Beyond Journalism. Mark Deuze

Beyond Journalism - Mark  Deuze


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reference point). We would like to consider the differences that truly make a difference, and recognize new or emerging voices as legitimate participants in setting the discourse about what journalism is, can, and should be.

      Scholars and educators tend to respond to this shift in two ways. One is to rally the troops, close ranks, and put significant effort in bringing coherence and stability (back) to the field. This gets established by producing impressive handbooks, canonical anthologies, readers, and companion volumes (and corresponding special issues of scholarly journals and conferences). Empirical approaches in this tradition center on comprehensive surveys and content analyses of journalists and journalism based on narrow definitions of the news industry offering conclusions about what journalism is and who journalists are (see Willnat, Weaver, and Choi 2013; Hanitzsch et al. 2011; Hellmueller and Mellado 2015).

      In this intervention we bring together these approaches to move beyond journalism, allowing for not so much a redefinition but a more inclusive appreciation and understanding of the field that in turn grounds the multiple case study approach in our work for this book. In doing so, our work sides with a growing number of interventions in the field to open up and consider complexity and hybridity; it aims to expand our toolkit to make sense of journalism and its role in society.

      As Montuori (2003: 543) notes about writing in the academic genre, it is “easier to leave all the personal, ambiguous, contextual material out. It is ultimately easier, I believe, to present just the context of justification, and leave out the messy context of discovery – or creation.” Indeed, both of us have found it a “tremendous creative challenge to be more transparent, to be more fully present” (ibid.) in this work, and though we both embrace this, what you will find here is only a partial answer to this challenge. We consider this book as a stepping-stone toward a more transparent, personal, and creative way of researching and writing about our field of study.

      From this broad perspective, we outline how journalism is not nearly as consistent nor homogeneous as it is made out to be, and focus instead on providing stories of journalism that show the multiple, seemingly contradictory (self-) understandings, activities, values, and emotions that are part of the professional practice of journalism. In the subsequent chapters we operationalize this approach by focusing on those reporters, editors, and associated staffers who make up the countless startups, new media companies, editorial collectives, and other forms of small enterprises that are emerging all over the world. These are journalists who, as pioneer communities, give shape to the profession in all kinds of ways, deliberately and self-reflexively, a process that we document with a sense of wonder. How do they make it work, what does it take to strike out on your own like that, what does journalism mean to them, and what is the price they pay for their endeavors?

      There is no neat summary and conclusion at the end of this book. We do not have a list of tips and tricks for how to be successful as a news startup and a journalism entrepreneur. We have opted to focus on particularity rather than imposing some kind of consistency or uniformity onto the data, onto our subjects. Throughout the book we have added short vignettes highlighting and profiling specific initiatives and people that we found inspiring or remarkable. These are people who made us think twice before labeling them in order to fit some preconceived notion of being a journalist or an entrepreneur. Ultimately, we hope the Beyond Journalism project, as initially outlined in this book, opens


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