Donald Matheson

Weblogs and the Epistemology of the News: Some Trends in Online Journalism:

Journalism has been slow to develop distinctive forms in response to the new contexts provided by the internet. One rapidly developing form, unique to the world wide web, is the weblog. This article reviews the claims made by proponents of the form and explores, through the case study of a weblog produced by the British Guardian newspaper, epistemological differences to the dominant Anglo-American news form. The article argues that the rearticulation in this institutional product of the relation between journalists and users, of the claim to authority made in the news text and of the news text as product, provides historians of both journalism and new media with a case study of the adaptation of journalism to new contexts.

The birth of news discourse: changes in news language in British newspapers, 1880-1930

This article examines some changes in news style in British newspapers between about 1880 and 1930 and proposes that they provide evidence of the emergence of a coherent and self-sufficient discourse of the news. It argues that changes in the ways in which the news has represented the world are as important as technological or economic changes to the development of the 20th-century news form, and that it is therefore important to look closely at issues of language. It suggests that three main developments in news texts occurred: the wide range of voices and styles of the Victorian press became subsumed under a single universal news voice; the status of the news text changed from being a collection of raw information to being a form of knowledge in itself; and the news developed independence from the conventions of public discourse.

Scowling at their Notebooks How British Journalists Understand their Writing

This article examines the understanding of newswriting within British print news journalism and, in particular, the practice’s management of the role of language in the news. Its material comprises journalists’ reflections on their practice in metatexts such as memoirs and textbooks. The article draws on phenomenological sociology and Bourdieu’s theorization of the censorship of ways of speaking within the journalistic community to show how writing tends to appear in journalists’ discussions of the job in ways that reduce the force of its challenge to journalism’s self-understanding. It concludes by suggesting that the habits of thinking about writing in British journalism stand in the way of any substantive reflexivity within British news practice or any reorientation of the practice in response to critiques of the active role of journalism in constructing understanding of society.

Blogging the New Zealand Election: The impact of new media practices on the old game

While the audiences for news and current affairs on the Internet are small, the Re is evidence from the United States that some online media are having a disproportionate influence on public affairs through their impact on the wider mediasphere. In particular, weblogs are credited with fact-checking the news media, widening the news agenda and forging new kinds of information networks. What is far from clear, however, is whethe R these new media contribute to a different quality of public debate or merely add a few extra voices. This paper explores the impact of weblogs on public affairs in Aotearoa/New Zealand through an analysis of the blogging of the 2005 general election.

Negotiating Claims to Journalism: Webloggers' Orientation to News Genres

This paper explores how writers of online diaries, or weblogs, about public affairs negotiate their relationship with the genres and social position of news journalism. Although often labelled radical journalists, this paper finds, through interviews with seven webloggers, that such writers orient themselves in complex ways towards news journalism, at times drawing upon its modes of knowledge, at times setting themselves in opposition to it and at times seeking to cross discursive spaces. The paper concludes that, rather than emerging as a new public communicative form or genre in relation to journalism, the distinctiveness of the form is in its generic heterogeneity and ability to traverse the boundaries of news and other institutional discourses.

MINDING THE GAPS

This article is a reflection – from the position of a journalism researcher – on one of the distinctive features of research on Aotearoa New Zealand media and communication and some of the reasons for that. Studying and teaching about this field in Aotearoa New Zealand is a matter of negotiating the large gaps in academic knowledge about the local situation. In particular, the article suggests researchers prioritise theory-building about the position of media within this small country that is so heavily dependent on owners and media products from overseas.

HANS-GEORG GADAMER'S PHILOSOPHICAL HERMENEUTICS AND JOURNALISM RESEARCH

The philosophical hermeneutics of German phenomenologist Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) is rarely cited in journalism studies, although it is better known in the fields of history, literary study and classical philology. I would like to suggest here that journalism studies can make fruitful use of the philosophical concepts he developed, in particular to use those idea to bring journalism’s interpretative work to the fore in critical enquiry. In the course of introducing some of his ideas, I emphasise implications for studying the practical knowledge of the journalist, the dichotomy between objective and subjective reporting, and neglected aspects of journalism ethics.

In Search of Popular Journalism in New Zealand

This paper explores the discourses of popular legitimacy deployed by New Zealand journalists. It studies in particular the ways that journalists reflect upon their relationship with “the people”, through their comments in such forums as trade publications, addresses to readers in the voice of the editor and memoirs. It argues that the dominant journalistic voices in Aotearoa New Zealand provide a narrow and poorly defined set of resources to describe how journalism practice relates to those outside the elite spaces of most public debate or to describe the grounds of journalists’ legitimacy as a set of spokespeople for society. Discourses of “the people” are marked by a discomfort with the category and are rarely politicized, when they are not elided away under competing terms such as community or public. The paper argues that the weakness of a sense of popular legitimacy has consequences for the quality of both journalism and of political and cultural debate in the country.

Talking in a Crowded Room: Political Blogging during the 2008 New Zealand General Election

This article analyses two of New Zealands foremost political blogs on public affairs in the four weeks prior to the 2008 New Zealand general election. The 2008 election represents, we argue, a moment when the scale and reach of blogging propelled it to a position of significance in New Zealand media. The study uses content analysis to track the material posted on these blogs and in their comments sections. It is concerned primarily with quantifying the kind of debate to be found there and, through that, analysing how these blogs contribute to the quality of public life. The findings show that while a small number of blogs dominate, one blogs comments section has seen significant growth in the number of individual commenters participating in political discussion. It therefore stands as a useful case study of how blogging has found a place within this countrys mediated politics.

The performance of publicness in social media: tracing patterns in tweets after a disaster

This article sets out to contribute to the critical understanding of public communication in social media by studying the use of Twitter after a severe earthquake in Aotearoa New Zealand in 2011. It also sets out to contribute to methodologies for studying this particular kind of publicness. It argues that the contours of the ‘social imaginary’ of the public, which are usually so hard to delineate and can be approached only in fragments or typical form, can be identified a little more clearly in the traces that people leave behind in their social media communication at critical, reflexive moments such as in the aftermath of disaster. The article draws on computer-assisted discourse analysis, specifically a corpus-linguistic-informed analysis of half a million tweets, in order to describe four main public discursive moves that were prevalent in this form of public communication. This is not to claim to describe a stable set of norms, but in fact the reverse. The article suggests that empirical, large-scale analysis of public communication in different situations, media and places opens up a project in which the varying norms of public communication are described and critiqued as they emerge in a range of discursive situations.