terms of age, they were quite representative of their respective organisations. In my fieldwork, I observed that people working in the NGOs and those involved in the organisation of the ACAG’s protest activities were around 40 years of age. Furthermore, the informants confirmed these observations during the interviews. Interestingly, the exception was the many young people who participated in the actual protests organised by the ‘asamblea’. In effect, informants confirmed that young people showed their engagement by participating in the mobilisations organised by the older activists. However, these young people were absent from the actual organisation of the protests, discussions and weekly meetings. Informants believed this to have had an effect on the ways in which the Internet was used by the ACAG.
I realise that this technological battle (referring to young people’s use of Facebook and Twitter), this technological tool, was misused by us. Maybe there is time still. We have had a ‘young assembly’ but we haven’t been able to use it in this sense. It’s an immense and terrific tool. (Man, ACAG)
On the other hand, Guayubira and REDES informants defined their Internet and mobile phone practices in opposition to young people’s use of social media and in terms of civic participation styles. But contrary to ACAG informants, they did not perceive social media as an opportunity for furthering participation and agency among people. They considered Facebook a mere tool for distributing personal content and entertainment, and therefore underestimated the possibility of using Facebook for civic engagement. Traditional mobilisation patterns were still the norm, and the Uruguayan NGOs, more established and well trained in the arts of mobilisation in the countryside, simply did not see social media as an opportunity. They did not expect to reach the stakeholders they wished to influence, such as politicians and journalists, through social media, because at the time these were mainly perceived as a personal communicational arena used by young people, uninterested in environmental concerns or in politics in general.
From what I see of Facebook it is basically a way to transfer of personal information to public spaces. This has nothing to do with our activity, and it has nothing to do with anything substantial. It is a lot of people, knowing about other people, to what party they went, what they wore then, how much alcohol they drank, how many pictures they took, one million pictures. This is far from what Guayubira is. (Woman, Guayubira Group)
Digital media grew in importance among activists during the years to come. Even though they had different perspectives, informants shared an instrumentalist conception of digital media practices, which they considered suitable primarily for one-way communication. They associated websites, newsletters, and e-mails with a form of information transfer taking place between them and others under more controlled and ‘serious’ forms. Social media was associated with young people and not related as much to traditional forms of civic engagement or modes of protest. It is worth noting that social media were becoming popular in 2008. However, this is insufficient to explain informants’ assessment. Rather, it illustrates how they understood their digital media practices in terms of different styles of civic engagement. Interviews with members of the grassroots organisation suggest that the relationship between civic engagement and digital media was in the process of becoming a more ‘social’ form of networking, while NGO members had a more traditional one-way view on their digital media practices.
Conclusion
The relation between environmental movements and digital media in non-Western media systems, such as the Southern Cone, changes with the emergence of new informational circumstances that give citizens and civil society organisations greater access to digital media that enables them to reach fellow citizens often, while bypassing mainstream media. During this long-standing protest, a combination of digital media practices enabled the formulation of arguments on the activists’ terms and the exchange and dissemination of these among activists and other citizens and environmental organisations, both locally and globally. Although its organisation and dissemination were aided by the use of online platforms and networking, physical mobilisation was central to the protest. Despite the fact that these countries have the highest Internet use in Latin America, activists relied primerely on a well-tested and widely used form of mobilisation in the region: the blockade. This may be due to the fact that the majority of activists were middle-aged, and that some of them were well trained in traditional forms of activism.
Overall, this case helps raise some theoretical points about digital media and protest in non-Western contexts. Firstly, environmental concerns may, in societies where the environment ranks low on political and media agendas, be formulated in political and economic rather than environmental terms. The formulation of environmental concerns in more familiar and successful discursive frames is an attempt to facilitate their acceptance among citizens and their inclusion in the mainstream media, which implies wider public awareness. When presenting demands or describing actions in their digital media output, all the organisations under study utilised political and economic, rather than environmental, lines of argumentation. The environmental frame was not the preferred way of presenting the protest discursively on activist websites. The activists’ attempts to make visible the environmental problems inherent to the pulp industry and forest monoculture, and to contribute to the expansion of public debate on the subject, were kept entirely within political and economic frames in their media output.
Secondly, the structure of the organisation and contextual mobilisation traditions, as well as the age of the activists, play a significant role in determining how digital media are conceived and used, in particular in the case of protest practices that involve social media or other interactive online platforms. The more structured NGOs strove towards the creation of one-way, unique and coordinated content that represented the organisation. These organisations put limits on individual expressions of engagement, in particular those involving interactivity. Individualised and interactive forms of activism tend to flourish, this case suggests, within loosely knit organisations like grassroots movements rather than in highly structured organisations such as established environmental NGOs. The leaderless grassroots movement allowed more room for activists to engage in social media and interactive online platforms, individually and without consulting the organisation. They were positive about participation in social media and different interactive online platforms, although they rarely used them. Age was a defining factor here, as older activists did not feel comfortable engaging openly in social media. To them the social media were unknown terrain which they would enter into without the aide of younger, more knowledgeable activists. Rich mobilisation traditions and practices were enhanced by digital media, not substituted by them, even though Argentina and Uruguay have the best Internet and mobile phone access in Latin America.
Thirdly, the relationship between activists’ online media and national news media is linked to the national authorities’ positioning on the matter in question, as this has implications for the online output of activists. Uruguayan NGOs did not have access to news media, as these echoed the voice of governmental authorities on the subject of pulp mills and forest monoculture. Instead, the NGOs strove to produce and disseminate information and arguments via digital media channels, this being the only way to reach fellow citizens. On the other hand, members of the grassroots organisation, who benefited from the Argentinean government’s positive attitude to the protest, had plenty of opportunities to express themselves in local and national media, mainly about the blockade. In other words, national media were perceived, both by NGOs and by grassroots activists, as the most powerful vehicle for increasing awareness about the protest because a wider range of people could be reached that way than through online, user-generated media. In the absence of mainstream media coverage, in the case of Uruguay, and with only event-related information, in the case of Argentina, the background and contextualising framing of the protest were made available mainly through online activist-generated content. Activists used political and economic arguments rather than environmental ones in their quest to gain public attention where they expected a concrete outcome. | textbooks/socialsci/Communication/Journalism_and_Mass_Communication/The_Environment_in_the_Age_of_the_Internet_(Graf)/1.02%3A_The_Environment_in_Disguise-_Insurgency_and_Digital_Media_in_the_Southern_Cone.txt |
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