Tamara Witschge and Frank Harbers
6Journalism as Practice
Abstract: In this chapter we propose to adopt a practice theory approach to theorize and examine journalism as an open, diverse and dynamic practice. We first highlight how the ways in which journalism is defined and how the journalistic profession is conceptualised are in flux, and journalistic norms, work routines and audience interactions are changing. We propose practice theory as it allows us to provide a bottom-up theorisation of journalism practices, avoiding the pitfalls that come with a priori definitions of what journalism and its societal function are. We address the issues currently prevalent in the field of journalism studies: a) the normative approach to journalism; b) the fixed definition of journalism; c) newsroom-centricity; d) human- and technocentrism. We then provide a general introduction to practice theory, highlighting some of its main features. Third, we illustrate how practice theory allows us insight into key tensions: The question of who is a journalist; the relation between normative ideals of journalism and the everyday practices; how to locate and study the site of journalism, if not focusing on the newsroom; and how to include materiality in journalism studies.
Keywords: discourse, journalism, practice, practice theory, self-conceptualization
1Introduction
In this chapter we explore how applying practice theory helps us to theorize and examine the way journalism is developing. Traditional news journalists have long been the ones who decide on the news of the day, but in the current digital age their monopoly on publishing information is challenged fundamentally. With information abundant, and many new providers of news and information, there is not only increased competition for audiences, but also for the understanding of journalism as cultural practice. The ways in which journalism is defined and how the journalistic profession is conceptualized are in flux, and journalistic norms, work routines, and audience interactions are changing fundamentally.
To make sense of these developments, and to understand what journalism is, we argue we can no longer employ research approaches that use a priori definitions of what journalism or its societal function should be. This is not to say that these normative conceptions no longer influence the way journalism is perceived. However, to take such a normative perspective as a point of departure puts blinders on journalism scholarship, privileging journalism practice within established organizations. Furthermore, traditional approaches to researching journalism generally regard journalism from a top-down perspective as a coherent set of practices, in which norms govern routines and routines direct the characteristics of the output. This fails to acknowledge the non-coherent and at times arbitrary nature of practices, in which strategic claims and everyday practices interact with each other more equally and are not necessarily aligned as lofty ideals clash with commercial and practical constraints.
We propose a practice theory approach (Schatzki 2001a) to study journalism bottom-up as an open practice, acknowledging the increasingly diverse range of actors with differing ideas and approaches to journalism. This does not mean that everything is journalism. The development of journalism practice – and any practice for that matter – is shaped by the past, its prior enactments and understandings. The approach proposed here allows us to do justice to the dynamic nature of journalism practice and moves away from approaches that use a priori definitions that may privilege certain practices and exclude others.
In the chapter we first discuss the issues that journalism scholars are faced with in the current journalistic field, and explore how these ask for a new theoretical and methodological approach (Section 2). There has already been a range of answers to highlight and do justice to the complexity of the field, including viewing journalism as network (Domingo & Wiard 2016), ecology (Anderson 2016), or (Bourdieusian) field – which also has a practice theory foundation (Vos 2016). We here propose the perspective of journalism as “practice”, as an inclusive and complementary way of viewing journalism. A practice approach allows us to understand journalism as the ongoing and reciprocal exchange between the activities involved in doing journalism and the discourses on it. In the third section we provide an overview of the main features of practice theory and in section four we explore how this approach allows us to deal with a number of issues that journalism and journalism scholars are faced with currently. We highlight four areas where this approach can help break open the current understanding. In the concluding section, we reflect on the methodological implications.
2Challenging journalism research
This chapter theorizes the shared practice as it is constituted by the many different activities, understandings and material contexts of existing and emerging forms of journalism. Conceptualizing journalism as an open practice in which many actors and many activities are involved, we seek an alternative for the conventional institutional, newsroom and genre-based understandings of journalism. As such, we aim to address the need in media and journalism studies to include both a detailed analysis of the everyday activities constituting the practice, and the many competing definitions and categorizations as made by the practicing actors themselves (Couldry 2004). Proposing this approach we address the following issues: a) the normative approach to journalism; b) the fixed definition of journalism; c) newsroom-centricity; d) human- and technocentrism.
2.1Normative approaches to journalism
Over time, a stable disciplinary understanding of what journalism is and does developed both in journalism practice (Hallin 1992) and in journalism studies (Turner 2005), which, as we detail below, is grounded in a thorough knowledge of the people, their work routines, and textual output within newsrooms and institutional media. The perspectives on journalism that developed are rooted in a particular predefined normative conception, emphasizing journalism’s democratic function.
As Barbie Zelizer (2013) points out, the predominant starting point of journalism studies is journalism’s deemed necessity for the maintenance of democracy. Journalists have long had a monopoly on publishing information in the public domain (Hansen 2012), and their ways of selecting, making and distributing this information affect what we deem as authoritative accounts of what is going on, how we perceive societal problems, and in part determines the priority we give to issues. The central role that journalists have been attributed in society, has greatly affected the way in which journalism has been researched, and understood. Whilst by no means uncontested in practice (Nerone 2013), in theory and research on journalism, the relation between news and democracy has become naturalized (Josephi 2013).
We do not suggest that journalism is irrelevant for democracy, or that we should ignore journalism’s societal role altogether. However, a more open-minded approach to journalism that extends our vision beyond its importance for democracy is called for. The field of journalism studies has become invested with such strong normative expectations, in particular journalism’s pivotal importance for democracy (Peters & Witschge 2014; Zelizer 2013), that new scholarly understandings of journalism’s role for society have been slow to develop (Josephi 2013). This limited approach goes hand-in-hand with two issues we discuss next: a limited definition of what journalism is and the privileging of certain practices over others. As a result, we do not capture the full breadth of journalism and its many relevancies for society.
2.2Fixed definition of journalism
Much like a coherent normative approach has developed over time, a rather coherent and homogenous understanding of journalism has become dominant (Deuze & Witschge 2018). This conceptualization fails to account for the myriad of practices, understandings and forms of output that together form “journalism”. Some of the most prevalent ways of defining journalism is either by way of the genre, the production space or the professional status of the journalist. These ways of defining and approaching journalism have always had their limitations: The professional status of journalists has always been contested (Schudson & Anderson 2009); the blurring of genres was highlighted decades ago (for instance, Brants 1998), and journalism has always been produced in many places beyond the newsroom (see Section 4.3).
Currently, the ways of delimiting our object of study in journalism studies have become even more inadequate (see also, Witschge et al. 2016). With the blurring of genres disrupting the traditional assumption of quality journalism, new entrants to the field challenging traditional outlets that struggle to keep afloat, and a rapid multiplication of production spaces, the status quo in both journalism and journalism studies is obviously challenged. It is thus not so much relevant to “arrive at the ‘proper’ definition, production or interpretation” (Erjavec & Poler Kovacic 2009: 149). Rather, we need to give insight into and theorize the different practices, definitions, and interpretations that are put forward by the multitude of actors competing to inform the dominant delineation of journalism. Recognizing that “abstract social categories and practices exist to the extent that they are called upon by people for particular interactional purposes” (Matheson 2004: 35), we need to pay attention to who is engaged in this definitional struggle of the genre, rather than adopt certain definitions a priori.
2.3Newsroom-centricity
A prevalent way of defining journalism has been through the institutions deemed at the center: the newsroom and traditional media institutions (Wahl-Jorgensen 2009; Anderson 2011). With newsroom ethnography as main method of data analysis, this approach has provided many valuable insights into how journalists work and how journalism has been produced (see for instance the seminal work by Tuchman (1978), or more recently: Usher 2014). However, viewing the newsroom as the center of journalistic production provides an overly limited perspective of where journalism is produced: traditional journalistic institutions cannot be presumed to be the exclusive center of journalistic production. We should not take for granted that the activities in these spaces continue to determine what journalism entails, as they have long done. Such a narrow approach to journalism conceals the existence of alternative sites and forms of journalism. As Nick Couldry (2004: 125) puts it, we need to “resist the temptation to see the actual institutional centres of media (and political) culture as ‘all there is’.” Such a view “distorts the breadth of the actual field of media (and political) practice beyond these claimed ‘centres’” (ibid.).
With the rapid changes in work cultures of established journalists as well as the entry of new producers of journalism, not traditionally labeled as journalists, we need to broaden our view beyond the newsroom. This is not to say that the newsroom no longer remains an important anchor point for news and journalism: Much of what is considered news and journalism still comes through the newsroom. Yet, these practices are not necessarily captured by being in the newsroom. Traditional media have become institutions populated by an increasingly fluctuating, precarious body of contracted and subcontracted reporters and editors, freelancers, temp agency workers, interns, and independent entrepreneurs (Deuze & Witschge 2016). We need new, more inclusive ways of locating and defining journalists, focusing not just on what happens in the center of the newsroom, but also in the margins and outside of the newsroom.
2.4Human- and technocentrism
Within journalism studies, we need to not only be wary of the newsroom-centric approaches as discussed above, but also avoid other existing types of narrow focus on journalism, such as human-centrism and technocentrism, which devote too much attention on certain actors in the production process that determines what journalism looks likes – in this case, respectively, journalists as makers or technology as structure. Journalism studies has long focused almost exclusively on the people involved in making the news. However, we need to consider also the material conditions (to put it simply, everything non-human) under which such production processes take place (see for instance Boczkowski (2015); De Maeyer 2016) – whether that pertains to the role of (mobile) phones, desks, content management systems, computers or other non-human (f)actors.
At the same time, it is important that a revaluation of the material in journalism is not simply equated with more attention to technology. Such an interpretation could easily lead to the trap of technocentrism, where the focus is on the effect of individual technologies, rather than resulting in a more complex understanding of the role of technology in news production. Such a deterministic and narrow view on technology is dominant in certain journalistic practices, where the focus on technology shrouds the role of economic, social and cultural changes (Witschge 2012). In journalism studies, the danger exists of a similarly deterministic focus on technology: “[The] obsession with what is new and next disarticulates technology and journalistic routines from both their material and economic contexts and their alignment with journalism’s normative functions” (Siegelbaum & Thomas 2016: 387).
3Practice theory
The above-mentioned limitations to the prevalent ways of researching journalism have become particularly pressing with the current changes of the field. As a response different scholars have called for ways in which we can do justice to the new, still rapidly developing situation: New theoretical approaches have developed (see for instance: Anderson 2016; Domingo & Wiard 2016; Vos 2016) and methodological implications considered (see for instance Karlsson and Sjøvaag 2016). Indeed, there is much attention for rethinking and re-theorizing journalism considering the many changes in the field (see, for instance, Peters & Broersma 2013; 2016; Boczkowski & Anderson 2016). Introducing a practice theory approach to journalism, we aim to contribute to this debate and answer the call to introduce practice theory in media studies (Couldry 2004; Bräuchler & Postill 2010).
Practice theory includes a diverse set of theories and approaches, some that have become relatively prominent in media and journalism studies, such as Bourdieu’s field theory (2005; for a discussion of its value for journalism studies, see Benson & Neveu 2005), Boltanski and Thévenot’s moral sociology (1999; for an application in media studies, see, for instance, Barron 2013), or Latour’s actor-network theory (2005; for an application in journalism studies, see, for instance, Domingo, Masip & Costera Meijer 2015). It has been applied to understand audience participation in journalism (Ahva 2017) and ethics (Borden 2007). All in all, we may be experiencing a “practice turn” in journalism studies as other fields have recently experienced (Schatzki, Knorr Cetina & von Savigni 2001).
Practice theory brings together a wide range of approaches that have as their central focus the “practice,” though there are disagreements on what constitutes a practice (Gherardi 2009b). What most approaches have in common is that they are concerned with the “collective, situated and provisional nature of knowledge and a sense of shared materiality” (ibid.: 535). What is central is that practices are not only conceptualized as: “embodied, materially arrays of human activity”, but more importantly that these are “centrally organized around shared practical understanding” (Schatzki 2001a: 11). For our purposes, we can view the practice of journalism as the shared set of activities and understandings of what is “journalism”. As such, it is not one or the other, but rather both the understandings and the activities that are constitutive and it is precisely in the interaction that the shared practice emerges. Indeed, practice theory’s attention for the intricate relation between these two fundamentally intertwined levels of practice – as Schatzki (2001b: 56) puts it, the “sayings” and the “doings” – is an elementary reason for us to propose this approach to journalism.
In response to the challenges in journalism studies, there are a number of features of practice theory that, as we argue, render it a valuable approach. Practice theory (i) includes both the interrelated sayings and doings that constitute a practice; (ii) asks for a bottom-up definition of what the practice entails, based on how actors categorize, understand, and enact the practice; (iii) acknowledges the dynamic nature of practices where sayings and doings impact one another; (iv) introduces a nuanced and holistic view on the role of materiality. We discuss these key features of practice theory before discussing more concretely how applying this practice theory approach to the field of journalism allows us to address the challenges that the field faces (Section 4).
First, and centrally, one of the main features of practice theory is the interaction between the activity and the understanding of the activity – the sayings and doings. Practices are seen as a set of activities that simultaneously structure and are structured by collective understandings of the activities in question (Schatzki 2001b). Practices are not simply the “‘routine’, ‘competitive advantage’, ‘embodied skills’, or (…) ‘what people do’” (Gherardi 2009b: 536). Rather, practice theory allows for complex and critical understanding of the social order as made up of both the activities (in particular routine activities) and discourses surrounding these (Couldry 2004: 121). It is here that we can also understand continuity in practices: the activities as become standard over time inform the understandings, and vice versa. At the same time, this is also how we can understand change: if either the understandings or the activities of journalism change, then over time, these can set new standards, and structure the practice of journalism. Notions such as “structuration”, “discipline” or “habitus”, theorizing the way people come to internalize established understandings and routines of a practice, can offer a helpful perspective on the way established understandings and patterns of action and individual deviation and innovation of practices interact. As such these concepts elucidate the dynamic of continuity and change of a practice (for a concise discussion of these concepts and their theoretical context, see Postill 2010: 6–12).
Second, the entwinement of the sayings and doings also shows that rather than conceptualizing a practice as a top-down rational and systematic phenomenon, it can better be considered as an ongoing process of bottom-up, collective negotiation of practitioners (both through the performance of an activity and the discourse on it) that is not only determined by abstract rational ideas and goals, but also by specific contextual and material conditions, normative preferences, habitualized routines, and subjective experiences (Schatzki 2005). Practices are not the logical result of a coherent top-down process in which rational knowledge and goals are translated into clearly delineated activities (Gherardi 2009b). Rather, practice theory focuses our attention to the inherently provisional nature of the practice and how it is shaped and reshaped by the understanding of that practice. As such, the question of how a practice is shaped is complex: “actions are linked into a practice not just by explicit understandings, but also by being governed by common rules and by sharing the common reference-point of certain ends, projects and beliefs” (Couldry 2004: 121). Therefore, bottom-up does not imply that there are no structuring elements, but rather that there is no such thing as “the” practice of journalism, as this is permanently constituted, rather than fixed, even at specific points in time.
This brings us to the third feature of practice theory that we highlight here: the dynamic nature of practices. Practice theory allows us to understand how shared and collective understandings and sets of activities develop. Practices are regular patterns of action that embody and reiterate shared conceptions of that activity thereby sustaining these practices (Gherardi 2009b: 536): “what makes possible the competent reproduction of a practice over and over again and its refinement while being practiced (or its abandonment) is the constant negotiation of what is thought to be a correct or incorrect way of practicing within the community of practitioners”. Within this “constant negotiation”, the emergence of a shared vocabulary for appraisal becomes an important part of the practice (ibid.). Mastering a certain activity means also mastering the vocabulary of appraisal: the ability to meaningfully discriminate between the different aspects of an activity, knowing how to categorize and evaluate the different aspects, ultimately facilitating the performance of an activity in line with the collective understanding of a practice (ibid.).
Practices are enacted and evaluated in light of a shared image of what it means to perform a practice in the “right” manner. Although shared understandings are at the heart of a practice, what is considered the ideal way of enacting it can differ between (groups of) practitioners – especially within a period of rapid change (Gherardi 2009b) like the journalistic field is in. The open approach of practice theory is particularly apt to explore the different ways in which a practice is conceived and how practitioners contest and negotiate the different takes on a practice through their sayings and doings. In addition, even when practitioners agree on the right way to perform a practice, the interaction between sayings and doings makes a practice inherently dynamic. As Gherardi (2009b) argues, every enactment of a practice not only reiterates, but also inevitably slightly reshapes a practice (also see Ahva 2017: 1528). A practice thus develops from the complex interaction of a web of enactments and discourses, past and present, by a myriad of actors, not only journalists, but also those surrounding it (whether they are publishers, web developers or marketers).
Fourth, practice theory focuses on the material context of the practice that is being researched. While the shared practical understandings that organize human activity are core in the understanding of practices, these arrays of understandings are understood as “embodied” and “materially mediated” (Schatzki 2001a: 11). Practice theory “joins a variety of ‘materialist’ approaches in highlighting how bundled activities interweave with ordered constellations of nonhuman entities” (ibid.: 12). For our purposes, the value of practice theory also lies in its holistic approach vis-à-vis its view on the role of the material in practices. It does not isolate it, but rather views it as integrally connected to the practice, the material arrangements – the “set-ups of material objects” (Schatzki 2005: 472) form the context of practices and need to be considered when analyzing the practice: “Whenever someone acts and therewith carries on a practice, she does so in a setting that is composed of material entities. The material arrangements amid which humans carry on embrace four types of entity: human beings, artefacts, other organisms, and things” (ibid.). In the next section we discuss the specific value of this and the other features of practice theory and then also consider why we prefer this approach to materiality over others when analyzing journalism.
4Addressing key tensions in journalism through practice theory
We argue that practice theory allows us insight into some of the most prevalent issues present in journalism studies, and we will illustrate this by focusing on the following challenges that journalism scholars are faced with: The question of who is a journalist; the relation between normative ideals of journalism and the everyday practices; how to locate and study the site of journalism, if not focusing on the newsroom; how to include materiality in journalism studies.
4.1Who is a journalist?
One of the most pressing questions is the question who is a journalist. Digital media technologies have considerably lowered the entry costs to the field, and the profession of the journalist (which was never protected as a formal profession) is open to many new entrants (Singer 2003; Chadwick 2013). The hybrid and fluid nature of the roles in journalism are identified by terms such as “citizen journalist”, the “produser”, and “semi-professional amateurs” (Nicey 2016). With new entrants to the field, the focus both in practice and in theory has been on the boundary work done to protect and gauge the conceptualization of who is a journalist (see, for instance, Carlson & Lewis 2015). The research on the question of who is a journalist shows how difficult it is to provide an inclusive alternative to the existing definitions that focused on either the genre or the newsroom.
The question of how to locate the different actors is addressed in Section 4.3 below. Here we address the more fundamental definitional issue: how do we define journalism? We have already indicated in the above that the definition of what is journalism and thus who is a journalist is not fixed. Moreover, the research on boundary work in journalism shows that there are a lot of different interests involved in conceptualizing what journalism is and what it is not (see for instance Fenton and Witschge (2010) on the nature of such definitional struggle). As such, we should not just aim for a “neutral” and inclusive definition for our research purposes, but rather also do justice to journalism as a practice that is constituted by actual activities and the accompanying (self) understandings (and the interaction between them).
Practice theory enables us to gain insight in the way journalism is delineated in a collective negotiation between a variety of actors, in which both the sayings and the doings of journalism play an equally important role. Moreover, by not defining journalism a priori, it allows us to adopt a bottom-up perspective that elucidates how the practice of journalism is the inherently provisional result of the ongoing collective negotiation of the activities, rules, routines, as well as definitions and emotions involved in doing journalism. Who is a journalist or what is journalism is a result of the research rather than the starting point.
This does not mean that everything is deemed journalism or that the term loses its distinctive value. However, to arrive at a definition the net is initially cast much wider than is common in current scholarship. Including anyone who considers themselves or is considered a journalist by others in the research and carefully examining these practices in close relation to the way they are understood and evaluated by the different actors involved, allows us to include a much larger variety of practices that are actually associated with journalism. Such an approach also provides us insight into the tension present in the field. For instance, by examining practices that present themselves as a form of journalism, but are not univocally accepted as such, it is possible to examine how the boundaries of journalism are negotiated – much like “tracing the network”, in ANT terms (Latour 2005), which proposes a similarly bottom-up way of identifying those actors who are relevant in the object of study (see, for instance, Anderson (2013) and Domingo, Masip & Costera Meijer (2015) for a fruitful application of this approach in journalism).
With the blurring of roles in journalism, the combining of professions (such as journalistic and marketing work, for instance), and range of actors that work outside of the traditional journalistic institutions (as freelancers, in start-ups, or nonpaid workers), it becomes increasingly important to look at how the “professional identity of journalists is discursively constructed” (Olausson 2017: 81) and how the activities and self-understanding (or ideology) inform one another. Caroline Fisher (2015: 376) looked at how journalists “perceived [sayings] and managed [doings] issues of conflict of interest when they entered journalism after working as a political media adviser” (our emphasis). Similarly, Lia-Paschalia Spyridou et al. (2013: 79), quoting Thomas Hanitzsch’s definition of who is a journalist highlights that journalistic culture “becomes manifest in the way journalists think and act”. Such a perspective shows how journalistic self-understanding and practice are intricately related and mutually constitutive.
Practice theory allows us to understand these elements – the way journalists do journalism and the way they talk about what they do – as mutually constituting the practice. These elements inform one another, even though activities and discourse do not always match; particularly in times of high commercial pressures, journalists cannot always perform journalism in the way that they think is “proper” (see for instance Witschge & Nygren 2009). It is important to highlight, as practice theory allows us to do, that journalists’ discourse on what they deem as “proper” journalism is not simply a neutral definition. Rather it conveys a normative stance and functions as important boundary work, determining who is considered a (good) journalist. At times it can even become an important marketing tool as well: The cases of French journalism start-up Mediapart and Dutch start-up De Correspondent show how their strong ideological positioning on what journalism should look like (and their aversion to mainstream journalism) has become an important part of their success. In this way, their (constructed) ideology is employed to position themselves among existing players (Wagemans, Witschge & Deuze 2016; Harbers 2016).
We see that the professional status of journalism, which has been a longstanding issue, and the questions of what is “proper” journalism and what sets journalists apart, have become ever more pressing with the entry of many new producers to the field (be they semi-professional amateurs (Nicey 2016), activist (Breindl 2016), sources (Carlson 2016), or citizen witnesses (Allan 2016)). Moreover, the many different work settings, and the ever more “liquid” nature of work practices (Deuze 2008) also pose challenges for the conceptualization of what is journalistic work, not just for who is a journalist. At the same time, we see that journalists self-identify strongly with the “profession”, referring to journalism as their “calling”, “duty” or “moral obligation” (Witschge 2013).
Practice theory helps us consider this attachment to the object of work, which is clearly present within journalism, as an integral part of the practice: it is this collective attachment “that sustains working practices and makes them change over time” (Gherardi 2009b: 537). Understanding research on journalism as a “theoretical and empirical inquiry on the attachment of subjects to the objects of their passion” would focus our attention on how journalists “put their passions into practice” (Gherardi 2009b: 537). Particularly in a time of precarious labor with less than ideal work conditions (with reorganization of newsrooms, layoffs and an increase of freelance or temporary contracts and unpaid work), viewing the practice of journalism through the lens of the passion driving the journalists (see Deuze & Witschge 2018), can further our understanding of the practice.
4.2The complex relation between normative ideals and everyday practices
Viewing journalism as practice – constituted both by the activities and the discourse on the activities – allows us to address the important question of how journalistic output comes into being, in such a way that we do not oversimplify or reduce the production process to a linear, rational, necessarily coherent or consistent set of actions. Despite – or maybe because – the influential understanding of journalism that developed over time (Hallin 1992), both in practice and theory, we emphasize the need to pay attention to the incongruences, tensions, and contradictions that are (also) part of the practice of journalism. Employing the lens of practice theory, in which practice is considered as “an array of understandings, rules, ends, projects, and even emotions” (Schatzki 2005: 481), we become more aware of the complex way in which the sayings and doings relate to each other and appreciate that this relation is not necessarily consistent.
We can come to understand, for instance, how implicit norms and routines, and even explicit rules that are in place in journalistic practice do not necessarily or entirely determine the outcome. As noted by David Ryfe (2006: 203), “something about the way news production is learned and enforced gives reporters a great deal of autonomy in choosing which rules to apply and when and how to apply them”. And indeed, as he points out, this raises the question “how do we conceptualize a rule such that it allows for both great consistency and great variability?” (ibid.). We would argue that this is where understanding journalism as practice constituted by a variety of elements and set in a specific context helps. This approach is particularly apt in paying the necessary “attention to the microstructure of news rules, and reporters’ negotiation of them in the act of producing the news” (ibid.: 204), thus providing insight into how rules and routines work as part of a broader ensemble that is journalism.
Such an approach allows us to view rules as only part of the elements that constitute and inform journalistic practices. Routines, definitions, emotions, and other elements of what is considered “proper” all are part of the practice that is journalism, and they can be contradictory, clashing or in sync. Viewing journalism as a practice, an ensemble of all these elements, gives us richer insight into whether, and if so, how abstract norms like factuality, impartiality, and engagement shape the activity of journalists and how, subsequently, the activity is translated into specific textual characteristics (Carpenter, Boehmer & Fico 2016).
4.3The site of journalism
Where journalism scholars have long looked for journalists within the newsroom, the newsroom no longer suffices as the sole place to define and locate journalism. Rather, we need new ways of understanding both traditional news organizations (with an increasingly networked nature, rather than a physical location where news work takes place (Deuze & Witschge 2018), as well as the startup culture that is becoming increasingly prevalent in the field of journalism (Bruno & Kleis Nielsen 2012), with the rise of the idea of the journalist as entrepreneur. Practice theory can help us in two ways here: it can provide a way to both understand and expand the concept of news organizations in such a way that it does justice to the emerging, evolving nature.
Rather than suggesting that we no longer need to pay attention to the news organizations in journalism, we suggest, without privileging the traditional newsroom to explore how different organizational formats help stabilize, form, or challenge journalistic practice: “social life (…) is inherently tied to a kind of context in which it transpires” (Schatzki 2005: 467). This context, the “site” of a practice, as Schatzki puts it, cannot simply be equated with a place, or a location, but should be regarded rather as encompassing the “arenas or broader sets of phenomena as part of which something – a building, an institution, an event – exists or occurs” (ibid.: 467–468). The changing nature of the newsroom, and rise of new organizational formats including start-up organizations, flex-working spaces, and home working, does not diminish the importance of the site of the practice. Rather, it asks of us to expand our traditional understanding of what constitutes the site or the context of journalism. Even though these spaces are less easily identified, they are crucial in understanding how the new activities and definitions of what is journalism and news work are taking shape.
In locating the site we need to not only consider the physical space in which journalism is produced, and pay attention to the way in which new activities and understandings are connected to new organizational structures. What forms, activities, rules, routines, emotions are emerging in the new spaces of journalism; how do they differ from those in traditional newsrooms, which parts of the practice are sustained, and which parts are altered and how, can all be considered through this practice lens.
4.4The role of materiality in the newsroom
As we highlighted in Section 2 of this chapter, one of the challenges in journalism studies is how to do justice to the material context of the production of journalism. The material context is always an important constituting part of any practice, but in particular with the recent and manifold changes to the material contexts in which journalism is produced it becomes even more pertinent to provide ample attention to this: Think of the new spaces of news production, whether the home, shared flex office spaces, cafés, or the converged and reorganized newsroom; the rise of digital technologies, including mobile devices, publishing platforms, or content management systems. As noted by De Maeyer (2016), there has been what we could call the “material turn” in journalism. She discusses how Actor Network Theory in particular has become an increasingly popular approach in Journalism Studies. This approach demands ample consideration for the role of non-human actors, and focuses researchers’ attention on the materiality in news production. While we embrace the call to pay attention to the material context of journalism, we propose that Schatzki’s humanists’ view on the ontology of the material context allows a more nuanced and integral view of the nature of the role of material context of journalism, including technologies, physical settings, and other material aspects.
As Schatzki (2001a: 20) highlights, practices “are generally construed as materially mediated nexuses of activity” and for most practice theorists the focus continues to lie with the human. The application of ANT in journalism studies has led to many important insights and rightly points our focus to consider the material dimension of journalistic practice (see, for instance, Hemmingway (2008) for a very detailed, micro-level analysis of journalistic practices and the role played by technology). However, we follow Schatzki (2001a: 20) in attributing a different role to the material level, and thus move away from one of the main principles that constitute the post-humanist understanding of the status of the material, namely the principle of symmetry. This principle posits that “concepts hitherto reserved for humans – agency, intention, purpose, knowledge, voice, etc. – also apply to nonhumans” (ibid.).
In the practice theory approach put forward here, it is acknowledged that “human agency both arises from bodily systems and is tied to ‘external’ arrangements of humans and nonhumans” but still places agency mainly with humans (ibid.). This means that materiality is not researched separately, but is rather considered as a constitutive element and integral part of practice, and as such needs to be considered in conjunction with the other aspects of practice – the two cannot be separated. Rather than privileging one or the other, we need to find ways in which both social and material factors are considered in an integrated manner, which again comes down to viewing the practice at different levels, both the micro and the macro level (see also Leonardi & Barley 2010). In the last section we will consider the methodological implications more in-depth.
5Concluding remarks: A note on method
In this chapter, we began with highlighting the challenges that journalism studies faces and argued we need an approach to studying journalism that views the practice as both a discursive endeavor and one constituted by activities, as such paying attention to the many elements that constitute the journalistic practice, including the “array of understandings, rules, ends, projects, and even emotions” (Schatzki 2005: 481). We have given an overview of what a practice theory approach entails, and discussed a number of key issues existing in the field that such an approach would help address. We would like to conclude here with some reflections on the methodological implications of adopting a practice theory approach. Though practice theory is not a method, nor comes with a specific set of methodological tools attached to it, adopting this approach does have implications for the empirical research done in journalism studies.
As we noted in the above, by focusing on the activities and definitions that interact and together shape the shared practices, practice theory allows for an important connection between the micro and macro levels of analysis. Though the focus is on the human activities and understandings of journalists, practice theory is a social rather than individualist approach. To ultimately transcend the individual level by identifying the shared nature of activities and discourses, we need a thorough understanding of the micro-level activities. In line with the argument of Davide Nicolini (2009: 1392), we argue that to understand journalism as a practice we need to “zoom in” by mapping the variety of activities, experiences, conceptions, and material tools that journalists employ. This is needed for a “detailed study of its discursive and material accomplishment”, which can explain the preference for ethnomethodology of practice-based studies (Gherardi 2009a: 118).
Indeed, gaining a thorough understanding of the everyday activities (which for journalism would also include the journalistic output produced), the discourses (including writings on the journalistic profession), and the material context constituting a practice, “requires considerable ‘participant observation’: watching participants’ activities, interacting with them (e.g., asking questions), and – at least ideally – attempting to learn their practices” (Schatzki 2005: 476). Moreover, we need to gain insight into the “names participants use for their activities [which] are an important clue for identifying existing practices” (ibid.) –, in terms of Gherardi (2009b: 537), we need to learn the shared “vocabulary for appraisal”. To gain the detailed knowledge of the “subjects’ lives and worlds,” Schatzki (2012: 24) argues, “the investigator has no choice but to do ethnography, that is, to practice interaction-observation”. Or, put differently: “There is no alternative to hanging out with, joining in with, talking to and watching, and getting together the people concerned” (ibid.: 25). It goes beyond the scope of this chapter to address the specific issues involved in applying ethnography in journalism, identifying the sites for ethnography with the multitude of spaces where journalism is made, but Robinson and Metzler (2016) provide a very helpful consideration of this.
Gaining a detailed understanding of the individual activities and discourses through ethnography is only the first step in getting to the practice. The next step is to identify the shared or collective part of the practice, which Nicolini (2009: 1392) calls “zooming out”, the switching of “theoretical lenses and following, or trailing, the connections between practices”. As such we need concepts that help us understand the way activities and understandings emerge within a particular setting and time-frame, and even more so, how they become “translocal phenomena” (ibid.): How does the “here-and-now of the situated practising and the elsewhere-and-then of other practices” interrelate (ibid.)? How do observed activities and definitions relate to each other and how are they impacted by already established understandings and performances of journalism?
To help gain such broader insight into the structuring and governing processes and elements, and gain insight into the shared nature of practices, it is helpful to include not only ethnographic approaches looking at the details at particular sites, but also include quantitative methods to gain an overview of the “quantifiable features of large classes of phenomena” (Schatzki 2012: 25). Such a call for statistics is not aimed at “mathematical modelling and computer simulations”, but to gain “overviews of social affairs” by mapping how prevalent the practices identified through in-depth qualitative research are on a larger scale (ibid.).
As our concluding remark, we would like to highlight our own role as researchers in the “forming” of practices. Our study of practices is not disconnected from the way a practice is constituted and sustained (Gherardi 2009a). We do not only describe but also inscribe the practice; we take part in the discursive process that constitutes and shapes a practice. Examining a practice means identifying it as such and therefore, like “genres only exist in so far as a social group declares and enforces the rules that constitute them” (Hodge & Kress quoted in Chandler 1997: 3), researchers contribute to and sustain the way a practice is understood and enacted (Gherardi 2009a). We hope that by calling for this bottom-up practice theory approach, we can help push the agenda for more awareness of the boundary work that is being done in the field, not the least by academics (Witschge et al. 2016). Giving ample attention to both the activities and the discursive work that constitute the journalistic practice, we can start to acknowledge the varied and dynamic nature that journalism is.
Acknowledgements
This chapter is published as part of the project “Entrepreneurship at Work” funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO, number 276-45-003).
Further reading
Insightful introductions to and accounts of practice theory can be found in the edited collection ‘The practice turn in contemporary theory’ (edited by Schatzki, Knorr Cetina and von Savigni, 2001). For a specific focus on what practice theory has to offer for media and journalism studies, Couldry (2004) and Postill (2010), and Ahva (2017) respectively provide helpful entry points. Edited books by Peters and Broersma (2013, 2016), Boczkowski and Anderson (2016), and Witschge et al. (2016) provide important theoretical perspectives on the transformation and changes journalism is experiencing. Zelizer (2013) offers an insightful exploration of the limitations of normative approaches linking democracy and journalism, and Deuze and Witschge (2018) discuss the limitations of a fixed definition of journalism. Wahl-Jorgensen (2009) and Anderson (2011) provide a critical perspective on the traditional newsroom-centric approach of journalism scholarship. A useful introduction into materiality and why it matters for journalism can be found in De Maeyer (2016).
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