16

Reconstructing Accountability

Essential Journalistic Reorientations

Martin Eide

While the institution of journalism is in the midst of profound reorientations, lots of people are concerned about the future of quality journalism and democracy. Many believe that high-quality news matters. A prominent spokesman of this view, President Barack Obama, puts it like this:

The journalism at stake is one that provides facts and constitutes the basis for an informed public. It is a journalism that feeds democracy, performs a crucial watchdog role, and holds the powerful accountable. The printed newspaper has traditionally been the key arena for this kind of accountability journalism. But during the last decades, new technology and new forms of communication have provided new platforms and new opportunities for serious journalism and democratic discourse. Simultaneously, the economic foundation for this kind of journalism in traditional as well as new media is facing severe challenges. This ambiguity generates certain professional tensions, and most prominent in this regard is the tension between the democratic functions of journalism and economic constraints.

The corporatization of the media and the logic of commercial journalism paved the way for the crisis of journalism long before the arrival of the Internet. Recently, this crisis has been intensified through a persistent decline in newspaper readership and advertising revenues – surrounded by an unprecedented media convergence with the Internet as a driving force. Together these developments have upset mainstream media practices to a new level of ambiguity. Journalism's ontology is challenged. Journalistic reorientations – including a revival of the ideals of the Fourth Estate – have become critically necessary. One thing is that journalism must hold those in power accountable. It is as imperative that journalism itself must be held accountable by an informed citizenry. In an age of essential journalistic reorientations, accountability and the social contract of journalism need to be reconstructed and sustained.

To succeed in this endeavor does not necessarily mean rescuing the institution of the printed newspaper, although the newspaper has been regarded as the main carrier of the values of accountability journalism. “Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to a New Era of Corruption)” is Paul Starr's catchy title for an essay on the newspaper crisis published in the New Republic (March 4, 2009). He points to the danger reduced news coverage represents for the integrity of government. “It is not just a speculative proposition that corruption is more likely to flourish when those in power have less reason to fear exposure,” Starr writes. Newspapers' role as a civic alarm system, functioning as “our eyes on the state, our check on private abuses,” is in peril, according to Starr.

To a certain extent it is true that it has mainly been in the print media and in public service-oriented television and radio corporations that we have found the qualities and ideals Starr refers to. The “old media” have, so far and with some conspicuous exceptions, served as agenda setters for “new media.” News items that pop up in different websites and blogs have typically evolved in traditional media of journalism. In a required reconstruction of accountability journalism, however, “new media” will have an indispensable and autonomous role to play, although the quality of the actual journalism will be more crucial than the media platform. The content is more decisive than the carrier.

It is journalism, not the printed newspaper per se, that needs to be sustained. It is the professionalism and the values of the institution of journalism that are of vital importance, regardless of whether journalism is performed on the web or on paper. Journalism has to prove its indispensability as a public good and as an essential element in democracy's infrastructure. In a new media situation, journalism must continuously reconstruct its accountability.

What is accountability journalism more precisely? We can start with a synthetic list provided by Robert McChesney and John Nichols (2010), defining what they label “healthy journalism”:

1. It must provide a rigorous account of people who are in power and people who wish to be in power, in the government, corporate and nonprofit sectors.
2. It must regard the information needs of all citizens as legitimate.
3. It must have a plausible method to separate truth from lies, or at least to prevent liars from being unaccountable and leading nations into catastrophes – particularly wars, economic crises and communal discord.
4. It must produce a wide range of informed opinions on the most important issues of our times – not only the transitory concerns of the moment, but also challenges that loom on the horizon. These issues cannot be determined primarily by what people in power are talking about. Journalism must provide the nation's early warning system, so problems can be anticipated, studied, debated and addressed before they grow to crisis proportions. (pp. 163–164)

This list covers fairly well journalism's crucial role in holding other social agents accountable and keeping the citizenry informed. It needs one important amendment, though: journalism itself must be held accountable in relation to its social obligations and ethical standards. Some kind of an accountability system must be activated to provide a rigorous account of journalism and to maintain a lively debate about journalistic quality.

Already, there is a wide range of so-called “media accountability systems” available. The phrase refers to different kinds of instruments to improve the dialogue between journalism and society. These instruments have been categorized into internal, external, and cooperative systems (Brurås, 2009). Internal versions may consist of systems for corrections and complaints, internal ombudsmen, efforts toward transparency in the editorial process, and annual accounts of journalistic shortcomings and achievements. External accountability systems may include different bodies for media criticism (such as watch blogs) and watchdog institutes. Cooperative systems may include reader panels, external ombudsmen, public hearings, and complaint channels.

In the early 1990s, the French media scholar Claude-Jean Bertrand counted 40 different versions of media accountability systems. Later on, he extended the list to 110 examples (cf. Brurås, 2009). Media accountability systems address the prevailing need for the legitimization and justification of journalistic practice and the social role of the journalistic institution. They have been considered a “third force” of media regulations, between the law and the market, or as a middle course between the bureaucracy and the jungle, to paraphrase Claude-Jean Bertrand (2003, p. ix).

Journalism studies also faces fundamental challenges in a time when the phenomenon and concept of journalism are contested. An essential challenge is to understand journalistic agency in a time when the profession is in flux. Sustainable research of journalism should also engage in field analyses in order to grasp changing boundaries and oppositions in the journalistic field. But, and most importantly, journalism studies has to address the interplay between structure and action in an intelligent way. A quest for a “third way” might also be relevant in this domain.

Against this backdrop, this chapter elaborates further on the unsettling situation for quality journalism and some of the accompanying and essential reorientations, from a normative and institutional perspective, along three dimensions. First, the political economy of accountability journalism is considered, with an emphasis on proposals concerning public subsidies and state intervention to save accountability journalism. Second, a few points will be made concerning professionalism and journalism's normative foundation. The key issue here will be the changing relation between journalists and their audiences (or “the people formerly known as the audience,” as the popular saying goes). Third, some future challenges for journalism studies will be emphasized, with a focus on the pressing theoretical need to understand journalistic agency under the new circumstances.

On the Political Economy of Accountability Journalism

The main feature of the traditional business model for producing news was that advertisers paid media organizations that provided them with desirable audiences, while these audiences were “provided with public affairs-oriented material that contributed to their ability to make the informed choices that are the hallmark of democratic political life” (Freedman, 2010, p. 39). The newspapers, literally, have been market intermediaries, connecting sellers and potential buyers, and as a byproduct the advertisers subsidized the production of relevant news for the citizens. “If there is one overriding factor behind the current financial crisis of the press,” Paul Starr (2009) states, “it is simply that the Internet has undermined the newspaper's role as market intermediary. Advertisers do not need to piggyback on the news to reach consumers, and consumers have other ways to find out about products and sales.”

In this situation, there is no reason to believe that advertisers will return to newspapers, and resources for journalism are now disappearing from old media faster than new media can develop them. Consequently, journalism's traditional business model might be beyond a point of no return, and the political economy of journalism is changing in ways that jeopardize the future of quality journalism. There is, furthermore, not much faith in the obvious method for generating income from media content, erecting “pay walls” and charging the user. Niche newspapers, like the Financial Times (UK) and the Wall Street Journal, are among the few that have successfully charged their readers for web access. When a major player like Rupert Murdoch introduced the “pay wall” scheme in 2010 for some of his British quality papers, The Times and the Sunday Times, the strategy was met with curious interest in the news business, but very few regarded it as a viable solution. Earlier, the New York Times had failed with a similar attempt. Still, there is light at the end of the tunnel, and there are optimists out there – on behalf of sustainable quality journalism.

I will refer to two different optimistic accounts, which both advocate a public contribution in order to solve the crisis, but to different extents. One approach talks about a reconstruction of journalism, the other sticks to a rhetoric of life and death. The first take is provided in the report entitled “The Reconstruction of American Journalism” by Leonard Downie, Jr. and Michael Schudson (2009). The second recommendation is put forward by Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols (2010) in their book The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again.

Downie and Schudson state that they share the distrust US citizens tend to have of direct government involvement or political influence in independent news reporting. But, they maintain: “this should not preclude government support for news reporting any more than it has for the arts, the humanities, and sciences, all of which receive some government support” (Downie & Schudson, 2009, p. 72). The recommendation advocated, then, is a varied mixture of ways to support news reporting, which must include nonmarket sources like philanthropy and government.

McChesney and Nichols (2010) issue a bolder diagnosis and propose a somewhat stronger medicine. They contend that it is now necessary to “face the hard and cold truth” and accept that “journalism is a public good that is no longer commercially viable” (p. 4). They state that while it “may have been true that, for much of this country's history, commercial interests provided sufficient resources for the provision of journalism, this is no longer the case” (p. 154). They argue that it is now of major importance for the state “to institute policies to aggressively create and support journalism” (p. 110). In a reinterpretation of US media history, the authors also reject the myth of “laissez-faire” and “government-hands-off” and the tendency to hide direct and indirect press subsidies. Why institute a more central role for the state to support the journalistic enterprise? In response, McChesney and Nichols deliver a surprising answer: it is the American way.

Neither of the two academic partnerships, however, proposes a solution similar to the Scandinavian countries, with direct state subsidies to the press, although they note that those subsidies have not affected journalists' willingness to provide criticism of governments. The Scandinavian model – or the democratic corporatist model, to use the concept proposed by Hallin and Mancini (2004) – is characterized by a high level of journalistic autonomy. Countries in Northern and Central Europe (Scandinavia included) “also tend to combine strong protection of press freedom with a significant level of regulation – again reflecting the assumption that media are a social institution and not simply a private business” (Hallin & Mancini, 2004, p. 163). The democratic corporatist model is characterized historically by a high level of journalistic professionalization and by “a strong tradition of limits on state power,” combined with “strong welfare state policies and other forms of active state intervention” (Hallin & Mancini, 2004, p. 145).

A lesson to be learned from this particular model of media and politics is the possibility of a coexistence of an active state and strong accountability journalism. And it is interesting to witness a new openness regarding future business models and public support of journalism at the other side of the Atlantic.

While McChesney and Nichols write vividly about the current crisis, and even about the death of US journalism, they simultaneously stress the potential for a new and better journalism in “the age of the possible.” It is not a matter of just saving journalism “but to provide America – and the world – with a greater journalism than any of us has ever known” (p. 229). In a similar vein, Leonard Downie and Michael Schudson remind us that the means of news reporting are being reinvented, and the character of news is being reconstructed. In these exciting but challenging times for the institution of journalism, new modes for financing accountability journalism are also being implemented and explored.

Downie and Schudson document a wide variety of such initiatives to provide accountability journalism. Many of them have a local basis, many specialize in investigative reporting, many are based on collaboration between professionals and amateurs, and many have a nonprofit foundation and approach. A majority of efforts like these can be conceived of as a possible reconstruction of accountability journalism. They are responses to an overall structural challenge in the current situation for quality journalism, to preserve “independent, original, credible reporting, whether or not it is popular or profitable, and regardless of the medium in which it appears” (Downie & Schudson, 2009, p. 12). Simultaneously, journalism's professionalism and its normative foundation are at stake.

On Professionalism and Journalism's Normative Foundation

The professional framework of journalism is challenged when the relationship between journalism and its audiences is in a phase of transition. The whole idea of professionalism is under siege in the age of the amateur and the citizen journalist. One response is to redefine the role of the journalist and to engage in dialogues and conversations with “the people formerly known as the audience.” The ways in which this is done should be subjected to investigation and discussion.

The participatory turn in the relation between professionals and amateurs in the field of journalism represents an essential journalistic reorientation. Prevailing slogans for this reorientation are “pro-am journalism” (where pro-am is short for professional–amateur), participatory journalism, and citizen journalism. Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian in the UK, speaks about “the mutualization” of the newspaper, a process in which “our readers have become part of what we do.”

Obviously, this is a success story with a considerable potential to inspire further mutualization of journalism and new efforts toward dialogue between journalists and audience members. The flourishing of so-called user-generated content and blogging stimulates a debate about journalistic expertise: what is it, and where is it to be found?

Christopher Anderson (2008) here points to an intriguing paradox at the core of the journalistic professionalization project. While professionalization is about drawing lines of demarcation against other professions and agents, journalists' professional identity also consists in keeping the professional borders open. For instance, there is a tendency to celebrate journalists who have entered the profession as outsiders. Furthermore, Anderson points to the still deep ambivalence among journalists toward the notion of the “journalism school.” In short, Anderson (2008) writes, journalistic expertise “seems as generous as it does jealous” (p. 263).

The mutualization of journalism also represents a generous approach toward the empowered audience and the providers of user-generated content. Journalists have to take on a new role, it is frequently argued; they can no longer act as teachers and lecturers but should engage in a dialogue with readers, listeners, and viewers. Journalism should be more of a seminar than a lecture (Gillmor, 2006, p. xxiv). Here the journalist is conceived of as a guide and a catalyst in a user-generated traffic, where the users are equal partners in a joint venture with professional journalists. But this is a false presumption, in my view, since the journalist necessarily has a different assignment and different responsibilities than the audience member or “user” of new media. There will always be a distinction between the professional and the amateur, and this relation will always be one of power and authority. In a seminar, a professor has a different obligation and responsibility than the student.

The extent to which we actually can witness a breakthrough for participatory journalism will vary from one country to another and from one context to another. Different structural features have to be taken into account in concrete studies of participatory journalism practices. Domingo and colleagues (2008) instructively demonstrate this in a study of participatory forms of journalism in 16 online newspapers in Europe and the United States. In all the newspapers they studied, only the interpretation stage was found to be significantly open to citizen participation. Beyond the comment section of the published articles, audience participation was relatively rare and diverse. Domingo et al. (2008) suggest that online newspapers' attitudes toward audience participation “are locally constructed not only in every country but also in every case, apparently shaped by specific contextual factors” (p. 335). Among such factors the following are emphasized: professional singularities, market characteristics, social particularities, and regulatory differences (p. 337).

The debate on citizen journalism and “pro-am” journalism tends to gravitate between two extreme positions. On the one hand, it is argued that a “cult of the amateur” undermines professional journalism. As a vibrant exponent of this view, Andrew Keen (2008) contends that “the ubiquity of free, user-generated content threatens the very core of our professional institutions” (p. 44). On the other hand, contributions from amateurs are celebrated for their journalistic merits and contributions to the “lifeblood of our political system” and to the “engine for our intellectual vitality” (Gant, 2007, p. 200). Journalism is a practice, an activity, not an institution, and, as Scott Gant asserts, we are all journalists now.

In order to reconstruct and maintain accountability journalism, it is, in my view, important to stick to the concept of journalism as an institution. It is in the institutional arrangement built around journalism that we find the obligations to and standards of accountability journalism. Decent journalism requires a decent journalistic institution. Citizen journalists and amateurs of different kinds, of course, can and often do deliver quality journalism. They are also free to invoke the values and norms of the journalistic institution. They might even claim the same rights as professional journalists, like “shield laws” and access privileges. But so far we do not, as citizens and news consumers, have the same right to expect citizen journalists to be committed to the values of public service and professional journalism, unless they explicitly subscribe to these values. We cannot hold any citizen journalists accountable in the same way as we do professional journalists. And we cannot expect any citizen journalist to be sanctioned when he or she commits journalistic errors and does not meet required ethical and professional standards.

The subtitle of Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel's The Elements of Journalism (2001) reads: “What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect.” Explications of what citizens should expect of journalism can be read as an outline of journalism's social contract. This contract can also be extracted from codes of ethics for journalism and other media accountability systems. Kovach and Rosenstiel's well-founded version states that “the purpose of journalism is to provide people with the information they need to be free and self-governing,” and that in order to fulfill this task:

1. Journalism's first obligation is to the truth.
2. Its first loyalty is to citizens.
3. Its essence is a discipline of verification.
4. Its practitioners must maintain independence from those they cover.
5. It must serve as an independent monitor of power.
6. It must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise.
7. It must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant.
8. It must keep the news comprehensive and proportional.
9. Its practitioners must be allowed to exercise their personal conscience. (pp. 12–13)

The normative foundations of accountability journalism are implied in the concept of the Fourth Estate. Of course, journalism's watchdog role and the idea of journalism as a public good can be, and often are, mobilized in strategic action toward commercial ends. This does not make the ideal less valuable, even though many will find the following quote from Rupert Murdoch revealing: “Unless we can return to principles of public service, we will lose our claim to be the Fourth Estate. What right have we to speak in the public interest when, too often, we are motivated by personal gain?” (quoted in Schultz, 1998, p. 15). These words were uttered in 1961 – long before Murdoch became the media tycoon he is today. The legitimacy force in the concept of the Fourth Estate could be used and abused then, as it can be now. This calls for a critical treatment of the ideal; it does not mean that the ideal is obsolete.

On Journalism Studies in the Age of Reorientation

In understanding the making and maintenance of accountability journalism, I want to turn to the long-standing question in social theory of the relationship between structure and agency. The effort to construct a form of accountability journalism can find inspiration in scholarly efforts “to overcome theoretically the practical contradiction of the human condition: the contradiction between people making history (society, system, structure etc.) and history (society, system, structure etc.) making people,” to quote Zygmunt Bauman (1989, p. 36). There is also something to be learned from Anthony Giddens (1979) and his persistent work to formulate a structuration theory. Furthermore, we can draw upon the economic historian Christopher Lloyd (1986, 1993) and structurism or methodological structurism.

In his reflections on historical sociology, Philip Abrams maintains that “in terms of their fundamental preoccupations, history and sociology are and always have been the same thing” (1982, p. x). His argument is that “at the heart of both disciplines is a common project: a sustained, diverse attempt to deal with [. . .] the problematic of structuring” (1982, p. x). Both disciplines are concerned with “the puzzle of human agency,” and they both try to approach agency through an understanding of “the process of social structuring” (Abrams, 1982, p. x).

This very general proposition might appear as a pure abstraction with minimal relevance for practical research, but I would argue otherwise. Empirical historical and sociological research on journalism can be enriched through accompanying reflections on the enigma of human action, on “shaping of action by structure and transforming of structure by action” (Abrams, 1982, p. 3, emphasis added). An awareness of this problematic can also be instrumental in avoiding different versions of determinism, be they technological or economic.

By conceiving of structures as both a medium for and a result of action – by viewing structures as potentially both constraining and enabling – we are approaching a valid understanding of a changing journalism in a changing society, and we are doing this without ruling out the individual actors who make a difference in the process. The intriguing interplay of material, institutional, and symbolic relationships is at stake. According to Graham Murdock (1991), “the trick we need to learn is how to keep these two faces of communications – the material and the symbolic – in play at the same time and to explore their interplay without collapsing either one into the other” (p. 54). He further emphasizes that this ambition confronts us precisely with “the central theoretical dilemma of the human sciences – how to conceptualize the relations between social structures, cultural formations, and situated action” (p. 54).

In accordance with Giddens's classic work on structure and action in the 1970s, we can conceive these concepts not as contradictory but as complementary terms, as faces of the duality of structure. By this notion, Giddens (1979) wants to express that “social structures both are constituted by human agency, at the same time that structures are the very medium for this constitution” (p. 5).

The interdependency of structure and action means that structure cannot be understood as synonymous with constraint (system compulsion) – structure is both force and choice; both restriction and incitement. Structures exist only as structural properties in a social system, which are organized as regular social practices. A typical expression of such structured social practices is an institution, which must be understood as a subcategory of system, that is, it must have an extension in time and space and be recognized by a majority of the members of a society. Journalism can serve as an example of such an institution, with its structured professional rules and resources.

In general there are two kinds of rules in Giddens's account, normative elements and codes of signification. Resources are also of two kinds: authoritative (or symbolic) resources and allocative (or material) resources. I find it useful that this conception of resources includes both symbolic and material features. In order to understand journalism and journalistic reorientations, we have to take into account the different versions of rules and resources. Furthermore, we might be able to distinguish between enabling and constraining aspects of different kinds of rules and resources. Such an analytical tool might be useful in order to consider the impact of the changing political economy as well as changing professional values, for example, with reference to lists of journalistic norms and qualities, like those provided by McChesney and Nichols and Kovach and Rosenstiel, discussed previously. The reconstruction of accountability is an active structuration where agents draw upon available rules and resources. Some resources, like the economic ones, might be constraining in relation to accountability journalism, while others, like professional values, might be enabling.

In his own writing, Giddens de-emphasizes the material resources to an unfortunate degree. Nor is he necessarily successful in his efforts to make “structure” a flexible concept detached from every aspect of constraint. Problems with Giddens's conception of structure, consequently, have led even sympathetic critics to prefer other conceptions of patterns of relations, like Norbert Elias's concept of “figurations” (Bauman, 1989) or a concept of “formations” (Murdock, 1993).

Elias's approach offers the advantage of a processual perspective embedded through empirical studies. In Elias's view, social phenomena “in reality can only be observed as evolving and having evolved” (1994, p. 186). To restrict the analysis to an either-or question or “to two antithetical states represents an unnecessary impoverishment of sociological perception on both empirical and theoretical levels” (p. 186). Figurations are in motion, they change, turn into other figurations, and it is therefore a research challenge “to develop one's own imaginative capacity that one is able to think in figurations, and, moreover, in figurations whose normal characteristics include a tendency to change” (p. 215).

Lloyd's (1993) project is to conceptualize and discuss methodological structurism, which he finds existing today “quite widely as an unexamined assumption within the explanations of many historians” (p. 7). Structures exist, as ensembles of rules, roles, relations, and meanings; they are real entities that are products neither of the theorists' nor of the agents' imaginations. They are not “reducible to characteristics of individuals or patterns of individual behaviour,” but they influence “the behaviour, beliefs, and understanding of persons, and they are knowable through the behaviour, products, and utterances of persons” (p. 39).

These approaches break with methodological individualism, with the idea that social categories and explanations can be reduced to descriptions in terms of individual predicates. Nor are these approaches compatible with traditional structure-oriented approaches, where the acting agents are seen as puppets in a structural web of influences. A preoccupation with the problematic of structuring can be a sensitizing device in attempts to come to terms with, or even transcend, the familiar dichotomy “creativity vs. constraint.” Rules and resources surrounding and present in the newsroom should be conceived as both media for and results of journalists' action. Different journalistic criteria are probably more fruitfully understood as “rules” – in Giddens's sense of generalizable procedures – than as causal explanations of journalistic behavior.

Furthermore, as Anderson (2008) emphasizes in a call for studies of changes in the “knowledge base” out of which journalists justify their work, knowledge and expertise are not static, ahistorical entities that occupational groups can seize. On the contrary, they are flexible rules and resources on which the agents can draw in their structuring of new professional procedures.

A promising analytical strategy could, then, be described as an institutional approach informed by a structuring perspective. The object of study is current and historical changes in social relations, in figurations in the journalistic institution and between this institution and society – for example, in the form of relations toward other agents in the journalistic field, toward the market, media owners, political actors of different kinds, toward journalistic norms and ideals, and so on.

Here, I have referred to theory on a relatively general level, and of course it would be possible to pursue the task of understanding the development of efforts to reconstruct accountability journalism further, inspired by more concrete theories, for instance, in the realm of political economy. In that case, simplistic readings based in economical determinism could be carefully avoided. This endeavor will then be in compliance with modern versions of political economy, like the one advocated by Peter Golding and Graham Murdock (1991) using the buzz phrase “critical political economy.” They emphasize, precisely with reference to the work of Anthony Giddens, the need to integrate approaches of agency and structure, and the accompanying need to “think of economic determination in a more flexible way” (Golding & Murdock, 1991, p. 19). It certainly has been a problem in analyses inspired by political economy that the agents' actions have disappeared or appeared as pure reflections of the structural circumstances. The interaction between structure and action – the structuring – tends to disappear.

Furthermore, in a political-economical vein we can learn a great deal from concrete studies of commercial journalism, like John McManus's Market-Driven Journalism (1994). McManus is relatively refined in his distinguishing of a journalistic logic on the one side, and market logic on the other. However, in my view he gets too mechanistic and simplistic in his analysis of how structural circumstances shape the news. Through references to the problematic of structuring, this kind of study could be developed in a fruitful way.

A more recent study of “new media” and “old news” is also promising in its efforts to combine structure and action. Natalie Fenton's volume, New Media, Old News: Journalism and Democracy in the Digital Age (2010), seeks to

There are, as we have seen, reasons to be concerned about the future of accountability journalism. There are also reasons to believe that this journalism – the journalism that feeds democracy – probably will be conducted in the future. Accountability will be reconstructed by professional journalists and by amateurs, separately and together. In a digital age and in an era of essential reorientations, core values of the institution of journalism are in need of active reinterpretations and support. In order to understand and sustain necessary reconstructions of accountability journalism, researchers have to account for an intriguing interplay between agency and structures.

REFERENCES

Abrams, P. (1982). Historical sociology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Anderson, C. (2008). Journalism: Expertise, authority, and power in democratic life. Notes towards an analysis. In D. Hesmondhalgh & J. Toynbee (Eds.), The media and social theory (pp. 248–264). New York, NY: Routledge.

Bauman, Z. (1989). Hermeneutics and modern social theory. In D. Held & J. B. Thompson (Eds.), Social theory of modern societies: Anthony Giddens and his critics (pp. 34–55). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Bertrand, C.-J. (2003). An arsenal for democracy: Media accountability systems. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

Brurås, S. (2009). “Media accountability systems”: Regulerende krefter mellom marked og lov [“Media accountability systems”: Regulating forces between market and law]. Norsk medietidsskrift, 16(2), 120–139.

Domingo, D., Quandt, T., Heinonen, A., Paulussen, S., Singer, J. B., & Vujnovic, M. (2008). Participatory journalism practices in the media and beyond: An international comparative study of initiatives in online newspapers. Journalism Practice, 2(3), 326–342.

Downie, Jr., L., & Schudson, M. (2009, October 19). The reconstruction of American journalism. Columbia Journalism Review. Retrieved from http://www.cjr.org/reconstruction/the_reconstruction_of_american.php

Elias, N. (1994). Über den Prozess der Zivilisation. Basel: Haus zum Falker. (Original work published 1939)

Fenton, N. (2007). Bridging the mythical divide: Political economy and cultural studies approaches to the media. In E. Devereux (Ed.), Issues and key debates in media studies (pp. 7–31). London, UK: Sage.

Fenton, N. (2010). Drowning or waving? New media, journalism and democracy. In N. Fenton (Ed.), New media, old news: Journalism and democracy in the digital age (pp. 3–16). London, UK: Sage.

Freedman, D. (2010). The political economy of the “new” news environment. In N. Fenton (Ed.), New media, old news: Journalism and democracy in the digital age (pp. 35–50). London, UK: Sage.

Gant, S. (2007). We're all journalists now: The transformation of the press and reshaping of the law in the Internet age. New York, NY: Free Press.

Giddens, A. (1979). Central problems in social theory. London, UK: Macmillan.

Gillmor, D. (2006). We the media: Grassroots journalism by the people for the people. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media.

Golding, P., & Murdock, G. (1991). Culture, communications, and political economy. In J. Curran & M. Gurevitch (Eds.), Mass media and society(pp. 60–83). London, UK: Edward Arnold.

Hallin, D. C., & Mancini, P. (2004). Comparing media systems: Three models of media and politics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Keen, A. (2008). The cult of the amateur. New York, NY: Doubleday.

Kovach, B., & Rosenstiel, T. (2001). The elements of journalism: What newspeople should know and the public should expect. New York, NY: Three Rivers Press.

Lloyd, C. (1986). Explanation in social history. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Lloyd, C. (1993). The structures of history. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

McChesney, R. W., & Nichols, J. (2010). The death and life of American journalism: The media revolution that will begin the world again. Philadelphia, PA: Perseus.

McManus, J. (1994). Market-driven journalism: Let the citizen beware. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Murdock, G. (1991). Communications, modernity and the human sciences. In H. Rønning & K. Lundby (Eds.), Media and communication: Readings in methodology, history and culture (pp. 53–64). Oslo, Norway: Norwegian University Press.

Murdock, G. (1993). Communications and the constitution of modernity. Media, Culture and Society, 15, 521–539.

Rusbridger, A. (2009, October 19). First read: The mutualized future is bright. Columbia Journalism Review. Retrieved from http://www.cjr.org/reconstruction/the_mutualized_future_is_brigh.php

Schultz, J. (1998). Reviving the Fourth Estate: Democracy, accountability and the media. Melbourne, Australia: Cambridge University Press.

Starr, P. (2009, March 4). Goodbye to the age of newspapers (Hello to a new era of corruption). New Republic. Retrieved from http://www.tnr.com/article/goodbye-the-age-newspapers-hello-new-era-corruption