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Why Has News Production in the United States Remained Stable at a Time of Great Change?
ABSTRACT
This chapter canvases the literature in the sociology of news production for explanations as to why, in the face of great change around them, American newspapers have failed to innovate. It finds three sorts of explanations in this literature: journalists are anchored to habits; they have deep investments in traditional practices and values; and they routinely re-enact long-standing definitions of what journalism is and of what it is for. Each explanation is elucidated through examples taken from the author's recent ethnographic work in several newsrooms.
According to many observers, journalism in the United States is undergoing a profound transformation. The argument rests principally on the new possibilities for cultural production brought on by the Internet. The Internet opens the doors into the field of journalism to many new entrants, thereby displacing journalists from their traditional role as gatekeepers of public conversation. As a multimedia networked medium, for example, the Internet creates the possibility of nonlinear – in other words non-authorial – storytelling (Pavlik, 2001). It allows “people formerly known as the audience” to produce their own news (Gillmor, 2004). It gives political actors an opportunity to reach their constituencies without the mediation of journalists (Bimber, 2003). It changes the way in which knowledge in public life is produced, aggregated, and brought to bear on governmental policymaking (Noveck, 2009). And it transforms the business model of journalism, which hinges on journalism's ability to serve as a funnel between advertisers and consumers (Anderson, 2009; Jarvis, 2009; Tapscott & Williams, 2006). The upshot is that the Internet has ushered in an age of “mass amateurization,” as Clay Shirky (2008, p. 71) puts it, a time when “anyone can be publisher [. . .] [ergo] anyone can be a journalist.”
Yet, despite this great upheaval, most descriptions of the practice of news-gathering and reporting find that it is stubbornly unchanged. Journalists still rely on the same sources, especially government agencies, as principal sources of news (see content analyses by Chung, 2007; Paterson, 2007; Quandt, 2008). Their definitions of news and newsworthiness, for instance through immediacy, impact, uniqueness, human interest, and the like – which have been taught in introduction to journalism classes for decades – remain essentially in place (see Leetaru, 2009). Conceptions of the journalist's role still revolve around long-standing values like objectivity, factuality, balance, and neutrality (see O'Sullivan & Heinonen, 2008; Paterson & Domingo, 2008). This is true even for “citizen journalists,” who see themselves and their work mostly in traditional terms (see Ryfe & Mensing, 2010). The presentation of news is changing a bit more. News-writing today is more informal and conversational than in the past, and more likely to incorporate multimedia elements. But these are changes of style rather than of substance. Despite the challenges posed by the Internet, the evidence indicates that journalists continue to act as if they were gatekeepers of the public conversation.
We are presented, then, with a puzzle. Why, when the challenge to journalism is so great, does the practice of news production in the US remain comparatively stable – even among individuals and groups located outside of mainstream news organizations, and indeed outside of the profession?1
In what follows I entertain three explanations of this puzzle, from the perspective of the sociology of news production. Each of these explanations highlights the role of news practices, but it perceives these practices as doing different sorts of work. The first explanation views news practices as something akin to habits. Journalists have been socialized to adopt particular practices and to perceive them as natural and inevitable. The unreflective manner in which journalists approach news practices, this argument goes, makes them difficult to dislodge. A second perspective notes that practices are not simply rules that journalists habitually follow. Rather, they are more like institutions – practices that contain both rules and resources (e.g., money or status). It is possible for journalists to develop investments in news practices, regarded as resource-laden activities. This means that change may be inhibited not because journalists are unreflective, but because they make strategic calculations about the costs and benefits of reordering these investments. Finally, a third approach observes that news practices are constitutive, in the sense that they enact a basic definition of what journalism is (see Ryfe, 2006). This definition acts as a kind of gravitational force, pulling journalists and others to engage one another in traditional ways, and setting boundaries beyond which it becomes difficult to recognize activities as journalism. To the extent that journalistic practice enacts constitutive rules, this argument suggests, old practices will tend to persist and new practices will tend to reproduce old meanings.
These explanations roughly correspond to three “waves” of research (Cottle, 2009) in the sociology of news tradition. The earliest, largest, and most powerful wave occurred in the decade from 1970 to 1980, when, by my count, no fewer than 15 studies written by 21 scholars were published (see, in chronological order, Tunstall, 1971; Cohen & Young, 1973; Sigal, 1973; Sigelman, 1973; Epstein, 1973; Argyris, 1974; Roshco, 1975; Altheide & Rasmussen, 1976; Chibnall, 1977; Tuchman, 1978; Schlesinger, 1978; Gans, 1979; Golding & Elliott, 1979; Fishman, 1980; Bantz, McCorkle, & Baade, 1980). This literature, which focused mostly on Anglo-American news media, came to a remarkably uniform conclusion about news production: news was homogeneous across news outlets, in large part because it was strongly shaped by organizational habits, routines, norms, and values adopted in much the same way by almost every news organization. By the early 1980s, this emphasis on the power of professional routines was conventional wisdom among those who studied the news. A second wave of research, smaller and less powerful than the first, arose to challenge this view (see Cottle, 2003; Eliasoph, 1988; Jacobs, 1996; Pedelty, 1995). In this wave, scholars stressed the themes of variability, heterogeneity, contingency, and conflict in the production of news. They argued, with Ronald Jacobs (1996, p. 375), that, while professional routines ensured a degree of uniformity in the news, “both within and between news [. . .] organizations, there is a significant degree of contestation and heterogeneity.” Beyond contradicting conventional wisdom, however, this wave of research developed no compelling alternative theory of news production, until Timothy Cook (1998) and Bartholomew Sparrow (1999) introduced an institutional theory of news in the late 1990s. This theory accounts for the interplay of uniformity and variability in news production through appeal to a language of interests, investments, strategies, and calculations. Finally, a last, incipient third wave of research is, I must admit, really one of my own making. I take my cue from recent work in the sociology of culture on “anchoring practices” in cultural production (see Archer, 1996; Emirbayer, 1997; Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Joas, 1993; Swidler, 2006). On this view, culture may work not by forming habits or prompting investments, but by defining what things, at bottom, are in social interactions. I say more about this notion below, but I believe the intuition explains a curious fact: practices may persist even when the individuals participating in them expressly desire to change.
It is tempting to frame these waves of research in terms of a story of progress, each wave improving on the last. But this would be a mistake. The history of the sociology of news has been less one of progress than one of addition. Each wave has added new concepts and ways of thinking that allow scholars to grapple with new situations and to address new questions. When it comes to the question of change, or rather of the lack of change, each tradition offers an important perspective, and indeed in most newsrooms the dynamics they refer to probably compound one another.
It is also the case, I think, that these traditions are not equally valuable at every moment. The first two explanations describe journalists as resisting, in various ways, the transformation of their profession. My own investigations of American metropolitan daily newspapers, which began in 2004, indicate that this resistance was more apparent in earlier stages of the transformation. Until about 2005 journalism remained a relatively settled profession, and many journalists acted as if the Internet was merely a hindrance to their practice. In contrast, today almost every working journalist recognizes that the Internet has dramatically altered the landscape of news, and that the profession must change in response to its new environment. I meet very few journalists these days who simply resist the idea of change. Yet, despite this growing awareness, news production remains as stable as ever. The constitutive quality of news practices better captures this fact: that news production remains unchanged even against the expressed wishes of journalists. My broad point here is that the transformation of news is a moving target. This means, in part, that the acuity of the lenses necessarily varies with changes in circumstances.
In what follows I outline the three approaches, drawing, where appropriate, on the relevant theoretical and empirical literature. Throughout I illustrate each perspective with examples from my own ethnographic investigations.2 Taken together, these perspectives explain why, in the midst of great turmoil, news production in the US remains remarkably stable.
Habits
The first of the approaches is the most long-standing and the easiest one to explain. It was deployed first by the early wave of newsroom ethnographies conducted in the 1960s and 1970s. To a person, the researchers who conducted these studies were struck by the highly routine and bureaucratic nature of news production. Here is Mark Fishman (1980, p. 14): “the routine work methods of journalists are capable of explaining the distinct character of media news.” And Phillip Schlesinger (1978, p. 106): “Broadcast news is the outcome of standardized production routines [. . .].” And Leon Sigal (1973, p. 4): newsmaking and gathering “is routine behavior: a good deal of the news is a product of the coupling of two information processing machines: one, the news organization; the other, government.” And Edward Epstein (1973, p. 8): “the outputs of network news are not simply the arbitrary choices of a few men; they result from a process.” The news, in short, is an outcome of bureaucratic rules, or, as so many of these studies put it, it is “manufactured” according to standard routines.
The language of routine implies that news practices are akin to habits: unconscious, unreflective, and utterly naturalized recipes for action. This is certainly the sense conveyed by the early studies. Leon Sigal (1973, p. 101) reports that news routines “take on a life of their own [. . .] Learned during apprenticeship, reinforced in daily experience on the job, they become ‘the way things are done.’” Gaye Tuchman (1978, p. 186) argues that reporters adopt a “natural attitude” toward their work, relying on largely implicit, everyday understandings to guide their activities. Herbert Gans (1979, p. 82) likens news decisions to “quick intuitive judgments, which some ascribe to a ‘feel.’” Throughout, these studies portray journalists as unselfconsciously reproducing the routines embedded in their practices.
The key dynamic in this process of news-gathering is socialization. Journalists, the argument goes, learn habits through immersion in newsrooms. Warren Breed's (1955, p. 328) analysis of how newspaper policy is conveyed to journalists is a classic statement of this position. He finds that each journalist learns his/her jobs as if “by osmosis [. . .] [staffers] become socialized and ‘learn the ropes’ [. . .] [by] [. . .] discover[ing] and internaliz[ing] the rights and obligations of his status and its norms and values.” Others have found much the same thing. Lee Sigelman (1973, p. 137) observes that reporters learn how to produce news in a “highly diffuse and extremely informal” manner, mostly by observing more veteran reporters as they go about their business. John Johnstone (1976) describes more formal mechanisms, like the role of the assignment editor in socializing reporters. Some of this socialization, of course, takes place outside the newsroom – in journalism school, for instance. But most journalists “learn the ropes” of the profession by working in the newsroom.
As an example, during my research I worked for six months in 2006 as a novice at a newspaper. Because I was a novice – and everyone in the newsroom knew it – the city editor often led me through a series of steps for completing a story: go to this place; ask to speak to this person; ask these questions; get these documents; call me with what you find – and so on. Reporting on each of these stories followed a script, and after long experience my editor could recite each script by heart. On one occasion, I returned to the newsroom to write a typical 10-inch story on a press conference at which the local district attorney announced a big drug bust. I sat at my computer, struggling to decide how to frame the information I had gathered. Counting on this story for the next day's newspaper and sensing my difficulty, my editor walked over and asked how things were going. After explaining my dilemma, he told me that there were really only seven different stories I could write about any drug bust. My job was to figure out which of these formulas applied best to the information at hand. At the end of my six-month stint I was socialized into the newsroom well enough not to have any longer to vocalize, or even think about, many of the steps necessary for gathering and reporting the news. Like my editor, I had begun to take them for granted, understanding them as the natural and appropriate things to do in the performance of my job.
The taken-for-grantedness of news practices is important to our story because, as the saying goes, habits are hard to break. This is so for two reasons. In the first instance, their very implicitness makes them difficult to uproot. Even today, after so much of conventional wisdom about journalism has been dispelled, many reporters describe standard news routines as simply the “way that news is produced.” This “natural attitude” prevents them from considering how they might respond in new ways to the new environment that surrounds their profession. In the second instance, breaking old habits requires time, attention, and reflection – scarce commodities in the contemporary newsroom. Time and again, journalists have told me they wished they had the luxury of thinking during the course of their day. But they simply do not have the time. Every day they must get the newspaper out; and, to accomplish this feat, they must rely on standard routines. In recent years the task has only become more difficult, as journalists have been forced to do less with more, that is, to fill not only newspapers but websites, blogs, twitter feeds, and the like – and all this happened with fewer of them in the newsroom. On several occasions, reporters have used the same metaphor to describe the difficulty. It is, they have told me, like building an airplane while it is in flight.
One explanation, then, for the persistence of standard practices in the midst of transformation has to do with the way in which journalists are socialized to follow tacit rules of news production. In criticisms of journalism, this idea is most often packaged as an indictment of the organizational culture of newsrooms. In a confidential email, one journalist told me: “Our challenge is [that] we can't break free of the cultural shackles and move the proverbial ship fast enough.” Paraphrasing another journalist, Peter Preston (2008, p. 318) presents the problem thus: journalists “treat every change, every innovation, with suspicion and something akin to fear.” Stuck in their routines and in their received wisdom, journalists simply are unwilling to change, or cannot change fast enough to match the speed of the transformation underway in their profession. In the academic literature, the criticism is often framed as a “cultural clash” between old and new journalists (Hermida & Thurman, 2008). To the extent that “old” journalists remain mired in old habits, their unwillingness or inability to change has prevented the profession from becoming more innovative (see also Bardoel & Deuze, 2001).
This argument is intuitively sensible, and it is visible in newsrooms. In the three newsrooms I have visited, I have met experienced journalists who are set in their ways; they refuse to carry cameras and take photos (as the new, multitasking, mobile journalist does); they make their editors add the graphics, boxes, and sidebars that accompany their stories; they fail to respond to readers' comments online; they are adamantly opposed to blogging and, if given a blog, they refuse to post to it. A typical example of this “natural attitude” happened during a meeting at one of the newsrooms I visited. The editor formed a committee of veteran journalists to work on a proposal for how newsroom practices might change in response to a perceived need for the newsroom to become more multiplatform – specifically, web-focused. The committee's recommendations were to be circulated throughout the newsroom. At their first meeting, committee members launched into a harangue about all that is wrong with the web: it destroys good writing; it takes reporters off the street; it is a “black hole” that sucks time and does not generate quality content. Said one member: “We have forgotten that we are the only news-gathering operation in this city. We are trying to be radio [. . .] the web. Let's be the newspaper.” Ironically, though not surprisingly, at the end of several meetings the committee recommended that the newsroom reallocate resources back to the newspaper.
The sentiment “let's be the newspaper” is a nice illustration of how the “natural attitude” of traditional reporters can inhibit change. But a focus on the taken-for-grantedness of traditional newsroom culture has limitations. Most obviously, as a second wave of research has argued, it leaves little room for journalistic agency – that is, for the possibility that journalists may actively interpret their routines rather than reproduce them as if by rote (Cottle, 2003; Eliasoph, 1988; Jacobs, 1996; Pedelty, 1995). Charles Bantz (1985), for example, observes that journalists do not always agree with news routines, or enact them in any simple way. Rather, reporters engage in constant conflict and negotiation with one another and with their managers. Nina Eliasoph (1988, p. 315) asserts that routines “accomplish different things in different contexts.” And Mark Pedelty (1995, p. 7) shows that news production looks less like a monotonous return of the same than like an endless management of contradiction.
A focus on habits has little to say about these variations in routines, or about the role of conflict in the reproduction of standard practices. Moreover, it does not explain why individuals working outside of mainstream newsrooms, such as online journalists, and even outside the profession, like citizen journalists, often seem as intent on reproducing old practices as the traditional journalists. Nor does this focus account for the fact that, after several years of dramatic upheaval, during which many unthinkable events have happened, there is little that is taken for granted in newsrooms today. Thus, while it is true that much of news production is indeed routine and is practiced in an unreflective manner, this insight cannot fully explain the stability of news production as a general rule, let alone during a time of great transformation.
Investments
If the second wave of research successfully pointed out that journalists produce the news in significantly different ways across news outlets, it did less well in crafting a theory that made sense of this variation or explained how and why it coexisted with the routines observed by the first wave of studies. Such a theory began to emerge, ironically enough, in a body of work intent on explaining the homogeneity of news production. Researchers began to note that, while first-wave scholars successfully highlighted the importance of news routines, they did less well in explaining the origins of these routines. As Simon Cottle (2003, p. 17) observes, most of this literature applies a kind of “organizational functionalism” to this question: the genesis of every routine is found in a perceived need on the part of news organizations. It is easy to identify the basic flaw in this explanation. If routines arise in order to satisfy organizational needs, and different organizations have different needs, then one would expect different organizations to adopt different routines. Empirically, this is not the case. Instead, as Timothy Cook (1998, p. 64) notes, every daily news outlet seems to be organized in much the same way and to abide by the same routines. To explain this uniformity, a number of scholars have turned to institutional and field theories of society (see Benson 2004, 2006; Benson & Neveu, 2005; Cook, 1998; Ryfe, 2006; Sparrow, 1999). On their account, news routines arise less from organizational need than from historical and institutional circumstance. Take, for example, the practice of deploying journalists at government agencies. This practice originated in the late nineteenth century. At the time, the practice was adopted in order to satisfy an organizational need, namely the need to get timely information. However, once adopted, the practice was propelled forward by the dynamics of path dependence. As explained by Paul Pierson (2000, p. 252), path dependence means that, as social actors take steps down a particular path, “the relative benefits” of continuing down the path “compared with other possible options increase over time.” The choice of placing reporters at government agencies set an important precedent. Over time, the cost of adopting and maintaining this practice gradually lowered in relation to the benefits of reproducing it, and so the practice eventually took hold across the field of journalism.
The crucial insight of this approach is that news routines are not simply sets of abstract rules that journalists learn. Rather they are constellations, to borrow from Anthony Giddens (1979, pp. 62–64), of “rules and resources” (italics mine). Again, consider the practice of stationing reporters at government agencies. It is true that the practice of “covering a beat” consists of abstract schemata or rules. Every reporter knows that covering a beat requires periodic chats with public information officers, attendance at agency meetings, collection and review of publicly available documents, and so on. But the practice only becomes effective when it accrues material and symbolic resources. Material resources include such things as office space, rolodexes, websites, and staff dedicated to answering reporters' questions. Symbolic resources include such things as friendship between agency staff and reporters, role conceptions, know-how, status, and recognition. Over time, these kinds of resources pooled around the practice of covering beats, such that the two – rules and resources – tended to implicate and reproduce each other. William Sewell (1992, p. 13) makes this general point when he writes: “schemas [or rules] are the effects of resources, just as resources are the effects of schemas [rules].” Applied to the practice of beat coverage, this means that the rules governing the practice naturally reproduce resources, just as the accumulation of resources around these practices tends to reproduce the rules. This dynamic makes the structure of news production difficult to circumvent.
A concrete example will illustrate the point. During my visit to one newsroom, reporters and editors were making a substantial effort to upgrade content on the newspaper's website. In the past, the website had received scant attention. One or two individuals were responsible for posting content, and most of the content they posted was repackaged from the newspaper. Moving forward, the site was to receive new attention and resources. As they tracked traffic on the site, editors learned that their largest audience visited at 8 a.m., then in slightly smaller numbers at noon and at 5 p.m., at which time traffic essentially disappeared until the next morning. These data led them to focus their efforts on posting as much fresh content as possible at 8 a.m. A problem arose, however, when editors realized that almost every reporter was assigned to a specific beat, that most of these beats covered government agencies, and that government agencies offered little new information between the hours of 5 p.m. and 8 a.m. For decades, the newspaper had invested resources in these beats, in forms as varied as interpersonal relationships, rolodexes, office space, and really simple syndication (RSS) feeds. These resources made changing the beat structure of reporting a costly proposition. It might have meant, for instance, dedicating more staff specifically to the website (and less to manning government beats), or requiring reporters to hold content for the web, or training reporters to do entirely different things, like interact with their audiences rather than with government sources. These costs might even have included not producing enough content to fill the next day's newspaper. Given that the newspaper still brought in over 90% of the organization's revenue and the website less than 5%, this was an easy calculation for the editors to make: they would innovate up to the point at which the cost of change outweighed the benefits of the status quo. In this case, the editors assigned two reporters to the website and asked them to start work at 5 a.m. But they made no other changes to the beat structure that governed most production in the newsroom, or to the way in which reporters covered beats. Thus conventional news practices persisted because the cost of inventing new ones was much higher than the benefits obtainable from their reproduction.
Individual journalists make the same sorts of calculations, and for much the same reasons. Unlike the first wave approach, which describes reporters as learning news rules and, once they have learned them, following them as if by rote, this second wave perspective portrays journalists as strategic calculators of self-interest. In other words, the schemata that organize social action confront journalists less as rules than as strategies for action. As a general matter, this change in language is designed to avoid the conclusion that social actors (like journalists) merely follow rules as if by rote. “In order to escape this danger,” Pierre Bourdieu (1986, p. 111) says in an interview, “one needs to bring into the theory the real principle of strategies, that is, a practical sense of things [. . .] what athletes call a feel for the game.” In the context of news production, this means understanding the schemata that organize practices less as sets of rules to be followed than as resources for problem solving.
In this way a theory that began with an effort to explain uniformity opens a way to understand the nature of variability in news production. It becomes apparent that, if viewed as problem-solving resources, multiple solutions to the same problem exist, in other words that journalists may arrange, order, mix, or combine the rules of news production in diverse ways. Consider again my six-month stint as a cub reporter. By the end of that time, it is true that I had been socialized into the newsroom well enough not to have to vocalize the rules any longer. But this is not to say that I always reproduced the practices in an unreflective, unconscious way. As a routine matter, this was not possible. Sometimes it was difficult to know which steps were the most appropriate ones in a given situation: should I call this or that person, ask these or those questions? At other times I disagreed with the city editor about the newsworthiness of a story, and I had to invent a strategy to persuade him that I was right. And sometimes, in pursuing a story, I hit a roadblock and did not know how to go on. On these occasions I sought advice from others, retraced my steps, and pursued alternative paths. Throughout, I actively interpreted the rules of practice so as to solve the problem at hand.
This activity illuminates the performative and improvisational dimension of news production. Different journalists may apply different practices to the same situation, and the same journalist may apply different practices to the same situation at different times – just as the second wave of ethnographic work insists. Strategies of action are not so extensive as to account for the particulars of every situation. They are not so cohesive that it is impossible to combine them in different ways. People also are differently positioned vis-à-vis one another and vis-à-vis the situation at hand. What looks appropriate to do from one vantage point may seem inappropriate from another. Finally, people have in their possession many different strategies, any number of which may be brought to bear on a given situation. Practices, then, do not determine precisely how they will be practiced. As Alan Warde (2005, p. 134) writes of the practice of consumption, a “pattern of activity can be filled out by a multitude of single and often unique actions reproducing the practice [. . .].”
The language of strategy also illuminates the fact that rules present opportunities as well as constraints to social actors. Journalists who are more creative and more skilled at using these opportunities (manipulating available strategies) will naturally accumulate more resources (e.g., money, status, autonomy) in relation to other journalists. This means that the practice of news production is not only improvisational; it is also, by definition, political. As journalists adapt news rules to local circumstances, a pecking order develops. A few journalists become “stars” and accumulate great resources, which they may then leverage into new opportunities. Others obtain fewer resources and have more limited options. The same dynamic, by the way, applies to news organizations: Different organizations will accrue differential amounts of resources available in the field of journalism, and so they will find themselves placed in a pecking order as well.
This becomes important for the prospects of change because, as with news organizations, the resources that journalists accumulate as they adopt conventional practices represent investments in the status quo. Consider the case of Dan Manning, a veteran reporter who worked the health beat at a newspaper I visited in the summer of 2008. Manning was in his early forties and had spent the last two decades working his way up the pecking order of news organizations. He started out at a very small community newspaper and, after stops at four other papers, he finally landed a job at the biggest newspaper in the region, covering healthcare – a premier beat in the newsroom. From Manning's perspective, the time, energy, and focus it took to master the practice of journalism represent an investment that he is, quite understandably, reluctant to relinquish. When contemplating changes to his practice, like blogging or multimedia storytelling, his instinct is to protect and defend. As he told me in a conversation: “We need to preserve the core mission of the newsroom. If we don't do anything else we need to do that [because] if we're not doing that [then] what are we doing?” In other words, Manning wished to protect the practices in which he had invested so much of his professional life. His conservative posture toward change arose not from a mindless embrace of tradition, but from a strategic calculation.
A view of news practices as rules and resources adds essential pieces to our puzzle as to why news production has remained stable in a time of great change. Most importantly, this view restores a sense of history and a concern for agency that are lost in a strict focus on organizational habits. However, like the first wave emphasis on habits, the conception of news practices as strategic investments has limits. Since 2007, the once slow and gradual decline of newspapers has greatly accelerated. Revenues have fallen precipitously, layoffs have accelerated – nearly a quarter of daily journalists lost their jobs in 2008–2009 alone – and entire news organizations, like the Rocky Mountain News, have folded. As Doug Smith, director of the Punch Sulzberger News Media Executive Leadership Program at Columbia University, recently put it: “It's chaos out there, and there's definitely a sense of terror” (Folkenflik, 2009). This collective “terror” implies that the costs of maintaining the status quo have, in recent years, grown greatly in relation to the benefits. Yet, even today, I know of no initiative in a daily newsroom to change fundamentally the standard practices of news production. This suggests that something beyond investments, path dependence, and strategic calculation is at work in maintaining the status quo.
Definitions
In order to explain the persistence of conventional news practices, I have found myself searching for new tools. I have mostly discovered these tools in recent work in the sociology of culture; but I begin with Clifford Geertz's (1973) famous distinction between culture as “models of” and “models for.” Cultural practices like the routines of journalism are “models for” in the sense that they serve as instructions for how to do the job. They are the rules that journalists follow to produce the news. But, as “models of” journalism, news routines also enact constitutive rules for what counts as journalism. The notion of a “constitutive rule” comes from John Searle (1969), who argues that practices like marriage, a trial, or indeed journalism have, embedded in them, rules that take the form “X counts as Y in context C” (quoted in D'Andrade 1984, p. 91). Such rules bring into being the very reality they name, and they do so by determining what counts as what in their particular social domain (for an application to journalism, see Ryfe, 2006).
Take, for instance, a reporter's notebook. We can think of the notebook as a resource attached to the practice of gathering information. Of course, there are rules for performing this activity: what kinds of information to collect, in what form, and so on. In this sense, the notebook has, embedded in it, a “model for” doing journalism, a recipe for how to perform the activity. However, the notebook also contains a “model of” journalism. It presupposes, for example, that a journalist is someone who gathers information (hence the need for a notebook). It assumes that a journalist must collect information from a source (most often, someone who possesses newsworthy information) and deliver it to a consumer (someone who might find the information useful, but would not learn of it without the efforts of the journalist). In this sense, the reporter's notebook enacts a definition of what journalism is: it is the act of filtering information obtained from one group and disseminated to another (or, in conventional terms, it is the action of a gatekeeper of information).3 This constitutive rule serves as a background context, which lends meaning to the reporter's notebook. To feel this rule at work, simply attend a city council meeting with and without a reporter's notebook and compare the difference in the way others respond to your presence.
The question is: What makes constitutive rules (like the notion of journalism as a filter) so resilient? Traditionally, the answer to this question has been something that comes down to the idea that constitutive rules are embedded habits. One strain of this argument suggests that habits run very deep. Built up through a process of accretion, such rules serve as an inner core for social fields, a background that creates the possibility of action. As such, the rules may simply be so implicit that they lie out of the reach of social actors like journalists and cannot be changed by them. Another strain has it that the habits are broadly apparent. Perhaps rules like “journalism is a filter” remain vital because they inform a great variety of news practices. The very number and breadth of these practices make the rules resilient. These arguments contain a kernel of truth, which is why the first wave of research in the sociology of news remains vital. It notes that the rules constituting journalism may be so tacit and difficult to formulate that they are beyond the reach of explicit efforts to change them. And it observes that the rules are embedded in so many practices that inertia sets in even if technological change alters some of them.
While sensible and certainly capable of explaining some of the dynamics of transformation in journalism, these arguments do not, however, capture all of the evidence. For instance, journalists have attacked and defended the conception of journalism as a filter of public information, an indication that the rule is not beyond their ability to formulate it in explicit terms. Moreover, the argument for breadth fails to explain why, in many cases, journalists are using new technologies less in order to invent new practices than in order to sustain old ones. From this perspective, it is especially puzzling that non-journalists, like bloggers and citizen journalists – who have not been socialized into the conventional practices of news-gathering and reporting and therefore have no investment in these practices – have used the new technologies more to reinforce than to challenge the standard conception of journalism (Ryfe & Mensing, 2010).
As a way around these dilemmas, I turn to sociologists, who note that the immediate experience of actors in a social situation is with one another, not with abstract rules or structures (see Archer, 1996; Emirbayer, 1997; Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Joas, 1993). On the ground, actors do not experience social structures so much as they experience interpretations of those structures (Wiley, 1994). This insight leads Ann Swidler (2006, p. 85) to argue that practices anchor constitutive rules in a social domain by serving as an “infrastructure of repeated interactional patterns. [Constitutive rules] remain stable not only because habit ingrains standard ways of doing things, but because the need to engage one another forces people to return to common structures.” In other words, constitutive rules persist not (or not only) because they are deeply and broadly embedded, but because they coordinate routine interactions between social actors. So long as the practices are followed, the interactions persist, and therefore so do the constitutive rules guiding those interactions. This result will follow even when the rules are no longer deeply or widely embedded.
Consider the following example. At the Cedar Rapids Gazette – one of the newsrooms I have visited – the CEO of the company, Chuck Peters, has led reporters through several presentations that describe a revolution in journalism.4 Peters argues that, in an online environment, journalism must and will become interactive, transparent, and collaborative. No longer a primary gatekeeper to public conversation, journalism must reinvent itself as a facilitator of and catalyst for community interaction. By this he means that journalists must come to see themselves as one voice among others in a community conversation. Over the past year, Peters' ideas have sparked an entire reorganization of the newsroom. The discussions about change in this newsroom have been so incessant that one group of reporters has made the topic into a drinking game: during meetings, they take a drink of water every time someone uses the word “fundamental” to describe the impending changes.
But, while Gazette reporters and editors have become comfortable talking about and imagining a new journalism, they are much less able to imagine doing journalism differently. Charlie Adams is a nice illustration of this point. Adams, who is in his mid-twenties, started as an intern at the Gazette three years ago and today is a city politics reporter. In a conversation, Adams expressed a willingness to change his practices. He likes blogging and is active on Twitter. When I asked about Peters' idea of a journalism that is more collaborative and interactive, Adams did not flinch. He expressed support for it and said, in agreement with Peters, that something like this kind of journalism was inevitable. In fact, when I entered the newsroom, the editor of the newspaper, Steve Buttry, held up Adams as someone who “gets it” and is readily adopting the new mind-set.
Despite his expressed interest in change, however, Adams finds himself doing journalism mostly in conventional ways. In large part, this is so because the filtering conception of the practice lies at the heart of his daily interactions with others. On his beat, almost every day, Adams does the following operations: he scans the meeting agendas of various government institutions; he interacts via email with individuals in and around government who might have newsworthy information; he contacts officials and experts to obtain quotes and to verify facts he would like to include in his stories; and, when time permits, he attends government meetings. In each of these interactions, Adams and his sources act on the assumption that he is a filter (or gatekeeper) into the newspaper, and therefore into the public conversation. This assumption informs everything, from Adam's skeptical attitude to the types of question he asks, to the snap judgments he makes about the information conveyed by sources. In other words, throughout these interactions, Adams' posture toward others is imbued with the filtering conception of journalism. This conception also informs the attitudes and actions of his sources, who work hard to manage how their information and views are portrayed in his stories. Adams' interactions in the newsrooms also reproduce the status quo. Every day his editors ask Adams to vouch for his work, to show, for example, that he has asked the right people the right sorts of questions, that he has verified information and correctly quoted sources, and that, most importantly, he has gotten his stories done on deadline. Thus, even as Adam grows more comfortable talking about change, his interactions with others ritually enact a traditional constitutive rule of journalism.
From this perspective, the principal impediment to change lies not in what journalists believe, prefer, or say, but in what they do. Their daily practices place them in relationships with others that, like a gravitational force, push and pull them to reproduce the established reality of what journalism is. Put another way, the key inhibition to change is not socialization, as in the first approach, or strategic calculation, as in the second, but recognition: the ability of journalists, sources, and even consumers of news to recognize new practices as journalism (and various individuals as journalists when they engage in these practices). Take, for instance, the practice of blogging. It is one of the most common new practices in journalism. Yet, in my conversations with journalists, most have described blogging as something that their editor has asked them to do in addition to their journalism. Typical is the comment of this reporter: “I don't mind blogging, but sometimes it gets in the way of my work.” Here the impediment to adopting the new practice is not normative – “we shouldn't do X” – or epistemological – “I don't know how to do X” – but ontological: “why would I do X?” This journalist did not resist blogging so much as fail to recognize it as a form of journalism. Given this fact, is it any wonder that reporters commonly use blogs as opportunities to empty their notebooks of the stories that, for reasons of space, they can no longer get in the newspaper?
The importance of recognition also helps to explain why online journalists and non-journalists often reinforce the values of traditional journalism. In newsrooms, online journalists must interact with others in terms of the filtering conception, or they risk being perceived as non-journalists (Paterson & Domingo, 2008). To establish their credibility, bloggers often work harder to hold journalists accountable to conventional practices than to invent new ones (Graves, 2007; Lenhart & Fox, 2006; Reese, Rutigliano, Hyun, & Jeon, 2007; Tremayne, 2007). And citizen journalists often act more out of a fear of losing traditional journalism than out of a desire to innovate (Ryfe & Mensing, 2010). In each instance, new entrants into the journalistic field are pulled toward conventional meanings via a process of recognition: individuals tend to orient their energies around practices that can be readily recognized and justified to others, in social interaction, as journalism.
Conclusion
It has been 15 years since the Internet first made its way into newsrooms, and it has been 10 years since observers recognized the medium's potential to disrupt conventional news practices. Yet, today, news production remains relatively untouched by this disruptive force. This fact represents one of the most compelling puzzles facing sociologists of news today. The solution to this puzzle illuminates crucial dynamics within journalism. Since journalism is one kind of cultural production among others, perhaps the solution has insights for the study of media production more generally.
In this chapter I have reviewed three potential explanations. All three focus on news practices, but they frame them in different ways. According to a first approach, news practices are habits: tacit rules that journalists have been socialized to reproduce in a relatively unreflective, unconscious way. On this view, news production remains stable because these practices have been naturalized. In a second approach, news practices are more like institutions, or like constellations of rules and resources. It is the fact that journalists have investments in the resources of standard practices that explains their persistence. A final approach views news practices as constitutive, in the sense that they enact a basic understanding of what counts as an instance of journalism. They are difficult to dislodge not because they are habitual or costly to change, but because they place journalists in social interactions that reproduce a shared understanding of what journalism is.
Each of these explanations roughly corresponds to “waves” of research in the sociology of news. It is tempting to embrace one of these waves over the others. But this would be a mistake. The dynamics illuminated by each wave of research are operative in most newsrooms. In fact, they likely compound one another, making change especially difficult. I also think that the dynamics uncovered by each wave of research are not at work to the same extent at every moment. In the early phases of the transformation underway in journalism (roughly, in the early to late 1990s), the first approach was probably a more accurate reflection of the state of things in newsrooms. At that time most daily journalists viewed the Internet as an intrusion. They were comfortable in their habits and saw their practices as simply the “way journalism is done.” This led them to resist efforts to align their practices more closely with opportunities afforded by the web. In a second phase of the transformation (late 1990s to early 2000s), it became apparent that the Internet presented more than a minor or transient challenge to conventional news practices. Yet, as journalists moved to develop more forceful responses, they realized that changing news practices entailed significant costs. In particular, over several decades, newsrooms had made significant investments in core news beats that they were loathe to give up. It did not help that these choices were made at a time when the industry began to experience significant losses in revenue and profits; or that the Internet offers so few new inducements: compared to the past, there is little profit to be made – either materially or symbolically – in online news. Since this calculation remains as true today as it was several years ago, the institutional argument still explains a great deal about the stagnancy of news production.
It does not, however, explain everything. Today, reporters and editors in many newsrooms are willing to bear the costs of change because they recognize that online news is the future of journalism. Yet even these individuals continue to reproduce standard practices. Moreover, I have witnessed non-journalists, from government officials to bloggers and citizen journalists (who ostensibly have few investments in traditional practices) work to resuscitate traditional journalism rather than to invent new practices. As I watch this process unfold, I see less resistance (“I won't do that”) and more of a simple lack of recognition of potentially new paths as journalism (“why would I do that?”).
A theory of news practices as constitutive explains these dynamics better. According to this perspective, news practices enact rules for what counts as journalism, like the notion that journalism is a practice of filtering information. These rules organize interactions in and out of newsrooms in such a way that it becomes difficult to recognize new practices as journalism unless they are put in traditional terms. The stumbling block here is more a lack of imagination: an ability to visualize what it would look and feel like to do journalism in a way that did not involve reporters acting as a filter of information from a source to a consumer. Even in a climate of “terror,” this sense of what journalism is still serves as the gravitational center of the field.
NOTES
The argument in this chapter is expanded and further developed in my book, Will Journalism Survive? An Inside Look into American Newsrooms (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2012).
1 In this chapter I focus on the situation in US journalism, mostly because it is the context I know best, but also because a comparison with other regions – such as Europe, Latin America, or Asia – is beyond the scope of the chapter. It is also the case that the sociology of news literature has emerged mostly in the United States and Great Britain. In a chapter designed to outline this literature, an appeal to the US context seems therefore sensible. That being said, economic, technological, and political pressures are forcing changes to media systems worldwide. These changes are, of course, inflected by local conditions, but the perspective of the sociology of news is useful for capturing at least some of these dynamics. For recent efforts in this regard, see the following introductions to special issues dedicated to the topic: Boyer and Hannerz (2006), Klinenberg and Benzecry (2005), Ryfe and Blach-Ørsten (2011).
2 Over the past five years I have spent nearly one third of my time in the newsrooms of three US mid-sized metropolitan daily newspapers. This work involved attending news meetings, following reporters on their beats, observing news practices, and having informal and formal conversations with almost every reporter and editor in the room. As a condition of access, I have agreed to keep the names of two of these newspapers and of their news workers anonymous. However, in accordance with the wishes of Chuck Peters, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Gazette Communications, and of Steve Buttry, then editor of the Cedar Rapids Gazette, I have agreed to use these three real names – of the Rapids Gazette and of Peters and Buttry – but to keep those of everyone else in the newsroom anonymous. Also by agreement, I did not audiotape conversations in any of these newsrooms, but I compiled instead notes in nine ringed binders. Scenes from this research included in the present essay come from these binders.
3 For a discussion of the way in which online collaboration is challenging this constitutive rule of journalism, see Bruns (2005).
4 Peters' presentations can be found at http://chuckpeters.iowa.com/
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