Chris Paterson

The efficacy of professional experience in the ethnographic investigation of production

ABSTRACT This article addresses the general problem of gaining access to media production settings for ethnographic research, and discusses evidence that professional media production experience in the field of study is increasingly becoming an essential criterion in gaining access for long-term ethnographic investigations. The question of prior experience further relates closely to the classic quandary of participant observation versus ‘pure’ observation of media production. The authors explore dilemmas posed by a decrease in scholarly distance, such as the potential loss of objectivity and an increased researcher effect due to intimacy with research subjects. The article reflects on the authors’ experiences as ethnographic researchers and former practitioners and the extent to which prior professional experience facilitated or inhibited ethnographic investigation as well as on the views and comments of contemporary media production researchers informally surveyed by the authors.

Beyond the Information Scandal: When South Africa bought into global news

Abstract South Africas Information Scandal brought to light the extent to which the government tried to change popular perceptions through the manipulation of the press. South Africas ‘Propaganda War’ began in 1972, at a time when the political, economic and social landscape was volatile and unpredictable – something the apartheid government hoped to better control by spending great sums on influencing negative press coverage and portraying a positive image of the country internationally. This article provides an historical account of the relationship between the South African Department of Information and UPITN (the then second largest television news distribution agency), and seeks to provide answers to questions about the influence of the government on the content distributed by the news agency during the period of ownership.

The manufacture of an international news event: The day Kosovo was born

When the new country of Kosovo declared its independence in 2008 it received extensive, but fleeting, international news coverage. This study seeks to provide insight into how an international news event was orchestrated by participants and how news coverage was planned and implemented by international media. We do so by investigating factors initiating, enabling, shaping, and limiting the global news coverage of this story. Particular attention is paid to the close relationship between local ‘fixers’ and media representatives, which is instrumental in most international news coverage, but which has received little scholarly examination; and to the influential role of the UK-based international television news agencies.

The new frontiers of journalism: citizen participation in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands

The pervasiveness of the Internet in society has led to much speculation about its consequences for journalism and, more generally, the political engagement of citizens. While there have been some dramatic changes for journalists and professional news organizations as a result of technological developments, it is the discussion around participation of the non-professional in the journalistic process that has moved to the fore. In this light, Deuze, Bruns and Neuberger contend that ‘digital and networked journalism in whatever shape or form must be seen as a praxis that is not exclusively tied to salaried work or professional institutions anymore’ (2007, p. 323). As free and easy-to-use online publishing has significantly lowered the threshold for participation in public communication, people without access to printing presses or television networks have started to engage in distributing information in all possible flavours over the Internet.

Production Research: Continuity and Transformation

At the heart of this book is the question: how well do we understand the institutions which create our media, our information, and our culture? Rather than seeking to reveal the substantially hidden world of cultural production (as many works cited in this introductory chapter do well), this anthology explores many of the contemporary challenges to understanding the nature of cultural production—considering the research process, rather than research findings. By doing so, we hope to encourage researchers to push the boundaries of production research beyond the traditional (but still very necessary) ‘newsroom observation’ in order to expand production research across boundaries of genre and medium, to liberally borrow theory and method across previously rigid disciplinary borders, and to confront new challenges which threaten to insulate the creation of media and culture from rigorous independent examination.

War Reporters Under Threat: The United States and Media Freedom

Preface 1. A Hidden War on the Media 2. The Culture of Press Intolerance: Collaboration and Suppression 3. Patterns of Violence: The Media Installation and the Media Worker Part 1: Escalation Part 2: Expansion of Anti-Press Violence 4. Media Response 5. Legality 6. Invisible Conflict? Appendix I: A Chronology of Attacks on Media Facilities and Personnel Linked to US Government Media Facilities Appendix II: Media Safety / Media Freedom Organisations Notes Index

Participatory journalism in Mozambique

This small case study addresses the phenomenon of participatory, non-professional and non-commercial informational communications in Mozambique, where, during social unrest in 2008, a popular blog – which is not primarily journalistic in nature – was alimented with eye-witness reporting by mobile phone calls and SMS (text messages) from a network of citizen journalists throughout the country. The blog – Diario de um sociologo [Diary of a Sociologist] – was the best (indeed, in many cases the only) available source of information about the protests and the violent state response to them, whereas established local and international media provided little coverage and tended to offer reporting deeply influenced by the official accounts (which had an interest in minimising and ridiculing protests instigated by government policies). This research expands on the experience of one of the authors as a user, while resident in Maputo, of that blog.

Book Review: Capital, State, Empire: The New American Way of Digital Warfare:

Scott Timcke’s Capital, State, Empire: The New American Way of Digital Warfare is a prodigious deployment of classical Marxism to examine the machinations of contemporary American empire (yes, all of them). While he ranges far, his central theme is the relationship of capital to forms of constraint: the ways that human labour is increasingly ‘unfree’ (although he fails to build from Sen’s (2001), seminal concept of ‘unfreedom’). In its most extreme, contemporary capitalism thrives on the sweatshops of Southeast Asia or suicide-inducing technology factories of China, while across the world those same capitalist enterprises suppress and confound the possibility of proletariat class consciousness. A free labour – where people have choice and a possibility of wealth accumulation – inexorably shifts towards unfree forms. He points to the new billionaire classes of Internet entrepreneurs who ‘seek to induce disruptions and efficiencies with little regard for anything other than profit’. Echoing Fuchs’ (2009) theorization of the ‘Internet gift economy’, he continues,

Journalism and Foreign Aid in Africa

ABSTRACT This essay introduces the Special Issue. The authors briefly survey the contemporary and complex relationship between aid and journalism and the role of foreign aid/development assistance in shaping African media systems. A call is made for greater research into the aid and journalism relationship and the impact these processes have on fostering independent national media sectors in Africa.

The Ethnography of Digital Journalism

This chapter examines the role ethnographic research has played in shaping contemporary understandings of journalism and discusses how it may be deployed to understand the digitalization of journalism.