Beyond Journalism. Mark Deuze
diverse, and creative journalism practices. This book can be considered to be both a manifesto and an empirical description of part of the field of journalism. We aim to get journalism studies beyond journalism studies by showing how journalism is beyond (what we have predominantly defined as) journalism. Moving beyond does not – cannot – entail a full divorce from what came before. That which we counter grows from the same intellectual soil that we come from (Ortega y Gasset 1967: 73–4). As José Ortega y Gasset (1967: 74) points out, any creative thought is “shaped in opposition to some other thought, which we believe erroneous, fallacious, and needful of correction.” So, that which we argue against in this book is what at this “particular moment looms above our soil” for us, but our roots are from the same soil, and this book is as much homage to as critique of the very field that we grew up in. And we know that we keep it alive by writing this book as well: as Ortega y Gasset goes on to say, the “adversary is never an ineffectual past: it is always contemporary and seemingly vestigial.” We hope to add as much as transform, and in doing so our actions as academics mirror those of the journalists profiled in this book, especially their hopes and aspirations to both contribute to as well as change journalism.
Telling new stories
Our aim then is not to erase our “adversary”; it is not even to combat it. Our aim is to complement and impact the field through telling stories – stories that are somewhat different from those told in mainstream journalism studies not only because of our object of study, our focus on the affective nature of newswork, but also in terms of style. As pointed out by Roberta Štěpánková (2015: 313), we may ask at some point in our academic lives: “Is my storytelling right?” As she reminds us: “there are no ‘correct’ stories, just multiple stories.” This is our attempt to be part of a growing movement among scholars as well as practitioners to make space for different kinds of stories.
We do so by focusing on a particular group of journalists: journalists who are involved in starting up (or who are in the process of setting up) small news companies outside the legacy media. These startup journalists can be seen as pioneers in the field. Pioneering communities are, in Andreas Hepp’s terms, “experimental groupings related to new forms of media-technology-related change and collectivity formation” (2016: 920). Pioneering communities “have a sense of mission” and have “a sense that they are at the ‘forefront’ of a media-related transformation of society as a whole” (Hepp 2016: 924–5). This is very much the case with the startup journalists and organizational contexts we have visited. These newsworkers are keenly aware of the role that they play, not only in society, but also in defining what journalism is as it charts new territory in the twenty-first century. This reflexivity is also something that Hepp refers to as characteristic of pioneering communities, “since they are engaged in a continual process of interpretation of themselves” (2016: 927). Furthermore, the spaces and places our cases use to facilitate their work are varied, constituting a range of pioneering and innovative practices. Oscar Westlund and Seth Lewis (2014) rightly consider “agents of media innovation” not just the individual professionals and communities involved, but also the role technologies, working environments, and other nonhuman actors play. By focusing on this group of journalists and their working arrangements and environments, we are able to add valuable stories of those in the field who are looking to contribute to the conceptualization of what journalism is. Moreover, in our analysis we are focusing on those stories and narratives that attest to the affective nature of the profession, providing much-needed emotional context for the question how these pioneers make it work on their own.
Our project recognizes an overall historical phase, where journalism worldwide is in a process of becoming a different kind of industry: less reliant on legacy news organizations, producing a great variety of contents and services, published across multiple platforms by practitioners in all kinds of formal and informal ways. This phase roughly coincides with the rise of new technologies (notably internet, smartphones, and various forms of automation), the shift of nation-based politics toward more complex supranational relations (as well as its return under the guise of populism), and a rapid glocalization of social, cultural, and economic affairs. The news industry, in response to such changes and challenges, has generally sought answers in consolidating its core business and streamlining existing operations. This meant laying off employees (including many journalists) and cutting budgets. The budgets for exploratory innovation projects, specialized beats (such as science reporting), and a range of correspondents were all trimmed. Journalism was once mostly organized in formal institutions where contracted laborers would produce content under informal yet highly structured working conditions generally arranged within the physical environment of a newsroom. Today the lived experience of professional journalists is much more precarious, fragmented, and networked.
Our starting point is that journalism is much more than its traditional definition: an activity operationally coupled with institutions of newswork. The boundaries between journalism and other forms of public communication – public relations, marketing, and corporate communication to the (generally unpaid) practices of mass self-communication online (via weblogs, videoblogs and podcasts, or simply through posts on social media) – are porous and often meaningless, particularly for media users. The digital environment has blurred the once clear distinction between the various phases of the news production process – including the gathering, verifying, reporting, editing, designing, distributing, publicizing, and promoting of information. This digital environment also sees a disruption of the unity of production, content, and distribution within each separate medium in favor of the development of new storytelling formats across multiple media (e.g. transmedia), new ways of delivering the news (increasingly via mobile and social media), and most significantly new ways of being a journalist. All of these developments require us to tell new stories about journalism: what it is, how it can be practiced, and what roles it plays in communities.
With Joep Cornelissen (2017: 369), we argue that any field of studies is generally “best served by a combination of styles of theorizing and the different explanatory programmes associated with them, so that different questions get asked and different modes of knowing sit alongside each other in a complementary fashion.” Both of us feel that the dominant tools of researching and telling stories in journalism studies are too restricted. Content analyses of high-profile national newspapers (and sometimes television newscasts) and surveys among journalists working in the newsrooms of legacy media organizations tell part of the story. Dominant theories such as news values, framing and agenda-setting, and journalism professionalization are necessary but limited. We question the lack of inclusivity of the diversity of voices heard in the field – as local, community, grassroots, minority, and independent media organizations tend to be all too often ignored in both journalism studies and education. The socialization effect of the dominant ways of thinking and writing about our object of study may mean that “particular ways of knowing” become suppressed (Cornelissen 2017: 370). The corresponding homogeneity in the field “has the potential to undermine variety, novelty, and innovation in research” (Corbett et al. 2014: 4). Although this homogenization can have benefits, providing a common ground for engaging in academic discussion of issues across diverse regions, for example, this move to conformity also has the potential to undermine creativity and the widest possible range of insights.
This is not to say there is no diversity in journalism studies. In fact, quite the opposite could be argued: the field has proliferated, opening up plentiful ways to investigate, theorize, and rethink journalism. Interestingly, the response to this diversification has largely been to test the merits of any novel or innovative approach against the dominant model and mode of journalism, which in effect colonized the intervention, making it subject to the rules established at the center.
Our aim is to tell new stories, and expand our storytelling format (what we choose to tell our stories about) as well as what we understand journalism to be. Much like William Gartner’s ambition for organization studies, we are not interested in providing a “one best way” model for journalism, as we are much more interested in highlighting the “need for mid-range theories that reflect contingent relationships” (1993: 236). Like Gartner, we are interested in specificities rather than generalities in the field at this stage. The field tends to understand journalism through a framework that suggests a homogenous