Cw Anderson

Between creative and quantified audiences: Web metrics and changing patterns of newswork in local US newsrooms

How are transformations in newswork intersecting with changes in the monitoring of reader behavior and new technologies of audience measurement? How, in short, are journalistic ‘visions of the audience’ shifting in the online era, and how are they enabling particular editorial practices? This article explores a provocative tension between the now common rhetorical invocation of the news audience as a ‘productive and generative’ entity, and the simultaneous, increasingly common institutional reduction of the audience to a quantifiable, rationalizable, largely consumptive aggregate. The first half of article reviews the literature on the relationship between audience understanding and newsroom practices. The second half of the article is comprised of an ethnographic analysis of the manner by which increasingly prominent and widespread techniques of audience measurement and quantification interact with the newsroom rhetoric of the active, generative audience. The article concludes with some thoughts regarding the role played by audience quantification and rationalization in shifting newswork practices. It argues that the underlying rhetoric of the active audience can be seen as laying the groundwork for a vision of the professional reporter that is less autonomous in his or her news decisions and increasingly reliant on audience metrics as a supplement to news judgment.

Post-Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present

Introduction: The Transformation of American Journalism Is UnavoidableThis paper is part survey and part manifesto, one that concerns itself with the practice of journalism and the practices of journalists in the United States. It is not, however, about the future of the news industry, both because much of that future is already here and because there is no such thing as the news industry anymore.There used to be one, held together by the usual things that hold an industry together: similarity of methods among a relatively small and coherent group of businesses, and an inability for anyone outside that group to produce a competitive product. Those conditions no longer hold true.If you wanted to sum up the past decade of the news ecosystem in a single phrase, it might be this: Everybody suddenly got a lot more freedom. The newsmakers, the advertisers, the startups, and, especially, the people formerly known as the audience have all been given new freedom to communicate, narrowly and broadly, outside the old strictures of the broadcast and publishing models. The past 15 years have seen an explosion of new tools and techniques, and, more importantly, new assumptions and expectations, and these changes have wrecked the old clarity.Theres no way to look at organizations as various as the Texas Tribune, SCOTUSblog and Front Porch Forum or such platforms as Facebook, YouTube and Storify and see anything like coherence. Theres no way to look at new experiments in nonprofit journalism like Andy Carvins work at NPR during the Arab Spring and convince yourself that journalism is securely in the hands of for-profit businesses. And theres no way to look at experiments in funding journalism via Kickstarter, or the coverage of protest movements via mobile phone, and convince yourself that making information public can be done only by professionals and institutions.Many of the changes talked about in the last decade as part of the future landscape of journalism have already taken place; much of journalisms imagined future is now its lived-in present. (As William Gibson noted long ago, The future is already here. Its just unevenly distributed.) Our goal is to write about what has already happened and what is happening today, and what we can learn from it, rather than engaging in much speculation.The effect of the current changes in the news ecosystem has already been a reduction in the quality of news in the United States. On present evidence, we are convinced that journalism in this country will get worse before it gets better, and, in some places (principally midsize and small cities with no daily paper) it will get markedly worse. Our hope is to limit the scope, depth and duration of that decay by pointing to ways to create useful journalism using tools, techniques and assumptions that werent even possible 10 years ago.We also highlight the ways new possibilities for journalism require new forms of organization. Traditional news organizations have tended to conserve both working methods and hierarchy, even as the old business models are collapsing, and even when new opportunities do not fit in those old patterns. In interview after interview with digitally focused members of the traditional press, the theme of being thwarted by process came up. Adapting to a world where the people formerly known as the audience are not readers and viewers but users and publishers will mean changing not just tactics but also self-conception. Merely bolting on a few new techniques will not be enough to adapt to the changing ecosystem; taking advantage of access to individuals, crowds and machines will mean changing organizational structure as well. (We recognize that many existing organizations will regard these recommendations as anathema.)This paper is written for multiple audiences - traditional news organizations interested in adapting as well as new entrants (whether individual journalists, news startups or organizations not previously part of the journalistic ecosystem) - and those organizations and entities that affect the news ecosystem, particularly governments and journalism schools, but also businesses and nonprofits. …

Data Journalism in the United States

Understanding the phenomenon of data journalism requires an examination of this emerging practice not just within organizations themselves, but across them, at the inter-institutional level. Using a semi-structured interview approach, we begin to map the emerging computational journalistic field. We find considerable variety among data journalists in terms of their educational backgrounds, skills, tools and goals. However, many of them face similar struggles, such as trying to define their roles within their organizations and managing scarce resources. Our cross-organizational approach allows for comparisons with similar studies in Belgium, Sweden, and Norway. The common thread in these studies is that the practice of data journalism is stratified. Divisions exist in some countries between resource-rich and resource-poor organizations and in other countries between the realm of discourse and the realm of practice.

Journalistic Networks and the Diffusion of Local News: The Brief, Happy News Life of the “Francisville Four”

Through a combination of network ethnography and more traditional, qualitative newsroom analysis, this article undertakes a step-by-step analysis of the circulation of a particular set of news facts—those relating to the eviction and arrest of a group of homeowners in Philadelphia during a single week in June 2008, a time period in which the story of the arrests emerged, exploded, and then quickly faded away. The article discusses some of the larger explanatory factors that might have contributed to the particular pattern of news diffusion described here, as well as the degree to which the factors observed might be generalizable across other cases. The article adds local nuance to Benklers (2006) description of information circulation in the networked public sphere, pointing to a pattern of iterative pyramiding in which key Web sites positioned within highly particular communities of interest act as bridges to larger, more diffused digital communities. The article also argues that news movement in the particular incident discussed can be characterized by an unusual combination of fact-entrepreneurship and a process of categorical misrecognition in which the circulation dynamics of the networked news ecosystem are leveraged by institutional and quasi-institutional communicative actors to advance particular occupational and professional goals, all the while misrecognizing both the identity and goals of the other nodes in the Philadelphia media sphere. Overall, the article serves as a preliminary attempt to outline the changing architecture of local journalism ecologies during a period of rapid news industry.

What aggregators do: Towards a networked concept of journalistic expertise in the digital age

This article analyzes expertise in the digital age through an ethnography of an increasingly valorized form of newswork – ‘serious, old fashioned reporting’ – and its purported occupational opposite, news aggregation. The article begins with a content analysis of the 4 March 2010 Federal Communications Commission workshop in which journalists tried to draw a sharp boundary between reporting and aggregation. In the second section the article explores the actual hybridized practices of journalistic aggregation. The empirical investigation serves as a scaffolding on which to build a theory of digital expertise that sees the nature and struggle over that expertise as networked properties. Expertise, according to the argument advanced in the final section, is neither a fixed property that can be ‘claimed’, nor is it simply the inevitable outcome of a clear occupational struggle over a particular jurisdiction. Specifically, the networks examined here coalesce around different conceptions of ‘what counts’ as a valid form of journalistic evidence under conditions of digitization.

Objects of journalism and the news

This article provides an overview of what an “object-oriented” approach to journalism studies might look like, based on a survey of articles collected for this special issue on journalism and materiality. We argue that focusing on the objects of journalism, rather than limiting or trivial, can provide scholars with insights into the social, material, and cultural context that suffuses our technologically obsessed world. The article pushes back against a dominant perspective in the Actor-Network Theory literature that sees the major value of that theory in studying technological innovation, calling instead for a theoretical approach open to questions of historical change, power, and symbolic practices.

Between the Unique and the Pattern

This article proposes that the underlying ideas of data journalism are not new, but rather can be traced back in history and align with larger questions about the role of quantification in journalistic practice. This article sketches out a theoretical frame (assemblage theory) in which quantitative journalism is best understood by examining the objects of evidence that journalism mobilizes on its behalf. The article illustrates this perspective by outlining three historical tensions in notions of quantitative journalism: tensions between records and reports, individuality and social science, and isolated facts and broader patterns.

The Sage Handbook of Digital Journalism

The production and consumption of news in the digital era is blurring the boundaries between professionals, citizens and activists. Actors producing information are multiplying, but still media companies hold central position. Journalism research faces important challenges to capture, examine, and understand the current news environment. The SAGE Handbook of Digital Journalism starts from the pressing need for a thorough and bold debate to redefine the assumptions of research in the changing field of journalism. The 38 chapters, written by a team of global experts, are organised into four key areas: Section A: Changing Contexts Section B: News Practices in the Digital Era Section C: Conceptualizations of Journalism Section D: Research Strategies By addressing both institutional and non-institutional news production and providing ample attention to the question ‘who is a journalist?’ and the changing practices of news audiences in the digital era, this Handbook shapes the field and defines the roadmap for the research challenges that scholars will face in the coming decades.

Social survey reportage: Context, narrative, and information visualization in early 20th century American journalism

This article takes a historical approach to the analysis of changes in the gathering and display of documents and data by journalists. It stands as an attempt to tease out the underlying epistemological changes implied by these transformations. The transition from the 19th to the 20th century would see the rise of the so-called survey movement, itself tied to the emergence of the progressive movement and concomitant with the growth of new techniques for collecting and visualizing social data. Alongside the emergence of the social survey, and oddly related to it in a number of intriguing ways, this time period would also see the invention of public relations as a technique of press management. To this end, this article chronicles the social movement known as the ‘Men and Religion Forward Movement’, discussing its pioneering combination of data collection, information display, and aggressive publicity strategies in service of the cause of social reform. The article examines the materiality of the Men and Religion Forward Movement’s information collection procedures, its charts, graphs, and other display devices, and the processes by which these ‘representations of the collective’ did or did not manifest themselves in newspaper coverage of the movement.

Dealing with the mess (we made): Unraveling hybridity, normativity, and complexity in journalism studies:

In this article, we discuss the rise and use of the concept of hybridity in journalism studies. Hybridity afforded a meaningful intervention in a discipline that had the tendency to focus on a stabilized and homogeneous understanding of the field. Nonetheless, we now need to reconsider its deployment, as it only partially allows us to address and understand the developments in journalism. We argue that if scholarship is to move forward in a productive manner, we need, rather than denote everything that is complex as hybrid, to develop new approaches to our object of study. Ultimately, this is an open invitation to the field to adopt experientialist, practice-based approaches that help us overcome the ultimately limited binary dualities that have long governed our theoretical and empirical work in the field.