Scott Eldridge

Normative Expectations: Employing "communities of practice" models for assessing journalism’s normative claims

Journalisms relationship with the public has historically rested on an assumption of its Fourth Estate roles and as fulfilling democratic imperatives. The normative dimensions of these ideals have also long been “taken as given” in journalism studies, serving as a starting point for discussions of journalisms public service, interest, and role. As contradictions to these normative ideals expose flaws in such assumptions, a reassessment of this normative basis for journalism is needed. This paper looks to challenge normative legacies of journalisms societal role. Drawing on uses and gratification theoretical frameworks and engaging with communities of practice, it explores how communities understand journalism from both top-down (journalism) and bottom-up (citizen) perspectives. This research considers citizen expectations of journalism and journalists, and evaluates perceptions of journalistic values from the ground up. By employing a community facilitation model, it offers an opportunity for participants from across the community to reassess their own conceptions of the role of journalism. This establishes a better basis to approach the journalism–public relationship that does not advantage historic, normative, or traditional legacies.

Morbid symptoms: between a dying and a re-birth (apologies to Gramsci)

This paper argues that despite an appearance of rupture, journalism is in an era of good fortune. While it would be both premature and historically naïve to point at a new “golden era”, there is reason to see a strengthening of journalisms sense of core responsibilities emerging from the challenges and opportunities which new technologies present. With an eye towards journalisms history as a force with the potential to feed contemporary debate, this paper briefly surveys the relationship between technological innovation and role perceptions of journalism. Against this backdrop, it evaluates the discourses of professional ideals and norms within the elite press in Britain in 2011 and 2012, in the context of new media technologies.

Hero or Anti-Hero?: Narratives of newswork and journalistic identity construction in complex digital megastories

Exploring constructions of journalistic identity in a digital age has been a lively area of scholarship as the field of digital journalism studies has grown. Yet despite many approaches to understanding digital change, key avenues for understanding changing constructions of identity remain underexplored. This paper addresses a conceptual void in research literature by employing semiotic and semantic approaches to analyse performances of journalistic identity in narratives of newswork facilitated by and focused on digital megaleaks. It seeks to aid understanding of the way narratives describe changing practices of newsgathering, and how journalists position themselves within these hybrid traditional/digital stories. Findings show news narratives reinforce the primacy of journalists within traditional boundaries of a journalistic field, and articulate a preferred imagination of journalistic identity. Methodologically, this paper shows how semantic and semiotic approaches lend themselves to studying narrativ...Exploring constructions of journalistic identity in a digital age has been a lively area of scholarship as the field of digital journalism studies has grown. Yet despite many approaches to understanding digital change, key avenues for understanding changing constructions of identity remain underexplored. This paper addresses a conceptual void in research literature by employing semiotic and semantic approaches to analyse performances of journalistic identity in narratives of newswork facilitated by and focused on digital megaleaks. It seeks to aid understanding of the way narratives describe changing practices of newsgathering, and how journalists position themselves within these hybrid traditional/digital stories. Findings show news narratives reinforce the primacy of journalists within traditional boundaries of a journalistic field, and articulate a preferred imagination of journalistic identity. Methodologically, this paper shows how semantic and semiotic approaches lend themselves to studying narratives of newswork within journalistic metadiscourses to understand journalistic identity at the nexus of traditional and digital dynamics. The resultant portrait of journalistic identity channels a socio-historic, romantic notion of the journalist as “the shadowy figure always to be found on the edges of the century’s great events”, updated to accommodate modern, digital dynamics.

Beyond WikiLeaks: implications for the future of communications, journalism and society

to the last of these is that “African American, white, female, Republican, Independent, and ideological conservative Millennials may be less likely to consume news because they view it as negative, uncaring, biased, and without value” (p. 90). The analysis builds on primary data collected by the author in the United States. However, there is an issue that some arguments are too technologically deterministic and the evidence provided focuses too much on newspapers and newspaper consumption as the key indicator of news engagement. The book does refer to other forms of news media, but it would have been useful to explore in more detail how news forms and the concept of news are changing for the different generations and whether news values as a result are changing too. This book provides an interesting, if complex, model for the myriad factors that influence the Millennial Generation’s news engagement after the emergence of social media. These factors, the author believes, “will determine whether we will be a society of news consumers who believe being informed is important or a nation in which news illiteracy is the norm” (p. xii). Indeed the book warns of dire consequences for society if “news consumers are extinct and being informed of news is no longer valued” (p. xii). Long-term implications of this generation’s non-engagement with news could be serious for the news industry, society and democracy. But the author argues that the trends in the declining news engagement of the Millennial Generations can be reversed and she presents a sort of manifesto of what stakeholders need to do to achieve this (summary p. 112 and in detail Chapter 7). The 14-point manifesto lists, for example: “Stakeholders must admit problem exists”, “Stakeholders must acknowledge problem matters”, “Legacy news media must become engaged”, “Social media and search engines must intervene”, “Parents need to do more” and “Millennials have a responsibility, too” (p. 112). These are noble aims but less is said about how they can be achieved and what the driving forces would be for their realisation. This book raises important questions, provides interesting primary data and is a useful contribution to the debate on changing news engagement. Given the complexity of the subject area and ongoing shifts in news consumptions, however, more research is needed on the topic to fully understand these changes.

Negotiating Uncertain Claims

Recent developments in the relations between politicians and journalists in the US have (among other things) created a situation where journalists often have to deal with information that is very difficult, even impossible, to verify, yet which has potential societal significance that cannot be ignored. This has, we argue, affected how journalists and journalistic outlets relate to each other within what we tentatively term an inferential community. To argue this, we analyze journalistic demonstrations of authority in attempts to establish and connect “facts” related to uncertain claims in two cases of the coverage of the nascent Trump administration. This is, however, not a fully elaborated case study through which we can conclude something broader about contemporary journalism. The paper should rather be seen as a preliminary empirical probe allowing us to focus on a specific issue while proposing a tentative conceptual and analytical frame through which this may be studied in a more sustained and detailed way.

Remaking the News: Essays on the Future of Journalism Scholarship in the Digital Age

As a stock take on the field of Digital Journalism Studies, the most resonant observation in Remaking the News is that, for those of us working in digital journalism studies, description is no longer enough. To this observation, made throughout Remaking the News and most emphatically by Rodney Benson in his chapter “From Heterogeneity to Differentiation”, I say “amen”. I would wager that many readers of this journal would agree. To our intellectual pleasure, then, we can find in Remaking the News, edited by Pablo Boczkowski and C.W. Anderson, a collection that moves discussions in our field further forward, beyond describing and towards explaining what is going on in digital journalism. In any nascent field, including our own, the demands of scholastic endeavor naturally begin at a descriptive point—how else to identify what it is we explore? However, this quickly tires. Noting that journalism is increasingly digital is increasingly trite, and the call for more robust theoretical explanation, as Benson makes echoes a call I made with Bob Franklin when we argued Digital Journalism Studies was a field coming into its own: “it has become clear that scholarship has progressed beyond identifying these intellectual dilemmas, and has moved towards building a rich theoretical engagement and understanding” (2017, 3). In doing so, we also need to identify “better ways of conceptualizing what journalism is and how it develops in a digital age” (Steensen and Ahva 2015, 1). Remaking the News reflects such shared ambitions. Laudably, this is done not by shying away from the ambitions of digital journalism research, or its missteps, but by bringing both together in conversation. Divided across 4 themes, and 19 essays, the work in its pages carry seeds of ideas for future research, while noting the undelivered potential of extant approaches. Writing for the Nieman Lab in June 2017, the editors introduce this volume as a way to address where, in the developing field of journalism research, “the frantic pace of knowledge production had somewhat prevented scholars to engage in a collective process of sensemaking about what had been accomplished and what might lie ahead” (Anderson and Boczkowski 2017). Remaking the News responds accordingly. The strengths here are in those essays which show a field whose growth has had pains. These illustrate as well, where developing a field with any consistency benefits from calling to account derivations from its own ambitions. As Benson calls out descriptivist tendencies, so too do colleagues in this volume who map academic blind spots (as Victor Pickard titles his essay), and those who prod necessary links with history, which are often glossed over (Anderson’s own contribution highlights just such a concern). Lest it seem this collection is an all-out critique on the field, it invigorates what promise to be fruitful research

The Digital Journalist

This chapter looks at WikiLeaks and other ‘Interloper Media’ (Eldridge 2013, 2014) to explore the boundaries and identity dimensions of ‘being’ a digital journalist. Media technologies have long been connected with a disruption of journalism’s norms, and this disruption has been pronounced with digital technologies (Eldridge 2015). As much as technological shifts have allowed the form and function of journalistic products to change and develop, the way new actors are embracing these digital technologies have exposed a particular disruption around understandings of what a journalist is and how that too might be changing. In this disruption, the boundaries of journalistic identity have been irritated by outspoken claims of belonging from new actors such as Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. Going beyond WikiLeaks, questions of journalism’s normative ideals, the domain of the ‘Fourth Estate’, and journalism’s role as a legitimating authority continue to be the focus of discursive reactions to a range of new media actors and their journalistic claims. As platforms, content, and media spaces where journalism occurs change at a rapid pace, questions of what it means to be a journalist are ever present. This chapter reflects on these debates to discuss whether a more expansive and flexible definition of a digital journalist can be developed. In identifying key elements of journalistic identity, this chapter will draw on the literature of ‘boundaries’ around that identity, steep these within a discussion of journalism’s self-defined profession and maintenance of its identity, and posit a definition of the digital journalist fit for modern media realities.

Livingstone and the legacy of Empire in the journalistic imagination

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