Brian Creech

Imagining the Journalist of the Future: Technological Visions of Journalism Education and Newswork

Digitization has resulted in great uncertainty for journalism, leading to disruption of business models, revenue streams, media distinctions, and production practices. This uncertainty has led to many articles, reports, blog posts, and general commentary discussing the future of both journalism and the skills required by journalists to succeed in this environment. This essay analyzes these discourses, focusing specifically on the nature of technology as the sole determiner of journalism’s future, with interventions aimed at journalism education and the structure of newswork. An idealized notion of the technologically adept journalist, ready to usher in digital stability, emerges as the object of these debates and, thanks in large part to the limited scope and ahistorical character of digital discourse, obscures more persistent, systemic critiques of technology and journalism.

Post-industrial fog: Reconsidering innovation in visions of journalism’s future

As US news organizations have faced twin crises in funding and authority in recent years, innovation has become a key concept and ideal driving many interventions aimed at saving journalism. Often, ahistorically and uncritically deployed notions of innovation elide questions of digital journalism’s democratic aspirations in favor of market-oriented solutions. To critically examine the discourse around innovation, this article interrogates documents produced by think tanks and non-profit institutes researching the future of journalism: the Knight Foundation, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, Harvard’s Nieman Foundation, and the Shorenstein Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, among others. A post-industrial vision for journalism emerges with an overriding and celebratory focus on innovation. We argue that this discourse marginalizes normative concerns about journalism’s democratic purpose and rests on an entrepreneurial logic that seeks to dictate digital journalism’s broader public virtues.

Disciplines of truth: The ‘Arab Spring’, American journalistic practice, and the production of public knowledge

This essay posits American journalism as a particular realm of public knowledge production, inflected with its own professional practices as well as the way in which those practices subjugate technologies of representation. Taking the Arab Spring of 2011 as a case study in journalistic knowledge production, this article analyzes three epistemological conditions underscoring the Arab Spring’s development as an object of knowledge: the use of social media tools within the practice of journalism, the representational authority of the individual reporter, and the articulation of journalistic knowledge to broader institutions of liberal democratic power. While these are by no means the only possible themes of investigation, by looking at how journalistic practices rendered the Arab Spring sensible and worthy of public consideration, this essay hopes to reveal them as temporally and technologically contingent, but also linked to the values of liberal democracy that undergird journalism’s role in American public life.

Make Every Frame Count

This paper presents a case study of the possibilities of slow photojournalism. Over the past decade, award-winning photojournalist David Burnett has used a 60-year-old Speed Graphic film camera to document US political events, several Olympic Games, and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, among other projects. His photographs reveal a significantly different aesthetic from contemporary photojournalism and he is celebrated for the perspective his analog photographs offer. This analysis is based on two points of examination: first, a textual analysis of articles and videos discussing the work; and second, a semiotic analysis of the imagery. The examination suggests Burnett’s photo aesthetic signifies a longing for an imagined analog, journalistic utopia of yore, where individual journalists had the time and freedom to put care and attention into their work.

Digital representation and Occupy Wall Street’s challenge to political subjectivity

This article considers the ways in which practices of digital representation were deployed in the Occupy Wall Street movement, arguing that acts of self-representation render intelligible not just the politics of a movement like Occupy Wall Street but also make sensible the relations of power such projects are immersed within. Building upon the notion that the specific power of the movement was exercised via a situated understanding of representation, this essay investigates how a digitally mediated sensibility made the broader critiques at the core of the Occupy movement not only intelligible to those inside and outside the movement but also offered a mode of subject constitution that pushed against liberal notions of political subjectivity.

“A Measure of Theory?”: Considering the Role of Theory in Media History

“Does journalism history matter?,” communications historian John Nerone recently asked American Journalism readers.1 After grappling with the rhetorical question, he concluded that journalism history should matter a great deal to journalists, historians, and social scientists alike. Indeed, it should matter to anyone interested in the role of media in society. But alas, if one were to look at the impact factors of media history journals, one might argue that the impact of journalism history is negligible—that we matter only marginally, if at all.2 The solution to restoring our relevance, Nerone suggests, is to engage in a more theoretical approach that considers the relationship between the past and the present.3 We agree, but herein lies the predicament, our greatest challenge. Journalism historians, like their brethren in traditional history departments, have always had a tenuous relationship with theory. In fact, the notion that good history should be devoid of theory has its roots in the discipline’s founding. That story, of course, has been well documented, on several occasions by Nerone himself, but it is worth briefly retelling here.4 It goes

A newsmaker’s tool: The 35mm camera and journalism’s material epistemology

As devices become a more visible and integral part of media practice, it is important for researchers and scholars to attend to the ways in which philosophies, professional discourses, and technical limits structure the ways these technologies are deployed. The 35mm camera is a technological waypoint between earlier large-format cameras and contemporary digital photography and offers a useful historical example for interrogating the relationship between seemingly inert technical operations and journalism’s modes of meaning production. To that end, this article offers a theoretical perspective for interrogating the 35mm camera through the lens of Latour, with the aim of developing a schema for integrating devices into the cultural study of media and communication.

Reading News as Narrative

Scholars who use textual approaches to study news often blend theoretical perspectives in their work, asking some combination of questions about how news narratives function culturally, how news narratives are produced, and how news narratives are situated epistemologically. These perspectives often lead to compelling insights, and this article argues that a more fully fleshed-out approach to genre in journalism studies offers a robust means for contextualizing a wide array of theoretical concerns. Methodologically, attention to the textual conventions of a genre helps scholars attend to news narratives as both the products of standardized journalistic routines and evidence of broader cultural forces at play, cultural forces that rely upon journalism’s implicit authority over the truth. This article lays out guidelines for performing genre analysis while also offering examples for potential future studies.

Nostalgic environmentalities in the EPA’s Documerica and State of the Environment projects

This article argues that environmental citizenship, understood as sustainable forms of consumption, is increasingly constructed through visual regimes of nostalgia for both pristine wilderness and an era of unfettered resource extraction. Drawing on the linkages between survey photography, popular constructions of nature, and nostalgia, it takes the Environmental Protection Agency’s Documerica and State of the Environment projects as opportunities to understand how depictions of the environment reinforce contemporary notions of sustainability. As the predominant discourse guiding environmentality, or the governance of our relationships with the non-human world, sustainability relies on scientific knowledges in order to harmonize economic growth, population health, and ecologies. To do so, sustainability draws on the power of media to encourage forms of consumption that might indefinitely perpetuate capitalist economies at the expense of the non-human world. Analysis of the images of small-town life, extraction industries, and pollution, as well as seemingly pristine wilderness in Documerica and State of the Environment demonstrates how these projects draw on widespread nostalgias in order to reinforce notions about sustainable modes of consumption and perpetual industrial growth. This article subsequently shows how the circulation of survey photographs harnesses the camera’s nostalgic lens in the service of contemporary environmentalities.

Bearing the cost to witness: the political economy of risk in contemporary conflict and war reporting:

As journalistic work has become increasingly precarious in recent decades, exposure to risk – that is, true bodily harm – has become a normalized condition for those reporting from conflict zones. This article considers the political economy of risk, paying particular attention to the ways it has been constructed as a desirable and manageable condition for various classes of news workers. The burden of risk is distributed unequally across staff reporters, freelancers, and non-Western local journalists of all stripes, and a persistent discourse of witnessing obscures both these inequities and the structural conditions that allow news organizations to profit from an increased assumption of individual risk. As structural conditions, individual mitigations, and practices of textual commodification are considered and critiqued, the article concludes by identifying specific strategies that push beyond an economic logic, and thus reassert the cultural and political value of conflict and war reporting as a practice that merits protection, regardless of who produces it. Such a critique focuses on developing the discursive tools that allow journalists and outside observers alike to ask ‘who should bear the costs of witnessing?’