Frank Harbers

Between engagement and ironic ambiguity: Mediating subjectivity in narrative journalism

This article explores how narrative journalism challenges dominant assumptions about objectivity by taking the mediating subjectivity of the reporter as a structuring principle for stories. By comparing the coverage of the Middle East conflict by British award-winning reporter Robert Fisk and Dutch novelist/reporter Arnon Grunberg we show how overt subjectivity is displayed in different manners and how this affects the persuasiveness of reporting. Fisk adopts a personal–engaged subjectivity that fits in with the tradition of ethnographic realism and in that respect abides by the fundamental maxims of traditional journalism. Conversely, Grunberg displays a personal–ironic subjectivity that resembles cultural phenomenology and constantly calls into question whether journalism is able to represent reality univocally. We argue that both approaches fit in with a broader cultural development that disputes the possibility of objective truth and questions the corresponding epistemological procedures. Nevertheless, the latter approach particularly raises doubt among readers and critics because it subverts the profession’s claim to truth.

Time to Engage

This article explores De Correspondent as a specific example of slow journalism that aims to establish an alternative for quality journalism governed by the objectivity regime. It offers an analysis of the way the platform redefines journalism’s quality standards against the background of the tension between traditional modernistic claims to truth and competing postmodern ideas on the social construction of knowledge. Moreover, the article examines how these ideals are translated into journalistic texts. The article argues that both in its rhetoric and in its actual practice, the articles in De Correspondent deviate from the principles of quality journalism under the objectivity regime. They are structured around the mediating subjectivity of the journalists and are thus openly subjective. Yet, they also draw on empirical research and scientific knowledge. Moreover, they are transparent about the reporting process, which through their reflection becomes an integral part of the story itself. Thus, being transparent about their combination of different forms of knowledge, rooted in more traditional rational-positivistic inquiry as well as in personal experience and emotion, they try to reconcile the tension between the modernist and postmodernist claims to truth.

Impact as driving force of journalistic and social change

In this article, we explore how entrepreneurial journalists from a wide variety of national contexts present ‘impact’ as one of the aims in their work. By exploring the variety, incongruences, and strategic considerations in the discourse on impact of those at the forefront of journalistic innovation, we provide a much-needed empirical account of the changing conceptualisation of what journalism is and what it is for. Our data show how impact becomes an ideologically as well as strategically driven endeavour as the entrepreneurs try to carve out their niche and position themselves both in relation to traditional counterparts and other startups. Ultimately, we provide empirical insight into a number of tensions that remain underlying in the discourse on constructive journalism, an increasingly popular conceptualisation that refers to a future-oriented, solution-driven, active form of journalism. We show how our interviewees marry different, commonly-deemed incompatible practices and values, thus challenging binary distinctions at the heart of conceptualisations of journalism, also perpetuated in the discourse on constructive journalism. As pioneers in the field, startups can be argued to inspire journalistic as well as social innovation, and furthermore push for a more inclusive understanding of the divergent conceptualisations and practices that together make up the amalgam that we call ‘journalism’.

Exploring Machine Learning to Study the Long-Term Transformation of News: Digital newspaper archives, journalism history, and algorithmic transparency

The labour-intensive nature of manual content analysis and the problematic accessibility of source material make quantitative analyses of news content still scarce in journalism history. However, the digitization of newspaper archives now allows for innovative digital methods for systematic longitudinal research beyond the scope of incidental case studies. We argue that supervised machine learning offers promising approaches to analyse abundant source material, ground analyses in big data, and map the structural transformation of journalistic discourse longitudinally. By automatically analysing form and style conventions, that reflect underlying professional norms and practices, the structure of news coverage can be studied more closely. However, automatically classifying latent and period-specific coding categories is highly complex. The structure of digital newspaper archives (e.g. segmentation, OCR) complicates this even more, while machine learning algorithms are often a black box. This paper shows how making classification processes transparent enables journalism scholars to employ these computational methods in a reliable and valid way. We illustrate this by focusing on the issues we encountered with automatically classifying news genres, an illuminating but particularly complex coding category. Ultimately, such an approach could foster a revision of journalism history, particularly the often hypothesized but understudied shift from opinion-based to fact-centred reporting.

'Ils ont bombardé Reims et nous avons vu cela!' : de Eerste Wereldoorlog als katalysator van de ontwikkeling van de verslaggeving ter plaatse

De Eerste Wereldoorlog beteugelde niet alleen de vrije informatiegaring van de Britse, Nederlandse en Franse pers,maar gaf ook een impuls gaf aan de ontwikkeling van de professionele praktijk van de journalistiek. In het oorlogsgebied en in de buurt van het strijdtoneel raakten de journalisten doordrongen van de verantwoordelijkheid die op hun schouders rustte. Ondanks de ingrijpendemaatregelen van de autoriteiten omhun verslaggeving te beteugelen en te controleren, poogden deze verslaggevers om een betrouwbaar beeld van de oorlogssituatie te schetsen. Een analyse van oorlogsreportages van Britse, Nederlandse en Franse journalisten, respectievelijk William Beach Thomas en George Ward Price, Jean Louis Pisuisse en Johan Luger, en Albert Londres, laat zien hoe de oorlog deze verslaggevers dwong om op hun eigen ogen en oren te vertrouwen en op basis van hun observaties een impressie van de werkelijkheid te geven. Ze zagen hun status als ooggetuige als teken van autoriteit en betrouwbaarheid. De nadruk op de ‘mediating subjectivity’ van de verslaggever betekende echter niet dat er al sprake was van de opkomst van het objectiviteitsregime.