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545728
JOU0010.1177/1464884914545728JournalismAnderson and De Maeyer
research-article2014
Introduction
Objects of journalism and the
news
Journalism
2015, Vol. 16(1) 3–9
© The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/1464884914545728
jou.sagepub.com
CW Anderson
City University of New York (CUNY), USA
Juliette De Maeyer
Université de Montréal, Canada
Abstract
This article provides an overview of what an “object-oriented” approach to journalism
studies might look like, based on a survey of articles collected for this special issue on
journalism and materiality. We argue that focusing on the objects of journalism, rather than
limiting or trivial, can provide scholars with insights into the social, material, and cultural
context that suffuses our technologically obsessed world. The article pushes back against
a dominant perspective in the Actor-Network Theory literature that sees the major
value of that theory in studying technological innovation, calling instead for a theoretical
approach open to questions of historical change, power, and symbolic practices.
Keywords
Actor-Network Theory, Foucault, materiality, power
In her address to the 2012 Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), Mary Gray (2012)
celebrated what she called ‘the twilight of toaster studies’: the impending death of a
certain strain of scholarly analysis that ‘re-instantiat[ed] technological objects as the
center of [social] action’. ‘We have reached’, she argues,
a critical moment in internet studies: we need to challenge ourselves and our publics to think
about the Internet in the contemporary world in far more nuanced, socially-situated ways …
Why? Because doing otherwise simply sets up emerging technologies as the next new ‘toaster’
to study.
Corresponding author:
Juliette De Maeyer, Department of Communication, Université de Montréal, PO Box 6128, Downton
Station, Montreal, QC H3C 3J7, Canada.
Email: [email protected]
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Journalism 16(1)
A few months later, as if to both acknowledge and satirize the scholarly trend Gray
wants to put out to pasture, an anonymous group of researchers ‘published’ the first issue
of the aptly named The Journal of Toaster Studies (‘an academic publication about new
technologies’). ‘The first issue of The Journal of Toaster Studies debuted in early 2013’,
they facetiously claimed, ‘with articles by Daniel Miller (“Does the Toast make the
Toaster? An Organo-materialisties Perspective … in Trinidad”) and Gary Alan Fine
(“Toasty Publics: Where does the Heat Come From? Bridging the micro and macro”)’
(Anon, 2013). While obviously a joke, the new journal highlighted a particular – and
relatively new – form of what we might call object-oriented uncertainty. What does all
this focus on materiality and objects get us, really? Are we just looking at the communicative equivalent of toasters? Are we uncritically accepting the arguments of Internet
evangelists who would rather we focus on the next object on the assembly line of new
digital technologies and the ‘innovations’ these make possible?
Throughout the course of our work on this Special Issue, from organizing the preconference at the International Communications Association conference in London in
2013, to the call for journal papers, to the final selection of the articles you now see
before you, we have been battling nagging doubts that we were engaged in building a
‘special issue of toaster studies’. The objects of journalism included here – Wikipedia
edit boxes, pica poles and proportion wheels, content management systems (CMSs), and
others – are indeed occasionally toaster-esque insofar as they are often delightfully mundane. But we want to take issue with the argument that putting the objects of journalism
at the center of our analysis ‘distracts us from the social context that animates the cultural
work of any technology’ (Gray, 2012). Indeed, we would argue just the opposite. Starting
our investigation with the objects of journalism provides a new window into the social,
material, and cultural context that suffuses our increasingly technologically obsessed
world. It can actually free us from a widespread societal belief that sees the digital as
simply a stand-in for unthinking ‘innovation’. It can provide us with nuanced understanding of power, not as it adheres to a nameless, faceless context, but as it manifests
itself in what Foucault has called the ‘micro-capillaries’ of society. Also in Foucauldian
terms, it can bring genealogy into our conversations about technology, insofar as it seeks
to uncover the human decisions, cultural values, organizational imperatives, and material
affordances that lead technologies to be introduced into organizations in the first place.
And it actually opens us up to a relational understanding of technology rather than a
deterministic one, an understanding that sees the material aspects of objects as inevitably
imbricated in a web of human and non-human relations.
For the remainder of this introduction, we will briefly highlight some of the ways that
the articles in this Special Issue make good on goals outlined above, in large part by tying
them to some broad themes about objects, materiality, history, and power we think are
worth emphasizing in journalism studies. We begin with a focus on the Actor–Network
Theory (ANT) of Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, John Law, and others, showing how
broadening what is usually understood as the mandate of ANT to include historical and
cultural perspectives can be a useful complement to its recurrent foci on new technology
and journalistic innovation. We then consider one particularly prevalent criticism of
ANT, that it lacks an adequate theory of power and thus lacks a critical edge, showing
how applying socio-technical theories to journalism in particular help demonstrate where
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Anderson and De Maeyer
5
the ‘criticality’ of ANT might be found. By drawing on the articles contained in this
Special Issue, we conclude our brief introduction by rethinking the opposition between
‘toasters’ and the ‘social context’ of toast making, or more to the point, between the
objects and cultures of journalism. What is unique about the argument that discourses,
humans, and objects matter for news production has less to do with ontology – about the
nature of the world – than it does with the deeply relational underpinnings of the different objects that make up that world.
Materiality, journalism, and history
There is a clear trail of works in journalism studies that directly address the issue of
materiality, primarily those drawing on ANT and the work on Bruno Latour. From
Turner’s 2005 short essay that introduced ANT to journalism studies (Turner, 2005), to
subsequent empirical inquiries that have adopted an explicitly Latourian framework (e.g.
Micó et al., 2013; Plesner, 2009; Weiss and Domingo, 2010), all embrace one of the pillars of ANT: studying humans and non-humans in a symmetrical way. In journalism
studies, this philosophical principle is often reframed into another, presumably equivalent methodological stance: ‘what is social is not detachable from what is material’ (Micó
et al., 2013: 122).
These ANT-inspired investigations into material aspects of journalism have produced
valuable empirical accounts of contemporary newsmaking. They also revolve around
several central themes, the primary one being that they study technological innovation
and new technological tools being introduced into newswork. This emphasis on innovation and technological change is often presented as the primary focus of ANT: ‘Actornetwork theory is an epistemological and methodological proposal to understand the
dynamics of innovation’ (authors’ emphasis), argue Micó et al. (2013). It is the technical
evolution undergone by journalism in the last decades that makes ANT so useful as an
analytical lens, argues Turner (2005). Weiss and Domingo (2010) write,
We argue that an actor-network approach can be especially beneficial to trace the power
relationships between the different actors involved in the development of an innovation in a
newsroom, the conflicts around the definition of a technology and the process of reaching
closure, including technical artifacts as another actor in the equation. (authors’ emphasis)
In these accounts, all of them important contributions to the journalism studies literature, analyzing ‘materiality’ essentially means studying (new) technologies. Such an
emphasis on innovation is indeed part of ANT as delineated by Bruno Latour in
Reassembling the Social (Latour, 2005). As a critique of what Latour (2005) calls the
‘sociology of the social’, Reassembling argues that innovation is precisely a domain
which traditional sociology fails to properly account for: ‘in situations where innovations
proliferates, where group boundaries are uncertain, when the range of entities to be taken
into account fluctuates, the sociology of the social is no longer able to trace actors’ new
associations’ (p. 11). In a parallel with the change that physics has undergone with the
introduction of the theory of relativity, Latour (2005) further argues that it is the rapid
pace of change that requires a shift of paradigm:
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Journalism 16(1)
In most ordinary cases, for instance situations that change slowly, the pre-relativist framework
is perfectly fine and any fixed frame of reference can register action without too much
deformation. But as soon as things accelerate, innovations proliferate, and entities are
multiplied, one then has an absolutist framework generating data that becomes hopelessly
messed up. (p. 12)
But technological innovation is not the only object that ANT aims to study. In
Reassembling the Social, Latour lays out other foundations of ANT’s empirical program. He points out privileged situations that allow the scientist to produce ‘good
accounts’, situations where the social (i.e. the meshing of actor-networks) becomes
more visible than usual. The study of innovation is one of these privileged circumstances, but it is not the only one. Latour also highlights other situations: when accidents or breakdowns happen, or when things stop being taken for granted as objects are
put at a distance. He refines the idea of ‘distance’ in three ways: ‘distance in time as in
archeology, distance in space as in ethnography, distance in skills as in learning’
(Latour, 2005: 80). Ultimately, Latour (2005) makes an argument for historical investigations: even when ‘objects have receded into the background for good, it is always
possible – but more difficult – to bring them back to light by using archives, documents, memories, museum collections’ (p. 80).
The application of ANT to journalism studies has so far mostly fulfilled the first step
of ANT’s original project, by primarily focusing on technological innovation. This
Special Issue aims at embracing a wider idea of materiality that is not solely confined to
technological innovation, but that accounts for a variety of objects in context, both historical and cultural. There should be little doubt that one of the signal contributions of
these articles to the study of journalism and materiality is the reintegration of history into
ANT-ian considerations that are largely (although not entirely) presentist in nature. Le
Cam’s piece, traveling back to the newsrooms of late 19th century, is one obvious example of this. In this piece, Le Cam uses objects as both evidence (photographs) and as the
focus of analysis (the object-filled newsrooms of Le Soir, Journal de Roubaix, Belga, Le
Telegramme, and Radio-Canada) and the focus of her study (the discursive construction
of these object-filled newsrooms themselves). By treating objects as both historical evidence and area of empirical focus, Le Cam is able to inaugurate what she calls a ‘spatial
ethnography of labor’, a spatial turn also taken by Usher in her analysis of the International
New York Times, although in a far different fashion than Le Cam.
In a less obvious way than Le Cam, Rodgers’ article is also about history, although
history of a far more recent vintage. By placing the arc of the Toronto Star’s CMS Torstar
Online Publishing System (TOPS) ‘into digital history’, as it were, Rodgers allows us to
gain a glimpse of how this system evolved, not just as a finished object that newsworkers
had to deal with (or not) but rather as the product of multiple, often contradictory organizational imperatives. TOPS has a history, and by examining that historical evolution,
scholars of journalism can more easily open the black-box that masks the underlying
tensions and discontinuities of large socio-technical systems beneath a finished, smooth
surface. This surface is often perceived as smooth, we should note, even when the system
in question fails. The actual situation is, of course, far more complex, a fact that a more
historical and time-bound focus helps us perceive.
7
History is one form of context in which it is useful to embed ANT; organizational or
professional culture is another. Graves’ paper on the overlaps and discontinuities between
the journalism of I.F. Stone and Joshua Micha Marshall (founder of Talking Points
Memo) straddles this line between historical and cultural context. By analyzing a form of
journalism (what he calls ‘annotative journalism’) which falls outside the traditional
journalistic imaginary of ‘original’ reporting about discrete events in both the mid-20th
century and today, Graves turns out attention to the way that professional culture often
embeds a certain understanding of materiality itself. Graves’ paper, in other words, is less
about the actually existing relationship between journalism, documents, and annotation
than it is about the way that journalists have thought about annotation, and in so doing,
the attitudes toward certain journalistic objects that underlie in that stance. Usher’s paper,
finally, can serve as a useful bridge in combining the socio-technical focus of Rodgers,
the spatially oriented perspective of Le Cam, and the material-cultural perspective of
Graves. In her study of the International Herald Tribune (now renamed the International
New York Times), Usher demonstrates how differential understandings of time and location, certain affordances buried within digital technologies, deep human needs (like
sleep), and the contested values of brand names themselves determine how a newsroom
not only operates, but indeed, is formed. Newsrooms, Usher seems to imply, are not
static buildings but are rather perennially provisional spaces assembled out of a range of
heterogenous materials and cultures, spaces that do indeed become solid but only through
a sort of organizationally useful blindness that allows news companies to function.
Power, objects, and materiality
One criticism of ANT, along with other socio-technical theories drawing heavily on the
micro-capillary theorizing of Foucault, is that it lacks an adequate theory of power; or, in
Couldry’s (2008) more specific language, that
ANT’s initial insights into a dimension of social order (spatiality of networks, power asymmetries)
are not developed for a network’s longer-term consequences for social space and its implications
for power … ANT has much to contribute to understanding the ‘how’ of such asymmetries, but
it is strangely silent when it comes to assessing whether, and why, they matter. (p. 7)
It is our hope that the articles in this Special Issue help reveal that this critique of the lack of
critique, to the degree it is accurate, is as much a matter of emphasis in the earlier ANT literature as it is a permanent debilitation. It is no surprise that Braun’s article on the ‘hidden
heterogeneities’ of MSNBC’s online interfaces does a particularly excellent job in laying
bare the very real way that socio-technical objects contribute to the maintenance of oftinvisible power relations, given that the piece draws its theoretical framework, not from
Latour, but from his co-conspirator John Law, whose writings on the sociotechnical have always contained the most explicit ‘critical edge’. Likewise, Ford’s overview
of the processes through a variety of digital artifacts contribute to the real-time construction
of breaking news on Wikipedia examines not only the way that power on Wikipedia is
assembled but on the ways that it, contra to Couldry’s critique, maintains itself over time.
This is an example of why a resolute focus on materiality and objects is particularly useful
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Journalism 16(1)
for these kinds of genealogical expeditions; in an ontological sense, info-boxes and warning
tags are purely digital objects, whose form is fluid and endlessly changeable. In reality,
however, they quickly assume positions of centrality in the Wikipedia editorial process,
positions that, moreover, are organizationally ‘irrational’ insofar as they were originally
designed for work in constructing an encyclopedia, not a breaking news service. What was
once a technological work-around, using a variety of malleable of digital tools, not only
alters the breaking news workflow of Wikipedia but contributes in a real sense to the establishment of digital power dynamics that are not easily altered.
But it is Keith’s article on those most mundane of newsroom artifacts, ‘pica poles,
proportion wheels, and paper dummies’, that may speak best to the different ways an
object-oriented analysis shines an unusual light on the power dynamics of news production. These items in the copy-editor toolkit are both cultural (they are symbols of an
accrued social and organizational power in newsrooms) but also only exist insofar as
they lie at the nexus of a specific, historically limited news production process. A pica
pole that did nothing useful would be less than useless – it would be a joke, a sad, faded
symbol of lost glory and technological advance. By interrogating what exactly these
objects of journalism mean today, what they used to mean in the 1970s, where they are
located in the newsroom, and what they do to in both today’s and yesterday’s journalism,
we can obtain an insight into many of the transformations affecting today’s journalism.
Conclusion
In the end, we want to highlight the fact that we see this Special Issue as more the launching of a long-overdue dialog than as a programmatic statement of exercise in ‘flagplanting’. As Pablo Boczkowski reminds us in the brief retrospective essay written
especially for this volume, studies of materiality and technology, drawing generally
from science technology studies (STS) perspectives at least, have long been part of the
journalism studies tradition. We think, however, that the ideas embedded in journalism
studies’ understandings of materiality could use some further fleshing out, along with a
greater focus on historicization, power, and culture that we mentioned earlier in this
introduction. To that end, we have asked several scholars from both within and outside
the journalism studies tradition – Michael Schudson, David Domingo, Gina Neff, as
well as the pioneering Boczkowski – to provide more reflective essays discussing the
problems and potentials embedded within an ‘objects of journalism’ approach. Daniel
Kreiss, finally, critically reflects on the issue as a whole in his concluding article.
If this Special Issue brings the underlying values and deficiencies of an ‘objects of journalism’ approach into greater circulation within journalism studies, then we think it will
have been a success, and worth the risk of filling an entire journal issue with reminiscences
about toaster-like things. In the end, we would like to believe that the various articles here
do an excellent job of illuminating some of the simple and not-so-simple material objects,
relations, cultures, and organizational structures which form both the background and foreground of so much of journalism production and reception in the 21st century.
Acknowledgements
We want to gratefully thank Christina Dunbar-Hester for introducing us to the Journal of Toaster
Studies, following her invitation to join the editorial board (she accepted).
9
References
Anon (2013) The journal of toaster studies: An academic publication about new technologies.
Available at: http://www.journalofts.org/ (accessed 6 June 2014).
Couldry N (2008) Actor network theory and media: Do they connect and on what terms? In: Hepp
A and Winter R (eds) Cultures of Connectivity. Creskill, NJ: The Hampton Press, pp. 93–110
[German translation published in parallel 2006 edition by Westdeutscher Verlag].
Gray Mary L (2012) CAUTION!! Boundary work ahead for Internet studies … or, why the
Twilight of the ‘Toaster Studies’ approach to Internet research is a very, very good thing.
Paper presented at IR13, University of Salford, Manchester, 19 October.
Latour B (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor Network Theory. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Micó JL, Masip P and Domingo D (2013) To wish impossible things: Convergence as a process
of diffusion of innovations in an actor-network. International Communication Gazette 75:
118–137.
Plesner U (2009) An actor-network perspective on changing work practices: Communication technologies as actants in newswork. Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism 10(5): 604–625.
Turner F (2005) Actor-networking the news. Social Epistemology 19(4): 321–324.
Weiss A and Domingo D (2010) Innovation processes in online newsrooms as actor-networks and
communities of practice. New Media & Society 12(7): 1156–1171.
Author biographies
CW Anderson is an Assistant Professor of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island (CUNY)
and directs research at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.
Juliette De Maeyer is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication at Université de
Montréal.
545729
JOU0010.1177/1464884914545729JournalismRodgers
Article
Foreign objects? Web
content management systems,
journalistic cultures and the
ontology of software
Journalism
2015, Vol. 16(1) 10–26
DOI: 10.1177/1464884914545729
jou.sagepub.com
Scott Rodgers
Birkbeck, University of London, UK
Abstract
Research on ‘digital’ journalism has focused largely on online news, with comparatively
less interest in the longer-term implications of software and computational technologies.
Drawing upon a 6-year study of the Toronto Star, this article provides an account of
TOPS, an in-house web content management system which served as the backbone
of thestar.com for 6 years. For some, TOPS was a successful software innovation,
while for others, a strategic digital ‘property’. But for most journalists, it was slow,
deficient in functionality, aesthetically unappealing and cumbersome. Although several
organizational factors can explain TOPS’ obstinacy, I argue for particular attention
to the complex ontology of software. Based on an outline of this ontology, I suggest
software be taken seriously as an object of journalism, which implies acknowledging its
partial autonomy from human use or authorization, accounting for its ability to mutate
indefinitely and analysing its capacity to encourage forms of ‘computational thinking’.
Keywords
Actor–network theory, computation, digital media, newspapers, organizational theory,
phenomenology, practice theory, site ontology, software, web content management systems
Introduction: Mundane troubles with software
As readers of thestar.com begin their morning in late August 2011, there is a flurry of
activity in the Toronto Star newsroom. That morning, at 4:45 a.m., Jack Layton, leader
Scott Rodgers, Department of Film, Media and Cultural Studies, Birkbeck, University of London, 43 Gordon
Square, Bloomsbury, London WC1H 0PD, UK.
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Rodgers
of the New Democratic Party of Canada, passed away in his Toronto home. Earlier that
year, Layton led his party to a remarkable 103 seats in the Canadian general election,
becoming for first time in party history the official opposition in Parliament. For newsroom editors, his death is a big story. The Star is Canada’s largest newspaper, and dedicates significant coverage to national politics. Moreover, Layton was also a long-time
Toronto city councillor, and onetime mayoral candidate, making the story doubly relevant for the newspaper’s primarily urban readership. But his death, though sad, is not
unexpected. Layton had fought the election while recovering from prostate cancer, and
later announced a leave of absence to fight a new and unspecified cancer. The newsroom
is busy because of the timing, at the beginning of the working day for many readers. The
print edition, finalized the previous day, has no account of Layton’s death. The Star’s
online and mobile editions, however, are providing saturation coverage, just as readers
log in to their office computers or check the news on their commute.
Yet, as editors add and update obituaries, editorials, news stories, commentaries,
photo galleries and more, they are experiencing troubles. Near the central newsroom
hub, under a large LCD screen displaying web metrics, sits Brian Kilburn.1 Brian’s not
at his usual desk, indeed he is not ‘of’ the newsroom. Brian is from ‘Group IT’. He looks
at the computer screen, one hand on mouse, the other on the telephone receiver. He
explains to an unknown conversant that ‘TOPS is not performing as it should’. Updates
on the Layton story are lagging. Using technical language, he summarizes an earlier call
with Torstar Digital. He remains calm; he almost seems to be performing a service. If this
is the case, his ‘clients’ are to either side of him. To his left, three web editors, currently
huddled around a computer looking anxiously at a web browser displaying thestar.com.
They debate whether various bits of content are old or updated versions. To his right is
Lloyd Dover, the Managing Editor. Lloyd is checking and sending emails, but is also
periodically craning his head, checking on Brian’s progress, and the web editors’ too.
This is not the first time TOPS has caused such mundane troubles.
Drawing upon an ethnographic study of the Toronto Star, this article tracks the ‘many
faces’ of TOPS, a web content management system (CMS) produced by a fledgling digital media arm within Torstar, the newspaper’s parent company. For some, TOPS represented innovation in software design; for others, it was a strategically-important digital
‘property’; and for others still, it was seen as wrongly imposed on the newsroom. For
those in the last category, typically journalists and mid-level editors, for 6 years, Canada’s
largest newspaper was forced to cope with a web CMS that was slow, deficient in functionality, aesthetically unappealing and cumbersome. Some organization members saw
TOPS as the product of ham-fisted boardroom manoeuvres, and watched it persist in
frustration, while they became increasingly familiar with social media, mobile devices
and cheaper off-the-shelf software packages. My argument in this paper however will be
that the apparent inability of the Toronto Star rid itself of TOPS sooner has as much to do
with the complex ontology of software objects as with corporate hubris or disorganization. Following a review of the extant literature, this argument will proceed through two
main sections. First, I will trace the appearance of TOPS across three organizational sites
– the web operation, the developers and senior newsroom managers – to provide a multisited lens into the operation of web CMS as a software object of journalism. Second, I
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Journalism 16(1)
will theorize the implications of TOPS’ differential appearance across these sites by connecting with the literature in the growing field of software studies.
My main finding is that taking software seriously as an object of journalism would
mean: acknowledging its partial autonomy from human use or authorization; accounting
for its ability to mutate indefinitely; and analysing its capacity to render humans as its
objects, by encouraging forms of ‘computational thinking’. This, in turn, opens up some
areas needing further investigation, including the longer-term proliferation of digital
computation technologies and their associated forms of ‘IT’ expertise within news
organizations, and more recent shifts away from in-house software systems, towards
third-party prepackaged software ‘solutions’ that further standardize journalistic form
across organizations. I end by arguing that journalism research should accept the partial
autonomy of software systems from journalistic practice, and in turn, develop ways to
study such phenomena as genuine objects of journalism.
Networked journalism and technologies of software
Literature on the implications of digital and networked media for news work is now one
of the richest and fastest moving areas of journalism studies, and it will not be feasible to
account for this literature exhaustively here (for a review, however, see Mitchelstein and
Boczkowski, 2009). Instead, I will focus on research which has studied, and debated how
to study, the relationships between technology and professionalized journalism. This
strand of debate has arguably arisen most fruitfully from qualitative researchers in dialogue with the newsroom ethnography tradition (e.g. Paterson and Domingo, 2008), who
have been interested in mapping technological change in relation to situated journalistic
cultures. Such work has observed the degree to which many journalistic routines and
hierarchies remain founded in the assumptions of print production. It is in this apparent
entanglement of print technology and practice, as much as any philosophical stance visa-vis journalism, which has often led to limited implementations of interactive online
platforms and tools (Domingo, 2008; Steensen, 2009; Thurman, 2008). This has also
formed the context for the ways in which professional journalists have normalized new
genres such as blogging and microblogging, typically hosted by third-party services such
as WordPress or Twitter, within more established regimes of journalistic practice (Lasorsa
et al., 2012; Singer, 2005).
Even as such ethnographic research provides nuanced accounts of transforming journalistic cultures in a digital era, it often under-theorizes the question of technology, and
its complex and historicized interrelationships with journalistic practice. In the last decade, however, a more theoretically inflected literature has emerged in response, inspired
by science and technology studies (STS) and actor–network theory (ANT), which seeks
to address the journalism–technology relation head on. A notable example is Boczkowski
(2004b) who, drawing on STS and focusing on the computerization of newsrooms,
argues journalism research needs to go beyond merely describing the ‘effects’ of technologies. Instead, attention needs to be paid to their varied ‘appropriation’ through
organizational structures, working practices and representations. Plesner (2009) makes a
similar argument, though drawing on ANT, suggesting that ‘we should refrain both from
13
Rodgers
essentializing the “effects” of ICTs and from forgetting to include them in our analyses
of work practices’ (p. 605). For Plesner (2009), technologies are densely interwoven into
associations with other actants, and do not possess independent ‘forces or consequences’
(p. 604). Hemmingway (2008) represents the most in-depth application of ANT to the
study of journalism, exploring in detail the ordinary alliances of regional television journalists and their myriad technologies. Echoing Plesner (2009) and Boczkowski (2004b),
Hemmingway asserts, and goes on to demonstrate empirically, that what is crucial is not
just the agency of technologies, but their agency via associations with human actors. In
short, the wave of journalism research interested in theorizing technology has also been
at the forefront in rejecting the implicit technological determinism of some writing on
online journalism.
Considering that the above research tends to be concerned specifically with digital
and networked media, ‘technology’ could be seen as too broad a concept. Indeed, it is
surprising that so little has been written in journalism studies on software technologies in
particular. While the online publishing of news has well-recognized implications, less is
understood about how this development has emerged within the much longer term proliferation of computational technologies related to and even ‘of’ journalism, such as digital page composition. Indeed, by Manovich’s (2001) definition of ‘new media objects’,
focused on their provenance in computation, printed newspapers were digital media well
before news went on the web.
There are of course notable exceptions to this research gap. Weiss and Domingo
(2010) combine the approaches of ANT and Wenger’s concept of ‘community of practice’ to trace a web CMS platform as an actant performed and positioned differently in
relation to distinct knowledge communities, such as those of web editors or technical
staff. In a methodological piece, Anderson and Kreiss (2013) also provide an account of
CMS software. With the aim of demonstrating the analytical strengths of ethnographic
research informed by ANT, they provide a remarkably detailed account of the protocols,
procedures and malfunctions of a CMS which goes well beyond technical description,
outlining how software infrastructures both reflect and instantiate the routines, roles and
hierarchies of practical journalistic cultures (see also Rodgers, 2014: 77–78). Perhaps the
most ambitious literature concerned with software in journalism studies are accounts of
various experiments which bring journalists together with software programmers. Lewis
and Usher (2013) convincingly argue that while such experiments might present new
frontiers of possibility, it is important to remain critical and not simply take for granted
the intrinsic value of computational concepts such as open source for journalism (see
also Aitamurto and Lewis, 2013). Czarniawska’s (2011) recent research provides one
reason to be cautious: she found remarkable standardization in the way three otherwise
differentiated news agencies (Swedish TT, Italian ANSA and Reuters) formatted their
news product, largely due to similar implementations of software platforms.
These strands of emergent research point to some of the ways in which we might
study what Anderson (2013) recently called the ‘shaggy, emerging beast’ of computational journalism (p. 1017). This article represents a modest but I hope helpful contribution to this new research agenda. My argument will centre on a claim that journalism
research needs to take the autonomy of software more seriously. As the ethnographic
research I am about to recount will substantiate, I accept the merit of studying
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Journalism 16(1)
technology as localized and appropriated within particular practical milieus. Yet what
seems missing in much of the existing literature is recognition of the trans-local and
trans-human forms of standardization that software objects introduce into such milieus.
Before I expand on this conceptual point, however, I will first present an empirical interlude, examining the case of the TOPS web CMS within the organizational settings of the
Toronto Star.
Case study and methodology
This article draws upon a multi-year (2005–2013) study of the Toronto Star, Canada’s
largest newspaper in readership terms, and the flagship holding of Torstar, a large media
company by Canadian standards (owning more than 120 newspapers, several digital
properties and Harlequin Books). Though Torstar is a publicly traded corporation, its
voting shares are controlled by five families with a longstanding historical interest in the
Toronto Star. Through special corporate governance structures, they ensure the newspaper remains faithful to a series of left-leaning ‘principles’ set out in the will of the founding editor, Joseph E. Atkinson.
While my larger study focused on the changing relationships of journalism and urban
public life, the research also produced a wealth of data around the changing practices,
technologies and authority of professionalized journalism in a digital age. The cornerstones of this data are two ethnographic field studies: the first taking place over 6 months
in early 2005, involving 6 weeks of participant observations and 58 interviews; and the
second taking place over 2 months in summer 2011, involving 4 weeks of participant
observations and 23 interviews. These ethnographic studies were significantly augmented by desk-based research of archival records, documentation, online materials and
historical news clippings. Collected data were coded and recoded iteratively throughout
the multi-year study, using computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software.
An important theoretical resource for the research was Schatzki’s (2002) ‘site ontology’, which helped to analytically account for the inherent dependence of various organized practices (e.g. editing, layout, copyediting, beat reporting) upon material
arrangements (e.g. office spaces, devices, infrastructures, mediums; see also Rodgers,
2013: 3–4, 2014: 72–73). In connecting practice theory with new materialist thinking
such as ANT, this approach has some similarities to that of Weiss and Domingo (2010),
though with a stronger emphasis on what I would term the nonhuman and nonrepresentational aspects of journalism work. This entailed three main dimensions: First, while I
was interested in self-conscious reflections in interviews, I also emphasized narrative
accounts of activities respondents considered routine and even uninteresting, but which
could be analyzed as basic preconditions of work rarely discussed explicitly (cf.
Markham, 2011). Second, I was interested in tracing the silent work of infrastructures
(see Star, 1999), for example, software (cf. Bruni, 2005) and mundane texts such as daily
editorial schedules (i.e. ‘skeds’; cf. Cooren, 2004). Finally, I sought to account for how
spatial arrangements were both crystallizations of, but also conditions of possibility for,
journalism and its associated technologies (see Rodgers, 2014). These three dimensions
allowed me to account for objects such as TOPS as at once enacted through situated
practices, yet also existing as trans-local and partially autonomous objects.
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Following TOPS
TOPS began its public-facing life on 18 December 2006, when it was announced as the
new ‘high-performance engine’ of thestar.com. TOPS is a web CMS: a database or
repository which organizes the publication of content on web browsers and mobile apps,
and allows for the simultaneous authoring, updating and management of content by users
who may have little knowledge of software architecture. TOPS initially denoted ‘Torstar
Online Publishing System’, a name highlighting its in-house, bespoke nature in 2006,
when it was primarily intended for use by Torstar-run websites. In time, however, ‘Total’
replaced ‘Torstar’ as TOPS became more of a prepackaged product for sale to other
organizations.
If one read only official announcements, TOPS is the coherent outcome of a seamless
development process. But such narratives conceal a much messier situation. TOPS had
what I will provisionally call varying ‘edges’ (to borrow a phrase from Gaonkar and
Povinelli, 2003: 392; see also Rodgers, 2014) across the different organizational sites in
which it appeared. Drawing primarily from my 2011 field research, I will consider three
such sites in particular: the web operation, the developers and the senior newsroom managers. These sites are not exhaustive – TOPS also appeared at other sites – but represent
the three most coherent appearances of the web CMS within the partial confines of my
own ethnographic analysis.
The web operation
The first site at which we will locate TOPS is near the centre of the recently redesigned
Toronto Star newsroom. Here, adjacent to a new central hub was the ‘web operation’, a
small group of around 13 who oversaw the content – though not the underlying web
architecture – of thestar.com. They sat along a row of desks, interacting occasionally but
with eyes almost continuously directed at dual-screen workstations. The hub next to
which they were located somewhat modestly mimicked new ‘integrated’ newsrooms
ostensibly prioritizing content over medium. As if to underline this, the redesign also
symbolically pushed aside another row of dual-screen workstations: those related to print
page production, right to the very edge of the newsroom. However, by all accounts, digital had not displaced print; indeed as at many newspaper organizations, the complexities
of producing a print product continued to hold sway.
Although members of the web operation often described their work in more expansive
and even aspirational terms, much of their daily labours amounted to maintaining thestar.
com via TOPS. It was they who decided the relative positioning of stories and content on
the main homepage. They who arrived early in the morning to manually clean up the
content automatically migrated overnight to TOPS from CCI NewsGate, the CMS system for the printed newspaper. And they who liaised between department journalists and
technical IT staff around the implementation of minor tweaks (e.g. photo galleries, live
chats), or the resolution of minor system bugs. Having a centralized web operation of this
nature, with these sorts of responsibilities, was seen as a temporary measure. In recent
history, the Toronto Star had attempted to disperse ‘web evangelists’ across various
departments and, indeed, in principle anyone within the news organization could add and
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amend content using TOPS. Yet in practice, the web operation was deemed necessary, as
staff dedicated to the day-to-day editorial maintenance of the web CMS.
And in this guise, TOPS largely appeared as a constraint inserted into the daily working environment of the web operation. It was a software object, a thing, with which they
coped:
It sounds like it’s patched together with duct tape and elastic bands; it just doesn’t … it doesn’t
give us the flexibility we need to respond to things instantly and overly creatively. I mean, I
think you’ve probably seen, like we have one way we can display a photo gallery, one way we
can do this and one way we can do that. It’s really a testament to those who work on the web
desk that they can like get around some of the issues and present some of their … present their
content as well as it is presented. They call it … I forget what it actually stands for, but they call
it Total Operating Piece of Shit. (Daina Simone, Senior Editor, Digital)
For web editors, TOPS created delay, lagging several minutes between an update and its
public availability to website users (as seen in the short account in this article’s introduction). TOPS also constrained – unduly for web editors – navigational and layout possibilities. For example, the TOPS template dictated that only stories with a photo could
appear as the main item on the home page. Perhaps most crucially, TOPS was seen to
perform poorly in terms of search engine optimization (SEO). This is even though editors such as Sheena Rutherford regarded SEO as ‘a bit of witchcraft … I’m not saying
that there aren’t people who have cracked it, but I don’t know that it really can be cracked
… with design elements’. Nevertheless, after reviewing several competing websites,
web editors negotiated a small redesign, whereby a new column titled ‘In the News’ was
created on the left hand extreme of the main page, listing several stories buried on subpages. Far from aesthetically appealing, the column added ‘density’ to the main page, in
an attempt to drive more traffic to the website. Via such manoeuvres, the web operation
largely sought to subvert TOPS.
The developers
If the web operation saw TOPS as a thing to subvert, a rather different edge of TOPS
emerges upon leaving the newsroom, housed in the Toronto Star’s 1970s waterfront
office tower, and travelling to 590 King Street West. Here, in Toronto’s trendy Fashion
District, was Torstar Digital, a division of Torstar Corporation and the developer of
TOPS. Its offices were housed in a refurbished industrial loft building, with open-plan
wooden desks, exposed brick walls and visible ventilation systems. It was a company
clearly seeking to project the gritty entrepreneurial flair of start-up digital media: as
recently as 2013, its website described a journey from just 2 to over 250 employees,
beginning ‘in a small basement office with a handful of forward-thinking innovators who
understood the power of digital disruption’. ‘Digital disruption’ was something of a philosophy for Torstar Digital, certainly for its President Vidar Waltersson:
You know, its independence from the assumptions, philosophies and culture of traditional
media organizations is crucial … we don’t say ‘the great media company from the traditional
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world in the digital realm is’ … and are able to finish that sentence. The great digital media
companies are all digital media companies. They’re Facebook and Google and Twitter … So
we created those kinds of conditions, so we need the entrepreneurial flexibility, and lack of
assumptions, and lack of a hard-set past culture that comes with a traditional media organization
who’s been around for a hundred years. That ends up being as much a liability as an asset, and
it becomes more of a liability than an asset on the Internet. (Vidar Waltersson, President, Torstar
Digital)
Torstar Digital’s public story may be one of building from the ground up, but the reality
is less gritty than the facade. Vidar had relatively deep roots at Torstar and the Toronto
Star. He first joined the newspaper in 1995, taking a 1-year contract to help launch the
Toronto Star’s first website, considered at the time to be a ‘revenue-free’ experiment. By
2005, Vidar had risen in Torstar’s executive ranks, and led a cross-media study which
recommended investment in digital media properties. As a result, Torstar Digital was
created, with only two employees, though these employees were given a project to grow
a new digital division for a large media corporation. Indeed, by 2011, a much larger
Torstar Digital was developing very few products in-house, instead primarily acquiring
existing start-ups needing additional resources and expertise.
TOPS was one of Torstar Digital’s early in-house projects. Although built to service
several Torstar websites, its initial development was anchored to its anticipated uses for
thestar.com. On its release in December 2006, it was viewed by some in the local web
developer community as a significant improvement:
The Toronto Star Website (http://www.thestar.com/) has FINALLY gotten a facelift. And it’s
about time too. However, this is no ordinary front-page overhaul … oh no sir … Ladies and
gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages, the NEW Toronto Star website is … get this …
ALL CSS!!! Nary a table in site sight … [T]he old design … was rife with horribly messy
markup, and had more tables than a furniture store. Code validation was nothing short of a joke.
Speaking of jokes, I’m quite sure at one point, thestar.com became the butt of jokes amongst
Toronto web standards designers. (http://www.pxleight.com/journal/2006/12/27/thestar-gets-afacelift/Website now inactive, last viewed 27 December 2006)
As can be seen in this indicative quote, for developers, TOPS was a major improvement
in terms of web architecture, rather than the content it organized. It is via web architecture that the developers asserted their authority vis-a-vis news organizations:
… traditionally [a newspaper] company’s digital strategy up until then was, what’s your
traditional media brand, take out the spaces, put it all in lower cases, and put dot com at the end
… So we had www.thestar.com and that was the Star’s digital strategy. It wasn’t about how do
you get user-generated content, what are you doing in terms of video, are you offering free
classified with up-scaling, or are you operating a web 2.0 experience? None of those things
were really a part of the thinking in traditional media companies; they were going to ride out
their brands into the digital environment. (Vidar Waltersson, President, Torstar Digital)
At Torstar Digital, traditional news organizations were seen as deeply mistaken in assuming they could simply transfer their content and brand online, and mistaken that they
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could still monopolize content selection and layout within the newsroom. Few working
at Torstar Digital had journalistic backgrounds. Instead, it was an organization inhabited
by web designers, computer programmers and digital media entrepreneurs. They tended
to see ‘news’ as a category of content produced via increasingly ‘participatory’ means,
and mediated by algorithmic logics and hierarchies, both of which required well-designed
software architecture. It was in this vein that TOPS was repurposed in 2008 towards a
major redesign of thestar.com, transforming it from a webpage to a ‘portal’ for various
online ‘verticals’ (e.g. ‘yourhome’, ‘wheels’, ‘parentcentral’ and ‘healthzone’). The
redesign was ostensibly collaborative – with Vidar Waltersson holding a dual role as
President of Torstar Digital and Vice President for Digital Media at the Toronto Star –
though as we’ll see shortly, others disagreed. In any event, by 2011, TOPS became a relatively minor property for Torstar Digital. A ‘prepackaged solution’ for the Toronto Star
and external organizations for which Torstar Digital acted as an ‘outside’ vendor.
The senior newsroom managers
The third edge we will trace for TOPS is that of senior managers in the newsroom. Senior
newsroom managers occupied an in-between position. On the one hand, when looking
towards the upper echelons of Torstar, they saw a corporation that was avowedly cautious
towards digital publishing, and which had historically tended to reward ‘print people’. On
the other hand, when looking towards the newsroom they collectively managed, they
tended to adopt the same realism of many reporters and production staff: they assumed a
progressively shrinking printed newspaper; they assumed a future with an increasingly
prominent multi-platform, digital Toronto Star; and they felt compelled to take into
account an audience presented to them via quantitative web metrics. So TOPS appeared
to senior managers in overlapping and contradictory ways. But, similar to the web operation, senior managers largely regard TOPS as a sort of foreign object. Their concern,
however, was an apparent lack of managerial authority over the platform’s design and
evolution, particularly evident in editors’ accounts of the 2008 website redesign:
… we had so many things go wrong. The guy who was in charge of the web under [Reid,
Editor-in-Chief, 2006-2008], he went into a corner of the newsroom, and no one even knew
him. He was terrible, he was fired, and I think [Sheena] took over and discovered he’d agreed
to all these kinds of things for the new website design … it was news to the newsroom that these
things were being done. Cause the guy sat in his little glass bubble and didn’t speak to anyone
about it. Sold us down the river into some awful things. (Jon Reilly, City Editor)
By the time I moved over in May, it was like, done, over. It wasn’t going to change. I would say
it was not done collaboratively … You know, one of the favorite sayings … was ‘the disrupted
cannot manage the disruption’ or whatever the hell that means … well, okay, that’s fine except
the disrupted have to produce the content for whatever the hell the people who are managing
the disruption are doing. (Sheena Rutherford, Associate Editor)
The neat ‘us’ and ‘them’ distinction deployed by Jon and Sheena was not so clear cut in
practice. In their everyday working practices, as lead editor of the so-called web
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operation and City Editor, respectively, Sheena and Jon interacted with TOPS essentially
as end users. Yet they were also embroiled in regular interactions with other senior managers, from their own and other departments, where TOPS appeared as a highly ambivalent object of managerial decision-making. Ambivalent, because TOPS and indeed the
entire information technology infrastructure at the Toronto Star was managed by ‘Group
IT’, a digital division outside of the newsroom as such, and beyond senior editors’ direct
control. Having grown to over 300 staff, and in 2011 moving to occupy vacated space on
the same floor as the newsroom after its redesign, Group IT was seen as needing containment. This was evident not only in relation to TOPS, but also Group IT’s management of
other systems, notably the CMS system for the printed newspaper, CCI NewsGate. While
NewsGate was an externally supplied rather than in-house product, its implementation at
the Toronto Star was complex and cumbersome. It required several installations, inhouse plug-ins and 10 years of internal training. Senior newsroom managers complained
that the system’s complexity was self-fulfilling: the army of technical staff responsible
for maintaining it had an inherent interest in sustaining its intricacy.
But beyond its growth as a division, senior managers worried about Group IT’s ‘client
service’ approach, which they regarded as both alien and insufficient:
There’s a newsroom culture and there’s an outside newsroom culture, and the thing the web
people always found here is the technicians who were supposed to fix bugs and all this, they don’t
understand that I mean you need it now … I know when [Sheena] was doing the web and would
want to do things, you had X-number of points a month or something, and this was how tasks
were allocated. If you had six points, and to, let’s say, fix the website so that, let me think, it would
say ‘updates’ for the updated stories? Well that’s six points so, if you use that card, they’ll do it
this month, but that’s the only thing they’ll do this month … And so they would, like, allocate
points where you could buy yourself a priority. Well, we’re the Toronto Star so we kind of want,
we’re the top priority site, we want staff dedicated to what we do. (Jon Reilly, City Editor)
Senior managers, accustomed to the print medium, expected a ‘master-servant’ relationship between editorial decisions and its resulting formats, but instead
… it’s reversed with online … the masters are IT telling you what you’re going to get … ‘You
want it to scroll? No, you can’t have that’. Or, ‘You can have it, but it will take you four years’
… a ticket will be written, a team will get together, they’ll have a discussion, they’ll have a
taskforce. It will take us a weekend to consider the options and they can come back in a couple
of years. It’s a massive frustration. (Lloyd Dover, Managing Editor)
Theorizing TOPS
In narrating the preceding accounts, my intent has not been to evaluate TOPS, nor valorize any of its particular ‘edges’, whether of the web operation, developers or senior
newsroom managers. Rather, I will now mobilize these accounts to outline three themes
related to the operation of software as an object of journalism.
The first is to think through the ontology of software as an object in and of itself. The
ordinary naming or practical treatment of TOPS as a ‘thing’ tells us something important.
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It is true that many of its apparent ‘effects’ are best understood as associations, appropriations and even misrecognitions produced through its entanglement with aspects of
situated journalistic practices. However, this cannot comprise a full account of TOPS as
a software object. As Thrift and French (2002) observe, ‘software’ objects show up in
several guises. Perhaps most prominently, software is imagined as commodified products, or otherwise, as the object of the field of software programming. Yet the most basic
expression of software is as an underlying language of instructions, otherwise known as
‘code’. As Berry (2011) notes, studying code directly is by no means straightforward (p.
29). Programmers may work with and interpret it as a kind of a textual artefact, but for
computational systems, code is not interpreted, it is directly executed. This duality of
code, argue Kitchin and Dodge (2011), is at the heart of software: it is designed and created, and therefore is a ‘product of the world’; yet it is also deployed and made operable,
and so it ‘does work in the world’ (p. 23). As a result, software is a form of ‘secondary
agency’, in that it can operate autonomously from human use or authorization (Kitchin
and Dodge, 2011; Mackenzie, 2006).
To be clear, this agency is not identical to nor crudely deterministic of human agency.
It remains crucial to account for the situated interactions between software and journalistic practices. But there are limits to such localized analyses:
It is no doubt reasonable to assume that whatever organizational and social implications
technologies may have, these are ultimately the outcome of the ways they are enacted in local
settings. Yet, the local enactment of technologies is never ex nihilo creation. It necessarily
presupposes the object of enactment. Certainly, the study of the incongruence of design and use
and the ways technologies are locally appropriated are essential to understanding the social
involvement of technology and the diversity by which technological systems are negotiated in
situ. By the same token, such perspective is not well suited to deal with layered, back-staged
operations beyond the inspection, understanding, and manipulative ability of situated agents.
(Kallinikos et al., 2013b: 397–398)
What this suggests is that while it is legitimate and helpful for journalism researchers to
study the localized appropriation of technology, and more specifically software, it is
equally important to attend to how such computational technologies introduce forms of
standardized decision-making and functionality unavailable to local interpretation or
authorization, yet which produces conditions of possibility for journalism practices at
trans-local scales. Thus, even as we might explain the uneven appearance of TOPS across
the three sites discussed here in terms such as local practical appropriation or misrecognition, we must also explain or at least acknowledge its partial autonomy as a web CMS
software object.2
Second, we should consider the implications of software objects’ capacity to continuously mutate. As Mackenzie (2006) argues, software is a type of object which ‘undergoes
phase transitions … It solidifies at some points, but vaporizes as others’ (p. 2; cf.
Manovich, 2001). Software objects such as web CMS can be made and remade into
potentially infinite versions which, as Mackenzie points out, perhaps explains why such
objects are ordinarily understood by non-specialists as immaterial or intangible
(Manovich, 2001). Thus, as Kallinikos et al. (2013a) argue, digital objects such as software have an ‘ambivalent ontology’.
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This ambivalence or mutability at least partially accounts for the growth of specialized ‘Group IT’ support seen in the account of TOPS at the Toronto Star, and known to
exist in similar form in virtually all large organizations. In the context of newspapers, the
need for such support has a long history, certainly predating online publishing, extending
to earlier print alternatives (see Boczkowski, 2004a) as well as computerized page composition. Group IT inhabited the interstices of the three sites narrated in the preceding
section, and also my field observations more generally. Their presence was not only
obvious, but most clear in the ongoing maintenance of the organization’s software and
computational infrastructure, for example, in fixing bugs, installing patches, running
updates and implementing new installations. Group IT ultimately held responsibility for
maintaining TOPS, and as a result they also had effective authority over thestar.com. So,
even as the newsroom redesign pushed page production to edge of newsroom, symbolically prioritizing the web, the substantial practical work involved in page production was
still understood as controlled within the newsroom.3 TOPS occupied a different terrain.
It was produced by Torstar Digital, self-proclaimed experts in the ‘power of disruption’,
and it was maintained and project-managed by Group IT. This division of labour was
said to be founded on the ethos noted by senior web editor Sheena Rutherford, that ‘the
disrupted cannot manage the disruption’.
The final theme I will highlight is the ways in which software objects can encourage
‘computational thinking’. While there are complex interdependencies between software
and habitual or organized practices, it is insufficient to see such interdependencies from
an anthropocentric point of view alone. As Berry (2011) argues, using the example of
SatNAV systems and Google Live Search, we can also become objects of software, being
required to think computationally in order to affect its intended functions (p. 120). Berry
observes that unlike Heidegger’s ‘ready to hand’ hammer – which withdraws from view
as its user focuses on the end of ramming a nail into wood – software platforms such as
Google Live Search are ‘unready to hand’. As a user types their search, algorithmically
determined terms are suggested, encouraging the user to recognize, and think with, the
computational agency in play. Dispersed in and around the use, maintenance and management of TOPS were several manifestations of the so-called computational thinking.
For example, there were noticeable shifts in the treatment of quantitative audience data.
Particularly in longer term strategic thinking, editors’ increasingly justified action in
light of available audience metrics (for further discussion, see Anderson, 2011; Lee et al.,
2014; MacGregor, 2007). It was also evident in those cases where editors and journalists
worked with developers and IT staff to formulate and implement tweaks to TOPS,
intended to optimize the discovery and presentation of content via algorithmic means,
such as search engines. As should hopefully be clear, computational thinking is not a byproduct of crude technological determination, but rather a phenomenology of action
always already taking place through and in conjunction with the formal logics of computational technologies (see Hayles, 2012).
It is important that the preceding analyses of TOPS not be seen in static terms.
Between my two observation periods, not only was there increasing comfort with and
acceptance of computational technologies, but also a remarkable shift in the everyday
phenomenology of newsroom technologies. In 2005, aside from desktop computers, the
main computational devices visible were the BlackBerry smart phones used by some
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senior editors. But by 2011, mobile devices proliferated: editors regularly used tablets in
news meetings; reporters used smart phones for all manner of tasks, from search to story
writing to video and photo capture. One result was that the mystique and novelty ascribed
to web CMS, and digital media in general, seemed to be eroding. My interviews in 2011
made clear that editors and journalists increasingly felt comfortable and confident
enough with their emerging multi-platform situation to turn away from questions of technology, and towards ‘content’:
I think this is also an important part of the lesson, is to understand your content, because this is
what this is really about. It’s not about being on the website. It’s not about going digital I don’t
think. It’s understanding how your content will play on different platforms, and how its
consumed on different platforms. (Sheena Rutherford, Associate Editor)
I would argue, however, that this confidence is not quite a case of journalists commandeering software infrastructure. Rather, it indicates a further domestication of such software and its associated infrastructures, with its status as an object partially receding from
the prevailing practical language of journalism (see Helle-Valle and Slettemeås, 2008).
Less and less a foreign object, more and more a silent appliance of journalism work.
Conclusion
By January 2013, TOPS finally met the end of its 6-year run as the web CMS underlying
thestar.com. In a major website re-launch, thestar.com shifted to a new off-the-shelf web
CMS (Adobe CQ5). Its stated ethos is ‘engagement’: It presents users arriving at a story
via social media or search engine referrals with linked content designed to drive them
deeper into the site, and it offers regular visitors a ‘mystar’ platform with a series of personalized features and settings. In addition, the new web CMS is designed to allow much
more flexible layout in both news content and advertising. Mobile versions of thestar.
com were likewise shifted to off-the-shelf, third-party providers: the newspaper’s first
tablet platform making use of the Pressly web app, and its mobile app and website moving from TOPS to Polar Mobile’s MediaEverywhere platform. Organizational changes
went alongside changes in technical platforms. By most accounts, online news assumed
elevated status in the newsroom, with priority placed on web news in the main morning
meeting, and the reorganization of the web operation into departments. At the corporate
level, Torstar Digital was folded to attain ‘operational savings’, with its digital properties
redistributed to other divisions within Torstar. There were relatively few layoffs; the
projected savings will largely result from shifting staff from Torstar Digital’s former
open-plan loft offices in Toronto’s Fashion District, back to the newspaper’s modernist
waterfront office building.
These more recent changes no doubt emerge from a confluence of factors. One worth
underlining is the Toronto Star’s relatively unique ownership arrangements, mentioned
earlier. The voting trust who control its parent company ascribe near-mythical status to
their flagship newspaper, and are strongly inclined to a revalorization of ‘traditional’
journalism in a digital age. So it is likely that, if only in part, some of these moves have
been made to redress perceived imbalances between the authority of the different
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organizational sites involved in thestar.com and its mobile platforms. But this does not
necessarily imply a lessening weight for software objects in relation to journalism at the
Star. If anything, these recent developments represent an example of a more widespread
shift, noted by Pollock and Williams (2009), whereby organizations are replacing software systems developed in-house with externally supplied, commercialized and prepackaged IT ‘solutions’. Arguably, this introduces even greater software-mediated
standardization between news organizations and indeed with other organizations and
outlets also (see also Czarniawska, 2011: 176–215).
My argument in this article in that journalism research needs to take seriously the
trans-local, autonomous operation of software, even as they rightly emphasize nuanced
research into the local and associational interactions of journalistic practice and technology. If we accept the partial autonomy of software objects such as web CMS from journalistic practices, then one possibility is that we do not regard software as objects of
journalism, but instead as objects in relation to journalism. This would be somewhat pessimistic, as it would imply journalism studies is a scholarly arena that views software as
foreign objects to journalism proper. There is another possibility, however. This is to
maintain that software objects are ‘of’ journalism. In this case, what would be required is
a sense of ‘journalism’ as part-constituted by nonhuman or technical agency, that is, by
forms of ‘secondary agency’ increasingly constituting the basic conditions of possibility
for journalism. In this scenario, it would be understood that some objects of journalism
(not necessarily software objects alone) are institutionalized at the point of design rather
than through the performance of organizational hierarchies or everyday routines (cf.
Kallinikos et al., 2013b). This opens up interesting, and certainly not straightforward,
questions about whether, and in what sort of conditions, (some) journalists might learn to
write code, or collaborate with software programmers (see Aitamurto and Lewis, 2013;
Lewis and Usher, 2013).
In summary, I have asserted that software objects do, to a degree, determine the circumstances of journalistic practices – and increasingly so. This has presented ‘digital’
journalism as not only broader than online news, but also broader than recent examples
of ‘robot journalism’ whereby algorithms are being used to automatically produce certain forms of news content (e.g. see Clerwall, 2014). I have sought to point to the longer
term, and perhaps more ordinary, ways in which software forms conditions of possibility
for journalistic practice. While I maintain that empirical accounts of how such software
objects matter for journalism should remain strongly situated and ethnographic, I have
argued that it is conceptually inadequate to reduce software to such localized settings. It
is worth ending with a note on the political implications of this view. The point made
here is emphatically not to prioritize a ‘hidden’ or nefarious politics operating beyond
human practice or consciousness. Rather, what is needed is a better account of the conditions of possibility through which the political communication embodied by journalism
practices is experienced, performed and ordered.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or
not-for-profit sectors.
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Notes
1. The names used when referring to Toronto Star and Torstar staff in this article are pseudonyms.
2. Such attention to objects themselves, independent of human involvements, leads toward the
more controversial terrain of object-oriented philosophies, one strand of which (e.g. Bogost,
2012; Harman, 2011) seeks to radically extend Heidegger’s tool-analysis beyond human
experience to the phenomenology of objects or ‘things’ (for discussions vis-a-vis software
studies, see Berry, 2011; Caplan, 2013). There is insufficient space here to explore this emergent intellectual field, but such approaches potentially mark a dramatic shift from investigations (including that of this article) which begin and end their investigation of software
objects from the perspective of human social life.
3. At least, that is, until March 2013, when the Toronto Star outsourced its page production
entirely.
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Author biography
Scott Rodgers is a Lecturer in Media Theory at Birkbeck, University of London. His research in
the area of journalism studies is largely focused on the urban spatialities of journalistic practices,
technologies and organizations.
545730
JOU0010.1177/1464884914545730JournalismJournalismBraun
Article
News programs: Designing
MSNBC.com’s online
interfaces
Journalism
2015, Vol. 16(1) 27–43
DOI: 10.1177/1464884914545730
jou.sagepub.com
Joshua A Braun
Quinnipiac University, USA
Abstract
In this essay, I use Law’s framework of heterogeneous engineering in tandem with
insights from other sociologists of systems and scholarship on organizations, as a
springboard to examine a number of digital artifacts assembled by the MSNBC Digital
Network over the period 2007 through 2010 and to explore the manner in which a
wide variety of values, interests, and concerns became ‘invested and contested’ in their
design. Specifically, this article, the result of 5 weeks of interviewing and field observation
at MSNBC.com, MSNBC TV, and National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) News’
various online offices, explores the backstories of two seemingly mundane interfaces
used by NBC News’ Web properties during that period, both of which are revealed to
be particularly dynamic, heterogeneous, contingent, and consequential.
Keywords
Heterarchy, heterogeneous engineering, interface design, MSNBC, Newsvine,
television news
In this essay, I use Law’s (1987, 2002) framework of heterogeneous engineering in tandem with insights from other sociologists of systems and scholarship on organizations,
as a springboard to examine a number of digital artifacts assembled by the MSNBC
Digital Network over the period 2007 through 2010 and to explore the manner in
which a wide variety of values, interests, and concerns became ‘invested and contested’ (Chamberlain, 2010) in their design. Specifically, this article, the result of 5
weeks of interviewing and field observation at MSNBC.com, MSNBC TV, and
National Broadcasting Company (NBC) News’ various online offices, explores the
Joshua A Braun, School of Communications, Quinnipiac University, 275 Mount Carmel Avenue, Hamden,
CT 06518, USA.
from jou.sagepub.com at UNIVERSIDAD DE CONCEPCION on December 27, 2014
DownloadedDownloaded
from http://www.elearnica.ir
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Journalism 16(1)
backstories of two seemingly mundane interfaces used by NBC News’ Web properties
during that period, both of which are revealed to be particularly dynamic, heterogeneous,
contingent, and consequential.
The first case involves MSNBC.com’s comment thread technology, derived from
software originally built to curate comments on Newsvine.com, a social news site akin
to Digg or reddit that was launched in 2005 and purchased by the MSNBC Digital
Network in 2007. The manner in which the system surfaced ‘valuable’ contributions,
identified ‘offensive’ ones, and the algorithmic processes by which value and offense
were evaluated were developed and fine-tuned within the social and technological context of the original Newsvine site. When these same tools were airdropped into MSNBC.
com, MSNBC TV, and NBC News properties, many of the assumptions behind them
ceased to operate, generating unexpected effects and eventually resulting in a dramatic
redesign of the Newsvine software that impacted both NBC News/MSNBC-branded
properties and the original Newsvine social network.
The second case is that of MSNBC.com story pages, the ‘front end’ visible to users of
a dramatic redesign of MSNBC.com’s underlying software aimed at changing the way
the company managed the technological infrastructure of its existing online brands and
launched new ones. This infrastructure and the strategy behind it have largely been jettisoned in the wake of changes to the corporate ownership of MSNBC and NBC News’
online presence, but nonetheless represent an interesting snapshot of the online company’s erstwhile approach to distributing content online – as well as a common modus
operandi of media organizations attempting to build platforms capable of leveraging
numerous markets simultaneously.
Media technologies and evolving organizations
As Pinch and Bijker (1984), Neff and Stark (2004), Kellogg et al. (2006), Chamberlain
(2010), Nissenbaum (2011), and Anderson (2013) have noted, we can often see the
improvisational nature of organizational activities, and the various interests, values, and
assumptions they must accommodate, etched into the design of the technical artifacts
they use and produce. This is, perhaps, especially true of media organizations, whose
work is everywhere influenced – mediated – by information technologies. And indeed,
there has been a good deal of scholarship on the role and production of technical artifacts
within contemporary and emerging organizational forms, variously referred to as ‘postmodern’ (Hughes, 1998), ‘heterarchic’ (Girard and Stark, 2002; Stark, 1999), ‘permanently beta’ (Neff and Stark, 2004), and ‘postbureaucratic’ (Kellogg et al., 2006), among
other monikers.
A common thread among these studies is that the increasingly tumultuous nature of
the economic landscape surrounding media in general, and media technologies in particular, has led to novel organizational forms, wherein workers and teams are organized
in ways that align with neither the dependent relationships characteristic of traditional
organizational hierarchies, nor with the level of independence that once commonly
accompanied notions of the free market. These new organizational structures, or ‘heterarchies’ (Stark, 1999), are characterized by the flattening of conventional hierarchies, the
troubling of traditional organizational boundaries, and the rise of project-based
Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at UNIVERSIDAD DE CONCEPCION on December 27, 2014
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Braun
economies (Child and McGrath, 2001; Girard and Stark, 2002; Grabher, 2002; Kellogg
et al., 2006; Neff and Stark, 2004; Stark, 1999).
In many of these accounts, producers of online media are held up as prime examples
of heterarchic firms, while digital information technologies are said to facilitate and
sustain their attendant flat organizational forms, taking on the role of awareness systems
that allow teams inside and outside the organization to simultaneously monitor one
another’s activity and react in real time (Boczkowski, 2010; Kellogg et al., 2006).
Moreover, the concurrent use of these technologies by project teams, clients, and end
users with distinct and at times disparate interests has led organizational scholars to lean
on language and concepts from the history and sociology of sociotechnical systems,
such as ‘boundary objects’ and ‘trading zones’ that deal with the complex interplay of
artifacts and social practices (Galison, 1997; Girard and Stark, 2002; Kellogg et al.,
2006; Star and Griesemer, 1989).
As all these authors point out, fast-changing technological landscapes may generate
solutions to organizational problems and permit new forms of organizing, but they also
pepper media firms with pressures and uncertainties. All of this raises rich questions
about the influence, or ‘material agency’ of technical artifacts in complex social systems,
of which news organizations are just one example. Indeed, as the very term, ‘heterarchy’
indicates, much of the challenge of studying new organizational forms lies in accounting
for their heterogeneity – the ‘increasingly dense and differentiated layering of people,
activities, and things’, within and across contemporary organizations, ‘each operating
within a limited sphere of knowing and acting that includes variously crude or sophisticated conceptualizations of the others’ (Suchman quoted in Neff and Stark, 2004: 181).
Heterogeneity and material agency in sociotechnical
systems
In Ron Howard’s film, Apollo 13, National Aeronautics and Space Administration
(NASA) engineers at mission control are charged with figuring out a way to repair the
imperiled astronauts’ life support system using only objects available aboard the spacecraft. More specifically, they famously need to fit a square peg into a round hole to connect two pieces of equipment that otherwise would not work together. Each one of the
available items aboard the spacecraft, with which the engineers intend to conduct the
repair, is what you might call recalcitrant (Burke, 1965), helping to solve one problem,
but often creating another, which has to be solved by adding yet another item, which in
turn creates another issue, and so on. Burke (1965) paints working with recalcitrant
objects like these as a dialogical process, whereby the world pushes back on our raw
intentions, forcing us to iteratively temper them into a viable strategy (p. 258). As he puts
it, ‘the recalcitrance of your material discovered en route may eventually compel you
to revise’ your plans. Pickering (1995) later encapsulated this notion of continual
reappraisal in his memorable turn of phrase, the ‘dance of human and material agency’
(p. 251). More than the simple notion of ‘solving one problem while creating another’,
recalcitrance, in other words, is a way of looking at agency, material and otherwise – the
stubborn unwillingness of parts to bend to fit the need at hand. It is the idea that things
never entirely give up their shape. In the film, the end result is an unholy-looking
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Journalism 16(1)
assemblage of bungee cords, duct tape, socks, and plastic bags – resources that are individually troublesome, but together solve more problems than they create.
On a larger scale, Law (1987) called this process of fitting together recalcitrant
actors into a working assemblage heterogeneous engineering. But, in his view, to
focus strictly on the gadgetry involved in such enterprises is inevitably misleading.
People and corporations are regularly in the position of having to engineer solutions
to their problems with recalcitrant tools, but when the introduction of a gadget to the
emerging solution creates a new problem, it is frequently patched not with another
gadget, but with a lawyer, a merger, a marketing campaign, an employee training
program, a new pricing scheme, and so on (Hughes, 1987, 1998; Law, 1987). Like
technological resources, these bits and pieces are also recalcitrant and the problems
they create may be solved with another gadget or another lawyer, and so on. This is
the ‘heterogeneous’ aspect of heterogeneous engineering – technology is only one
sort of tool amid the various legal, social, scientific, and economic implements that
get lashed together into a working system like, say, a media organization or an online
distribution strategy for TV news. That the result looks complicated when we open it
up to examine it is no surprise – there are no solutions in the world, save for those full
of socks and duct tape.
All of these observations and theoretical frames raise an interesting proposition: if the
improvisational nature of system-building activities – and the various interests, values,
and assumptions they must accommodate – are indeed etched into the design of technical
artifacts, might we use these tools and interfaces to examine and tell the story of contemporary media organizations? That is the task to which I turn in the remainder of this
article.
Cases and methods
The cases in this article grew out of a larger research project on online publishing and
distribution of TV news. MSNBC.com is a particularly rich case for exploring trends
discussed above: as a hybrid company built specifically to link TV and the Internet, its
struggles – over how to innovate with new forms of distribution and online participation
while also maintaining its standing as a traditional medium – are emblematic of many of
the challenges of legacy news media organizations more broadly as they have moved
online. Moreover, MSNBC.com was arguably a particularly successful negotiator of
these challenges. Even amid controversial restructuring and changes in corporate ownership, by 2005 the New York Times had dubbed it ‘the most-used news site on the Internet’
(Carter, 2005). In subsequent years – up until its acquisition by Comcast – it consistently
remained among the top three most trafficked news outlets in the United States, alongside CNN.com and Yahoo! News (Stelter, 2010).
The particular artifacts I discuss were chosen because they allow us to pry at the various trends discussed above in interesting ways. In particular, they highlight the role of
technical artifacts in negotiating and sustaining heterarchic organizational forms. The
first case, Newsvine, is an illustrative example of how technical and organizational
change occurs within a postbureaucratic media organization as subsidiaries and project
teams pursue their own provincial objectives by way of heterogeneous engineering.
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Braun
The second case, concerning MSNBC.com’s story page redesign, illustrates a firm’s
technologically mediated response to the heterogeneous challenges presented by this
mode of organizing.
The data for these case studies were obtained through a combined 5 weeks interviewing and field observation at MSNBC, the bulk of which was conducted in 2010 at the
East Coast offices of MSNBC, NBC News, and MSNBC.com, as well as the Newsvine
headquarters in Seattle, just prior to the acquisition of MSNBC and NBC News by
Comcast. Over the course of the larger project, which spans 2009 to the present, I have
conducted 50 semi-structured interviews with employees of MSNBC, NBC News, and
MSNBC.com, along with their partners and competitors. My recounting of these cases is
based on qualitative analysis of transcripts from these interviews, my descriptive field
notes from 2010, and commentary appearing in press releases and trade publications.
Nice threads: Civil discourse and the design of commenting
tools
Newsvine’s original design
The online startup Newsvine was founded amid a span of heavy experimentation with
social news among technology startups. Following the notable success of several general
interest and niche news aggregation sites at the turn of the millennium, including Google
News, Yahoo! News, Slashdot, and Topix, news provision became a major area of online
investment and innovation in the mid-2000s. In addition to Newsvine, the period between
late 2004 and early 2006 saw the emergence of a host of popular and/or critically acclaimed
sites including Digg, reddit, Memeorandum, The Huffington Post, and Findory.
When Newsvine incorporated in 2005, with a little over US$1 million in backing from
a Seattle-based venture capital firm, the startup consisted of five staffers. The group’s
broad ideas for a business were eventually crystallized into a concept for a site where
citizen journalism published by users would be aggregated and discussed alongside professional news content. Users would be able to rate the quality of articles, and their votes,
when tallied, would determine the placement of stories on the site’s cover and section
fronts. The result would be a constantly evolving news site on which the prominence of
articles was gauged by quality, rather than source, leading to heightened exposure for the
site’s ‘citizen journalists’ – far beyond what they would generally be able to obtain by
publishing one-off stories independently.
The Newsvine founders were sensitive to the complex array of factors that go into
making a working social media site. They realized the social norms that grew up on their
site would play a major role in dictating the quality of its content and, consequently, the
company’s ability to monetize it. Maintaining a reasonably high standard of content on
the site would be necessary, both to attract advertisers, investors, corporate partners, and
potentially acquisition offers, as well as to ensure that Newsvine’s content could be managed and moderated by a small staff that would scale much more slowly than the site’s
user base. The team thus set about marshalling a heterogeneous set of tools in an attempt
to carefully engineer not just the software for the site itself, but the community that
would use it.
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Among the strategies they employed were technical features, including the site’s voting mechanisms and an abuse-reporting feature that would allow the user base to be
enlisted in reporting spam and offensive content. They also created a sophisticated karma
system called ‘Vineacity’ that, like similar systems on other sites, totaled the amount of
positive feedback a user’s stories and comments had received, but – unlike most of these
other systems – also programmatically enumerated other types of achievement that the
Newsvine staff saw as desirable, such as courtesy to others and connectedness within the
community. These technical features helped to incentivize pro-social behavior and to
minimize less helpful contributions on the site. And the developers engaged in other,
more directly social forms of engineering as well. For example, in the early phases of the
site, Newsvine developers selected as alpha and beta testers friends and acquaintances
they thought would be positive influences on the community as it grew. The developers
also took care early on to open the site up to the public incrementally, so as to prevent
positive community norms cultivated in and by the existing community from being
drowned out by a sudden influx of new users. In other words, new users were initially
added only at the rate at which they could be acculturated by the existing user base, a
socialization process underwritten by the technical mechanism of giving new users limited numbers of registration invitations to extend to friends.
These technical and social strategies were also paired with commercial incentives
for creating good content and inviting high-quality contributors to the site.
Specifically, Newsvine instituted a revenue-sharing program that awarded users who
kept popular blogs on the site a share of the revenue from the display advertising
appearing on their stories and user pages. And if an existing member of the community invited popular users to the site, she would receive a cut of the ad revenue from
her invitees’ content as well. In collaboration with the user base, the staff also developed a set of five brief, prominently displayed, and easily citable policies called the
‘Code of Honor’, akin to Wikipedia’s ‘pillars’ in that they served as a sort of legal–
philosophical document for the site – aspirational moderation guidelines frequently
referenced both by Newsvine’s staff moderator and users when discussing acceptable
behavior or reporting abuse.
What I have mentioned here are, by necessity, only a few of the numerous technical,
social, commercial, and policy-oriented strategies put forward by Newsvine in an attempt
to grow a user base that would produce consistently high-quality content and be manageable by a small staff of one or two moderators. The heterogeneous combination of strategies worked well, or at least yielded some notable successes. Thanks to ardent
self-policing by the user base (and other interventions not discussed here), the site’s
rapidly scaling community could be moderated by one person who could leave each
weekend without the domain devolving into chaos. The quality of its discussions led to
the site being selected by the New York Times as one of the first three social networks for
which the paper’s website added share buttons. Newsvine also earned the Time magazine’s award for ‘Top News Site of 2006’, among other accolades, and the startup
received multiple acquisition offers over the subsequent year. But nowhere is the intimate and constant interpermeability of technology and its heterogeneous context more
apparent than when that context shifts abruptly, which is precisely what happened when
the Newsvine startup was acquired.
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• Selection of friends and “friends of friends” as alpha and beta testers.
• Incremental opening of the site to new users at a rate that allowed them to
be socialized by the existing user base.
• Human moderators responding individually to abuse reports and user
missteps.
• Entreaties from founders to the community to help socialize new members.
• Inclusion among the “Vineacity” karma awards of editorial prizes given by
the site’s proprietors for exemplary user contributions.
Technical
• Automated voting mechanism for determining prominence of user
contributions.
• Automated abuse reporting mechanism.
• “Vineacity” karma system that awards users for pro-social achievements.
• Artificially limited numbers or registration invitations during beta testing.
• Comment collapsing algorithm for automatically hiding user contributions
repeatedly flagged as offensive.
• Graphical icon automatically applied to new users’ contributions to identify
them to the community.
Commercial • Revenue sharing program that gave users a cut of the ad revenue on popular
columns.
• Inclusion in the revenue-sharing model of financial incentives for inviting
productive users to the community.
• Deals with professional news publications to drive traffic to the site.
• Sought acquisition to pay back investors and bankroll continued expansion
of the social media site.
Policy• The “Code of Honor,” a brief and highly readable set of moderation
Oriented
guidelines promoted to and adopted by the user community.
Social
Figure 1. A selection of the heterogeneous tools employed by Newsvine in the service of its
goal of creating a productive and commercially viable social news site. Note that nearly every
element put in place was challenged in some way by (or served as a response to) the company’s
acquisition by MSNBC.com.
Newsvine becomes an MSNBC.com property
In 2007, Newsvine was purchased by MSNBC.com, a joint venture between Microsoft
and NBC Universal that, among other things, was the primary website for NBC News and
MSNBC TV. Newsvine became one of, and eventually the primary, system for user commentary on MSNBC.com, as well as one of the main content management systems in use
by NBC journalists. This transition was ultimately a fruitful one, but in the short term it
wrought numerous complications that turn out to be instructive for the study of sociotechnical systems and how they play within and across organizational boundaries (Figure 1).
Newsvine, upon its acquisition, became the primary discussion tool for MSNBC.com
stories, which received tens of millions of visitors every month. As a result, Newsvine
itself also began receiving lots and lots of new users, who were not ‘friends of mine and
friends of theirs’ as then-Newsvine CEO Mike Davidson referred to the site’s original
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Journalism 16(1)
self-selecting community. Many of these new users streaming in from MSNBC.com had
never heard of Newsvine or the Code of Honor, they did not understand ‘Vineacity’. ‘The
people that come over to Newsvine in that way [from MSNBC.com ‘Discuss’ links] are
not familiar with the ethos of Newsvine’, noted Davidson.
They feel like they are about to leave a comment on a major media site. Sometimes there are
bad behaviors that go along with that. If you’re reading some sort of article – or watching some
sort of video – by a pundit on MSNBC … [and] you want to leave a comment about it, flaming
what you just saw, you’re not necessarily aware that that’s not really acceptable behavior on
Newsvine.
And as one might expect, for a technological interface built around a carefully cultivated
and largely self-policing user base, this began to have repercussions. The Newsvine Blog
entry from this time in early 2008 reads, in part,
[The influx of new users] is a good thing, of course … but it’s [also] potentially a bad thing
because as we all know, when new users come en masse to a Newsvine thread, they aren’t
always aware of how we do things around here. We were all new at one time. Please welcome
in our new visitors as you would a new guest to your own cocktail party, with diplomacy and
patience. We hope that the Newsvine community puts its best foot forward when receiving new
participants into the collective discussion.
The post listed off several of Newsvine’s initial technical responses to this problem,
including the addition of a special label to new users’ comments meant to flag for the
existing community which users should be given helpful advice and/or a wide berth. The
post, and particularly the excerpt above, is interesting in the manner in which it lays out
a heterogeneous solution to the problems incurred by integration with MSNBC.com.
Technological fixes were being delivered, yes, but the post is also an entreaty to experienced Newsvine users to help socialize the unwashed masses from MSNBC.com, to
make them amenable to the site’s system of moderation. And interestingly, a technical fix
– the special label for comments by newly registered users – was added to the interface
and used in combination to identify for the community individuals in need of social engineering. This is yet another example of how the Newsvine staff saw design and social
practice as mutually supporting and intimately intertwined.
There were those in Newsvine’s core user base who answered the developer blog’s
clarion call to help draw MSNBC.com users into the Newsvine community and acquaint
them with the site’s norms. However, as Davidson noted above, many of the people coming in from MSNBC.com were apt to view the Newsvine page they landed on as a normal comment thread on a mainstream news site, responding to – or worse, flaming – the
single story and leaving, never to return, opting out of Newsvine’s reputation economy
and normative structure entirely. Although the growth of online communities frequently
leads to escalating ‘conflict and coordination costs’ (Kittur et al., 2007), and challenges
to established norms – including flames – can at times lead to better articulations of a
community’s existing values (Franco et al., 1995), what was happening at Newsvine was
the introduction of a ceaseless, directed flow of users who not only did not share the
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community’s norms, but mistook it for something else entirely. Newsvine developer Josh
Yockey noted,
At first the Newsvine users tried to interact with them as if they were part of the Newsvine
community. So they’d reply to their comments and teach them about the Code of Honor if they
looked like they were violating it. And I think eventually most of them just stopped. Because
they realized these people weren’t coming back. … I think a lot of the Newsvine people just
realized that it wasn’t worth going into these ten thousand comment-long threads and
thoughtfully replying to each one of them. ‘Excuse me, you should educate yourself on the
Code of Honor’. You know, they just got out.
By ‘got out’, Yockey did not mean here that the existing user base left the site. Rather, in
his account they remained on Newsvine, but began avoiding the comment threads for
MSNBC.com stories like an unsavory neighborhood. Meanwhile, although Newsvine’s
full-time human moderator was still on duty, ready to respond to bad behavior in these
threads, much of his job was dependent on the ability of the community to accurately
locate and report abusive comments among the thousands of user contributions that
poured in daily. Unfortunately, the community that understood and abided by the norms
on which the moderation software was predicated was increasingly avoiding MSNBC.
com discussion threads altogether.
This is not to say that no abuse reports were being filed on MSNBC.com threads. The
individuals filing them, however, were not necessarily the ones familiar with the site’s
original normative structure. In addition to adding noise to the queue of Newsvine’s
human moderator, these abuse reports would also trip up the site’s automated moderation
mechanisms. On a site like Newsvine, when enough users report a story or a comment as
abuse, it is automatically ‘collapsed’ by the system, meaning that the text of the comment, while not removed altogether, is hidden by default (users who wish to read a collapsed comment can click its heading to reveal the text).
It is worth noting that any reasonably effective comment collapsing algorithm1 is
itself a heterogeneous product. When debates get heated, some comments may simultaneously be voted up by some users and reported as abusive by others; to work effectively,
a collapsing script has to operate on a sliding scale so that as an article draws more attention and registers more ratings in aggregate, it also takes more negative votes to bring
down a comment. Common sense tells us that five abuse reports on a comment that has
only been rated eight times should probably be collapsed. But how about a comment
with a thousand total ratings that has been flagged five times?
Creating a collapsing algorithm that intelligently weighs the balance of votes for and
against a comment is a tricky challenge, simultaneously technical and social. By analogy,
Law (2002), in examining engineering equations used in aircraft design, underscored the
manner in which mathematical expressions that on their face purported to simply explain
the physics of lift, wing contouring, and airspeed were ultimately as much or more about
the comfort and safety of crews and pilots, as well as the commercial and political conditions under which aircraft were designed.
Bruno Latour (1990) refers to this process, through which the messy and diverse
world of experience is reduced to an equation, an engineering diagram, an algorithm, as
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Journalism 16(1)
deflation. While Newsvine comment threads are far removed from the life and death
world of experimental aviation, we can similarly understand moderation algorithms as
concealing a great deal of hard-won experience, and containing within them a set of
working assumptions about what we tend to think of as fundamentally social problems:
the extent to which controversy should be tolerated and/or valued in discourse, as well
as the perceived nature and values of the community flagging and voting on those
comments.
They are thus heterogeneous technologies in the sense that their functioning is inextricably linked to interrelated technical, social, and policy concerns. Automated moderation systems at times seem deceptively simple, but thinking about them in this way
reveals a surprising amount of complexity at work. The upshot of this observation, as it
pertains to MSNBC.com comment threads, was that the algorithm designed to respond
to complaints by users familiar with Newsvine’s site policies was often being used
instead by visitors who, as one producer caricatured it, ‘are screaming at their TV and
don’t realize there’s a human on the other end’. In this new context, many comments got
collapsed not because they violated community norms, but simply because the ‘Report
Abuse’ button became a weapon in the arsenal of angry one-off commenters.
Vitriolic comments and abuse of community participation mechanisms plague many
legacy news providers (Braun and Gillespie, 2011). MSNBC.com was not unique in this
respect, though they had, perhaps, hoped to alleviate such problems by integrating their
mainstream media site with an existing online community with a reputation for good
behavior. Ironically, though, prior to the acquisition of Newsvine, many of MSNBC.
com’s discussion tools had required that comments be vetted by Web producers prior to
their publication,2 which had resulted in discussion threads that, to readers anyhow,
appeared comparably civil, if somewhat sparsely populated. So, as MSNBC.com’s new
Newsvine-powered discussion threads filled publicly with vitriol, an initial reaction of
some MSNBC.com staffers I spoke with was that there was perhaps something wrong
with Newsvine’s software, its moderation technology, or the culture of its users.
What turns out to be interesting, then, is that the exact same technology – the same
user interface and underlying algorithms – that worked so well for the original Newsvine
site appeared to break when integrated with MSNBC.com content. And while the
Newsvine comment platform on MSNBC.com continued to function flawlessly from a
strictly technical perspective, it was indeed malfunctioning in a sense. It ceased to operate at an optimal level because it was, in fact, a sociotechnical system that had been
stripped of the social, as opposed to the technical, components that allowed it to function
correctly.
As these issues became better understood, MSNBC.com and Newsvine stepped in to
solve them in ways that could fill another article. MSNBC.com increased its staff moderation presence in discussion threads, doing more to quickly remove vitriolic comments,
help commenters understand each section’s standards of discourse, and simply let users
know by their participation that they were not yelling into thin air, but that publishers
were reading their comments. Meanwhile, Newsvine began to redesign its software platform and the heterogeneous system of which it was a part to cope with a new user base.
The company took the creation of generative communities from a massive mainstream
media user base as its new challenge for innovation.
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Braun
The resulting platform is an interesting one: discussions on Newsvine.com now take
place among small groups of users – while there are spaces for public discussion, generally speaking you must join one or more groups to comment. The intention is that users
in these smaller groups will get to know one another in ways they never could in threads
with thousands of comments, thus limiting the sorts of bad behavior that come with the
relative anonymity of comment threads on large news sites. Moreover, while the actual
workings behind the new ranking mechanism for Newsvine stories are somewhat opaque,
the idea in 2010 was that the visibility of comments and posts on the site would in many
cases be determined by the amount of positive feedback awarded the group, as opposed
to the individual, allowing the algorithm, or potentially the administrators of the system,
to feature groups whose discussions were determined by the community to be most interesting or whose discourse was most civil. ‘Newsvine 3.0’, as the revised system has been
branded, was rolled out in beta on Newsvine.com and subsequently introduced as the
primary commenting system of a revamped MSNBC cable site. Its most interesting conversational groups may at some point be a featured commentary on the latter site and on
NBCNews.com, the two successors to the original MSNBC.com.
The integration of MSNBC.com and Newsvine thus has had dramatic impacts on the
design of Newsvine.com, ultimately spurring a total redesign of the site. And as
Newsvine’s software became integrated into the larger MSNBC.com website, replacing
older blogging tools, community features, and content management functions,
Newsvine’s evolution likewise had a major impact on MSNBC-branded and NBC
News–branded properties as well. Ultimately, the acquisition of Newsvine by MSNBC.
com transformed both sites in far-reaching ways, beyond the mere technical requirements of allowing their various software platforms to interoperate.
MSNBC.com’s flexible architectures
The year 2010 saw an extensive redesign of MSNBC.com’s story pages, which were not
only receiving an updated look, but also being built on top of a new software architecture. This architecture upgrade, which involved the introduction of a software system
called SkyPad, was in part intended to help speed up the site’s years-long development
cycles. Newsvine’s former director of technology, Josh Yockey said of MSNBC.com,
[Around 2005] they had a lot of problems with stability and the server just not being up. And
so they [subsequently] made an organizational focus on ensuring that there was no chance that
when you went to MSNBC.com there wasn’t a fast page showing you news. And to that
monomaniacal goal they ended up sacrificing a lot of agility in their development. So they were
very careful about rolling out features and very careful about developing them and very careful
about testing everything through. The upshot of which is that everything was really stable, but
if somebody went in and said, ‘Hey, we want to change our blog platform’, it would have been
two and a half years to get something turned around.
To make development more flexible, and hopefully much faster, MSNBC.com added
what they referred to as a ‘compositional layer’ to MSNBC.com’s publishing platform in
the form of SkyPad. Former president Charles Tillinghast explained SkyPad as a virtual
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Journalism 16(1)
‘punchdown block’, after the old routing systems used with phone equipment. A punchdown block allowed its operator to plug a collection of wires into either end and make
connections at will between any sender and any receiver. In the same way, where
MSNBC.com and other sites in the MSNBC Digital Network – subsidiaries like
Newsvine, BreakingNews, and EveryBlock – had once consisted of distinct Web interfaces connected to their own independent databases, SkyPad was intended to ultimately
allow any site in the MSNBC Digital Network to access data from any other, and conversely to allow the company to spin up databases for information not tied exclusively to
any one site. ‘The whole point of all this is that you can replace the front end and back
end components independently’, said Tillinghast:
So it’s not a monolithic system. These are all components. And that way you could, say, upgrade
the editorial UI to keep it all fresh and webby, even though you don’t change anything on the
back. Or you could add a new database on the back so that you could do more queries for stories
or populate databases. For example, a long time ago we fed in the bridge repair data for the
entire country so that after the Minneapolis bridge collapse, you can go and find out what the
status of a bridge in your own neighborhood is. We were pulling that out of the database. Well,
now that database could just be plugged right into SkyPad and it becomes really easy for an
editor to query, to do a report like that without much effort.
SkyPad was thus intended to have several important effects. First, it would speed up
development by increasing the modularity of the sites employing it. User interfaces and
databases would become isolated components to be updated and swapped out like so
many interchangeable parts, thus limiting the scope of the work that had to be done to
refresh any one piece of the site. Second, it would increase the diversity of data sources
developers and, ideally, editorial staff could draw from – rather than trying to fit some
interesting new data set into a Procrustean database tied to a particular site’s content
management system (CMS), a new database could be created for that content and
‘plugged in’ to SkyPad. Third, and finally, SkyPad would effectively serve as a massive
application programming interface (API), allowing developers and designers to easily
call up and flexibly present data from any source within the MSNBC Digital Network,
which in turn would mean they could ideally assemble new page templates and whole
new websites on the fly.
One of the first products to come out of SkyPad was the 2010 MSNBC.com story
page template, which allowed editors to mash up, arrange, and continually update any
combination of text, video, photos, illustrations, user comments – and ultimately other
media as well – from across the MSNBC Digital Network. An important advantage was
that the page for any news story on the site could be continually updated over the course
of a breaking news event to allow for the constant addition of new information in a wide
variety of media formats. Being able to update a single story page with a broad variety of
different media, which could be continually linked to and revisited at the same URL, was
seen as a dramatic improvement over the previous CMS’s workflow, which would generally involve publishing text, videos, and story updates all as their own individual items
on the site, or combining them only through inflexible templates that did not allow editors to place different media in ways that best told the story they intended.
39
Braun
The ability to combine fresh news updates with older multimedia content on the same
page also provided a solution to a common problem encountered by the websites of TV
news organizations. Namely, while their flagship brands are often evening newscasts,
news websites do most of their traffic during daytime hours (Boczkowski, 2010).
Promoting clips from the previous evening’s broadcast – quite literally ‘yesterday’s
news’ – on a news website can put it at a competitive disadvantage with other online
news outlets, and as such TV news websites often have a tortured relationship with many
of their cable and broadcast properties. TV producers want their content featured prominently online, while web editors often find it more competitive to tuck it away in favor
of breaking stories. The flexible SkyPad story pages provided a creative technical compromise, allowing TV stories to be used as supplemental content on a page that could still
be continually updated with the latest breaking news.
The same trading zone-style compromise also made it possible to take advantage of
moments of alignment between editorial staffs and products whose tenor and target audiences might be viewed as incompatible on a larger scale. For example, the op-ed style
commentary of Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow might not generally have meshed
well with the neutral-minded reporting espoused by editors of other portions of MSNBC.
com (Stelter, 2010). But if one of these programs contained a traditional breaking news
segment, it could still easily be slotted into the story page for that topic on a one-off
basis, allowing editors and producers to take advantage of opportunities for crosspromotion whenever and wherever they arose, while allowing different teams within the
larger organization to maintain their independent and often quite disparate editorial
voices and brand strategies.
Generality in the service of specificity
The development of the all-new SkyPad architecture proceeded apace with a similarly
flexible and repurposable architecture called ‘M3’, which was focused on blogs and
developed for MSNBC.com by its Newsvine subsidiary. The amount of effort put into
developing both platforms was substantial, labor intensive, and – most interestingly –
aimed at making them useful in a broad array of highly specific, even unforeseeable
editorial circumstances. If the MSNBC Digital Network saw a brief window of opportunity to acquire or launch a new brand, it could now, in theory, spin up a corresponding
site rapidly, whatever the unique editorial requirements. If the über-specific editorial
need ever arose to mash up local exit polls with bridge repair data, that too would be
possible in theory under the new system. This all dovetailed with MSNBC.com’s publicly espoused ‘one size does not fit all’ market strategy of creating editorial products to
suit a broad variety of needs.
In addition to serving the needs of a large heterarchic organization, full of distinct
technical and editorial subcultures pursuing loosely coordinated goals in a rapidly changing technological environment, the new platforms were also aimed at helping MSNBC.
com to grow beyond its existing audience. While the site had long done well among an
undifferentiated audience of general news consumers, the year 2010 saw the launch of
numerous branded sites and blogs on MSNBC.com and within the larger MSNBC Digital
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Journalism 16(1)
Network aimed at reaching specific target markets – moms, foodies, social media junkies, gamers, and so on.
What’s interesting is that this proliferation of niche brands and their highly specific
needs was underwritten by the construction of ever more generic and multi-purpose publishing tools, built to be easily re-branded, to accept a wide variety of content, and to allow
for rapid repurposing and cross-posting of content across branded properties. This proliferation of targeted brands and editorial products, combined with increased architectural
flexibility, was a strategy for aggregating as many niche audiences as possible via a single
technical platform. It was, in effect, an attempt at mass reach without mass mediation.
In other words, MSNBC.com’s architectural overhaul reflected a recognition not
only of diverse motives within the company, but among users whose activities had
become highly influential in a distribution environment increasingly moderated by
social media. As former CEO Charles Tillinghast put it, the idea was that users who
were part of niche communities related to the online company’s myriad interest-based
columns and brands – astronomy blogs, hyperlocal news sites, and so on – would frequent these online locales as a means of locating content relevant to their own social
networks and ‘share it out from there’ as a means of gaining social capital. And while,
in the wake of recent changes to MSNBC.com’s corporate ownership, the 2010 story
pages – along with SkyPad and aspects of M3 – have been phased out, they collectively represent a design and editorial strategy that is increasingly common across
many online media companies from AOL, MSN, and Yahoo! to Gawker, Vox Media,
and Cheezburger, Inc.
Discussion
By tracking the changes to, and technical compromises ultimately embodied in, the
design of everyday artifacts in use on a news site, I have argued we can tell a nuanced
story about the organization itself. So what have we found? As evidenced in these cases,
online publishing at a large media organization, where many different interests, companies, and editorial subcultures are both spread across large physical distances and lying
under one figurative roof (Deuze, 2007; Girard and Stark, 2002; Kellogg et al., 2006) is
a highly complex enterprise and a tremendous example of heterogeneous engineering,
wherein resources must be lashed together creatively in ways that align the interests of
many groups and actors, technical and social, that have their own provincial requirements and rarely bend perfectly to meet the need at hand.
There has been no shortage of scathing criticism on the part of journalism scholars
and industry observers over the past decade to the effect that ‘legacy’ media organizations have failed to take strategic lessons from the success of social media startups.
Insofar as the Newsvine acquisition was an early and earnest attempt on the part of one
such firm to take social media seriously, it illustrates how startups and older media
organizations each operate within unique networks of oft-recalcitrant resources and face
unique challenges. The Newsvine case demonstrates that the heterogeneous infrastructure and resources of a startup cannot simply be plugged into a legacy news organization
or vice versa.
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Braun
Rather, legacy media are often caught in the teeth of the shifting tectonic plates
described by organizational scholars: a transition on the part of firms from operating
largely via top–down hierarchies optimized for the production of scarce commodities to
new and emerging organizational structures often centered around the creation of informational goods. On the one hand, legacy news media are purveyors of just the sort of
goods around which new organizational practices frequently pivot. On the other, the
bureaucratic and economic structures from which they sprang – and which, in many cases,
allow them to continue to exist – have traditionally been very much about the production
of scarce commodities along the lines of newspapers, bound magazines, and discrete
newscasts. It is not surprising, then, that MSNBC.com and many other legacy news firms
have developed hybrid organizational forms that can be classified neither as hierarchies
nor as collections of free agents. They are heterogeneous structures, or – to wit – prime
examples of heterarchy (Stark, 1999). And rather than having a homogenizing effect on
organizational cultures, vertical integration and corporate partnerships tend to make things
more complex, populating news organizations with diverse organizational subcultures,
each with their own heterogeneous strategies and assemblages of tools.
In scholarship on sociotechnical systems, many (though not all) case studies have
centered around projects wrought by more traditional organizational forms examining
systems from a more or less top–down perspective. While systems scholars, keenly
aware of the nuances of the sociology of knowledge, have readily acknowledged that the
appearance of a system largely depends on where, and from whose point of view, one
begins to trace out the networks of relationships involved in it (e.g. Latour, 2005; Star
and Griesemer, 1989) in a ‘postmodern’ or ‘heterarchic’ environment, this observation
becomes far more than a truism or methodological caveat. It is, rather, the key to understanding contemporary media systems full of agents with distinct goals, acting and reacting to one another simultaneously.
For MSNBC.com executives, for example, the acquisition of Newsvine was a way to
add a social media offering to its portfolio, so as to leverage an emerging and highly
engaged portion of the news market. Simultaneously, from Newsvine’s perspective,
MSNBC.com was a financier whose deep pockets could pay back investors and bankroll
further development of their social media site.
In other words, if MSNBC.com was an architect enrolling Newsvine in the sociotechnical system it was building, Newsvine was equal parts an architect in its own right,
enrolling MSNBC.com as a resource in its own emerging network. The interaction of
these interleaved systems and system builders, each a recalcitrant resource from the perspective of the other, altered both systems profoundly. But neither was a simple subordinate of the other. Trying to make sense of heterarchic news media organizations only
works when we are willing to hold in abeyance our tendency to view large systems as
singular – if contested – objects of inquiry. Rather, in tracing out the associations
involved, we must admit we are dealing with multiple overlapping systems. These are
promulgated simultaneously by different system builders within and across organizations, each of whom has defined in their mind’s eye a system that accords with their own
unique goals and understandings, attempting to unfold their own provincial teleology by
rearranging shared resources.
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Journalism 16(1)
When we view sociotechnical systems from the perspective of a single system builder,
we risk telling aggrandizing tales in which system builders remake the world in their image,
as formerly recalcitrant actors are domesticated and slotted into a top–down organizational
chart. When we instead see actors as enrolled simultaneously in different systems, each
strategizing and unfolding according their own provincial teleologies, we have what you
might call a more ‘relativistic’ view of systems, in which what a system looks like depends
heavily on vantage point – on the position from which the observer traces it out – and in
which constructs like power and position are dynamic and not so easily tabulated.3
At MSNBC.com, this state of affairs became etched into the design of its technologies. The overhaul of story pages and their underlying architecture were, in effect, a
material acknowledgment of the reality of relativistic systems. They were tools for a
flattened hierarchy, designed to be as flexible as possible so as to meet the needs of many
user and editorial groups, reconciling the requirements of on-air and online staff and the
myriad desks and project teams within the larger organization.
Funding
This research was funded by a dissertation grant from the Cornell Graduate School.
Notes
1. A software algorithm is a set of rules that determines how a program should respond to a
given set of inputs – in this case, whether it should collapse a comment based on the running
tally of positive votes and abuse reports.
2. For a discussion of gatekeeping practices as they pertain to comment threads, see Hermida
and Thurman (2008).
3. Another way of saying this is that understanding sociotechnical systems, the way they are
defined differently by different actors and the way they are reimagined to fit new realities and
arrangements of resources, is about understanding narratives. It is no coincidence, for example, that Kenneth Burke, who offers up such a compelling description of the role of material agency in tempering the systems we imagine and build toward, was a literary theorist.
If building a sociotechnical system is about working teleologically toward one’s preferred
arrangement of resources, narrative has been similarly described as a means of ‘ordering the
universe’ (Cooren, 2000; Greimas, 1987). For more on the connection between narrative and
organization, see Weick (1995).
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Author biography
Joshua A Braun is Assistant Professor of Communications at Quinnipiac University. He is currently completing work on a book about online distribution of television news, forthcoming in
2015 from Yale University Press.
545732
JOU0010.1177/1464884914545732JournalismKeith
Article
Horseshoes, stylebooks,
wheels, poles, and dummies:
Objects of editing power in
20th-century newsrooms
Journalism
2015, Vol. 16(1) 44–60
DOI: 10.1177/1464884914545732
jou.sagepub.com
Susan Keith
Rutgers University, USA
Abstract
This essay examines five largely unsung artifacts of 20th-century newspaper journalism –
the U-shaped copy desk, stylebooks, pica sticks, proportion wheels, and paper dummies
– to tell a story about power shifts in US newsrooms. The essay also offers a new model
of 20th-century newsroom eras, arguing that these objects of journalism mark what
might be called the age of the copy desk, a time between the 1920s and 1970s when
copy-desk editors exercised a quiet control over content. That power faded over the
decades, symbolized by the disappearance of the distinctively shaped copy desk and the
loss of relevance of most of the other tools. It was replaced, this essay argues, by eras
of the writer from the 1970s into the 1980s and the designer from the late 1980s into
the 21st century.
Keywords
Copy desk, copy editor, designers, journalism, journalism history, newspaper, reporter
power, reporters
Introduction
This essay examines five rarely studied objects used in newspaper production in the 20th
century – the horseshoe-shaped copy desk, the stylebook, the pica measuring stick, the
photo proportion wheel, and the paper page dummy – to tell a story about power shifts in
US newsrooms. The essay argues that these pieces of material culture – simple products
Susan Keith, Department of Journalism and Media Studies, School of Communication and Information,
Rutgers University, 4 Huntington St., New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA.
45
Keith
of the fields of furniture making, book publishing, graphic design, photography, and
printing – together symbolized in US newspaper journalism one historical stage in construction of how the news looked. From at least the 1920s to as late as about the 1970s,
this essay maintains, copy editors (known as ‘sub-editors’ in Britain and some other parts
of the world), working at U-shaped tables, used stylebooks, pica sticks, proportion
wheels, and page dummies as tools of newsroom power, designating the relative importance of different events as presented in newspapers and exerting control over both the
wording and appearance of news.
These material artifacts, closely guarded in newsrooms – if an editor lost a pica stick, it
could be difficult, at some newspapers, to obtain a replacement – also symbolized one type
of ‘editor power’. That power faded over the decades, a casualty of several factors that
gradually shifted newsroom clout from copy desks to reporters and section editors in the
1970s and 1980s and of the adoption, during the later 1980s, of a different system of objects
for creating newspaper pages: pagination and desktop publishing software. Although stylebooks remained a part of newsrooms, the decline in use of pica poles, photo proportion
wheels, and dummies heralded a shift to the ‘designer power’ of the 1990s, which has been
displaced by the (many would argue too-slow) drive to digital in the 21st century.
This essay draws on work by Barnhurst and Nerone (2001, 2003) but proposes a
greater focus on frontline newsworkers. It also acknowledges the perspective of Latour
(2005), who calls for researchers to reconsider the place of objects in social processes,
seeing ‘any thing that does modify a state of affairs by making a difference’ as an actor
(p. 71). Such copy-desk actors are particularly interesting to study in the second decade
of the 21st century, as traditional editing practices are being disrupted, with many newsrooms dismantling their copy desks, centralizing copy-editing and design functions for
several newspapers in one geographic location, and doing away with traditional copy
editing for online stories entirely (Channick, 2011; Keith, 2009; Lypny, 2013; Myers,
2012). The essay proceeds in two parts. The first discusses objects of the copy desk and
how they were or are used. The second discusses where the era of those objects fits into
the history of US newspapering, proposing a rethinking of the usual ordering of 20thcentury newsroom eras.
Objects of editing
Horseshoes, stylebooks, pica sticks, proportion wheels, and dummies
The most visible of the five objects of journalism examined in this essay was the
U-shaped table, or ‘horseshoe’, around which copy editors sat, sometimes described as
‘the most notable feature of the classic newsroom’ (Nesvisky, 2008: 46). The middle of
the U was occupied by the chief copy editor, whose position led to his being referred to
as ‘the slot’, a term still used in many newsrooms to describe the supervisor of the copy
desk. He (virtually all were men) handed paper copies of stories to copy editors sitting
around the outside of the desk, who came, as a result, to be called ‘rim editors’ or ‘rimmers’. When these rim editors finished editing the stories, they passed them back across
the desk to the slot, who reviewed the copy editors’ work, made changes if necessary, and
sent the edited stories to the composing room to be set into type (Brown, 2010).
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Journalism 16(1)
It is not clear when newspapers began to use the horseshoe configuration – which
allowed editors ‘to see and interact with everyone else at very close range’ (Nesvisky,
2008: 46) – but journalists’ memoirs and biographies of journalists refer to U-shaped
copy desks existing as early as the 1920s and 1930s (Berkow, 2007; Currell, 2009). At
some newspapers, sports and other departments that produced specialized copy had their
own, often smaller, U-shaped desks (Duscha, 2005; Wilson, 2006).
Editors working at these desks employed – and encouraged reporters to use (Davis,
1992) – consistent rules of spelling, punctuation, word usage, and editorial style (appropriate abbreviations, capitalization, etc.) outlined in stylebooks. In the United States, the
stylebooks used most often were those published by the Associated Press – available in
something like its present form since 1953 (Moynihan, 2003) – or United Press
International, though midsize and larger newspapers compiled their own primary or secondary stylebooks (Garst, 1943; Miles, 1995).
Some of the copy editors used pica sticks, also known as ‘line gauges’, ‘printer’s rulers’, ‘pica poles’, and ‘pica rulers’. These flat measuring sticks typically are 12 inches
long, though they are available in 6-, 18-, and 24-inch sizes. They are marked with both
inches and picas, a unit equal to one-sixth of an inch that is used to measure the width of
a block of text, and sometimes with other measures (Ryan and Conover, 2004; Williams,
n.d.). Pica sticks can be made of plastic or wood, but the iconic version is stainless steel
calibrated with black markings and capped by a rounded head that often contains a hole
for hanging the tool.
Proportion wheels consist of two flat circles of heavy paper or lightweight plastic, the
smaller superimposed upon the larger, that are used to size photographs or illustrations.
The circles, which are marked off in units of measure, are connected in the middle with
a fastener so that they can turn independently. To use a proportion wheel, a copy editor
would find a number on the inner circle that corresponded to the width of an original
hard-copy photograph or illustration and turn that circle so that it lined up with a number
on the outer circle that corresponded to the desired width of the image. A small window
in the top circle would display a percentage by which the image had to be reduced or
enlarged to obtain a photograph or illustration of the desired size (Gurney, 2010).
Paper dummies were sheets of paper, divided into columns corresponding to the number of columns of type on a newspaper page, on which copy or design editors drew
mock-ups of finished newspaper pages, placing stories, headlines, graphics/illustrations,
photos, and photo captions. These ‘maps’ served as guides for printers using hot type or
compositors working with pre-pagination versions of photomechanical typesetting
(sometimes called ‘area composition’) to put together pages. Later, when design was
fully computerized, dummies were often used by copy editors or designers as a way to
visualize pages before beginning on-screen work.
These five tools often were employed together in US newsrooms. A copy editor sitting at a horseshoe-shaped desk would edit a story, correcting errors and checking questions of style in the stylebook used in that newsroom. Next, the copy editor or a colleague
designated to design pages would use the proportion wheel to determine the size of art
elements and employ a pica stick as a straight edge while drawing on the paper dummy
to indicate where stories, photos, headlines, and cutlines (photo captions) should be
placed. The editor would label the dummy to designate which page it represented and
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write information about the percentage to which photos should be reduced or enlarged on
a paper tag attached to the images. In many newsrooms, photos and dummies were collected by clerks, rolled together and sent to the composing room by pneumatic tube
(Bennett, 2009; Lamb, 2012).
The people who used the objects
These tools were used by copy editors, often called the ‘last line of defense’ against
errors in newspapers because they (or their supervisor) would be the last newsroom
workers to see stories, headlines, and cutlines before they appeared in print (Vane, 1997).
The job of copy editor seems to have developed as a separate newsroom position in the
United States around the time of the Civil War. The position did not take on a specific
name, ‘copyreader’, however, until the 1870s and did not develop into an entity separate
from the city desk until the 1880s (Solomon, 1993).
Over the decades, particularly after World War II, copy desks dealt with a series of
changing technologies. They went from marking stories on paper and sending them to be
set into lead type by Linotype operators,1 to dealing with wire stories that had been sent
via teletypesetting (TTS) equipment directly to those linecasting machines (Wilson,
1953). Later, many copy editors worked with optical-character recognition readers
(Compaine, 1980; Randall, 1979, 1986). Computer-based editing arrived in the 1970s
and 1980s, eliminating the need for a horseshoe-shaped editing desk, as stories could be
handed off by the slot electronically, in a variety of models (Russial, 2003; Walsh, n.d.).
At some newspapers, however, U-shaped tables continued to be used, at least as furniture
on which electronic screens were positioned, well into the 1980s (Himmel and Himmel,
2009; Rhomberg, 2012; Soderlind, 2006).
Through most of these changes to the way text was processed at newspapers, the way
routine visual decisions were made remained roughly the same as in the 1930s, when large
dailies shifted responsibility of the look of the newspaper from printers to editors (Barnhurst,
1994). Copy editors – or, at some newspapers, specially designated copy-desk members
called ‘makeup editors’ or ‘layout editors’ – designated how stories and images would be
played on dummies that guided blue-collar production workers in the composing room.
Copy-desk workers did not, certainly, always have free rein in these decisions. They
worked, especially in designing front pages, under the guidance of the newspaper’s editor or managing editor. In addition, their work likely was influenced by design principles
advocated by typographers such as Ben Sherbow (1921), who wrote several popular
books and redesigned the New York Tribune in 1922. Copy editors with journalism
degrees – and that was far from all of them between the 1930s and 1960s – would have
received some instruction in layout if they took a course in copy editing, texts for which
generally included a chapter such as ‘The Principles of Makeup’ (Brown, 1952). Later in
the 20th century, copy editors with journalism degrees might even have had an entire
course in newspaper design, such as those pioneered by Edmund Arnold, a newspaperman-turned-typographer-turned-design guru, who taught at Syracuse University and
Virginia Commonwealth University (Miller, 2007).
Given, however, the speed of breaking news and the possibility of responding to
developments by remaking pages in the multiple daily editions that metropolitan
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newspapers once produced (Barnhurst, 2011; Hobbs, 2010), copy editors and associated
newsworkers could not help having an impact, at an occupational level, on how news
was presented. It was they who wielded the tools of design. That fact, and the fact that
copy editors and the copy-desk supervisor (known in different newsrooms by such titles
as ‘the slot’, ‘the news editor’, and ‘the copy chief’) were the last to touch reporters’
copy, put the copy desk in a position of quiet power. In fact, one might even say that for
several decades, there existed in US journalism a now largely unrecognized ‘age of the
copy desk’ – signified by the relevance of U-shaped tables, stylebooks, pica poles, paper
dummies, and proportion wheels.
Newsroom eras: A new approach
In The Form of News (Barnhurst and Nerone, 2001) and a related article (Nerone and
Barnhurst, 2003), Barnhurst and Nerone suggest that US newspapering can be read as
having passed through several periods of style (visual characteristics), type (a newspaper’s mode of production, encompassing ‘its machinery, its business plan, and its division of labor’ (Nerone and Barnhurst, 2003: 436)), and ideals (roughly the societal idea
of a newspaper’s purpose). They see the US colonial period as being the era of ‘the
printer’s paper’, the 1820s–1880s as being a period of both ‘the editor’s paper’ and ‘the
publisher’s paper’, and the 1880s ushering in the ‘industrial paper’ in an era of increased
mechanization. In their timeline, the second decade of the 20th century, when professionalizing impulses were being felt in many fields, including journalism, brought the
era of the ‘professional paper’, which lasted until the 1950s (p. 436). The 1980s brought
the beginning of the ‘corporate paper’, ‘more sophisticated at targeting specific readership segments and packaging them for advertisers’ and ‘less interested in mass readership and more interested in high income and highly motivated subscribers’ (p. 439).
Each of those divisions is useful for understanding the broad sweep of newspaper history. This essay, however, aims to add to that timeline a layer of detail and an understanding of the shifting balance of power among frontline newsworkers, tied in part to the use
of the objects of editing described here. It proposes that decades roughly analogous to
Nerone and Barnhurst’s professional and corporate paper eras encompass ages of the
copy editor, the reporter/writer, and the designer.
Of course, periodization in history is always somewhat problematic. Although
attempting to understand the past by seeing it as composed of different time periods can
help us see major developments in context, the exercise is necessarily reductive, and it is
rarely possible to say that one age ended cleanly at a precise point and that another immediately began. In addition, as Bentley (1996) wrote, identifying eras of history
depends on prior decisions about the issues and processes that are most important for the
shaping of human societies. … Even within the framework of a single society, changes in
perspective can call the coherence of conventionally recognized periods into question. (p. 749)
Furthermore, as Kaufmann (2010) wrote, place cannot be ignored: ‘Periodization relies
on the historicist assumption that not everything is possible in all times, but it is also true
that not everything is possible in all places’ (p. 3). So the eras discussed here should be
understood with the following cautions:
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•• Eras may have sometimes overlapped, with the power of one type of newsroom
worker rising before that of another had fully faded.
•• Eras likely will have been expressed differently in different locales, with, for
example, reporters being more influential from the mid-20th century onward in
some newsrooms than in others.
•• Individual counter-examples surely existed, such as the untouchable reporter or
columnist who was able to avoid the constraints of even a strong copy desk.
These limitations do not, however, seem reason to shy away from offering an alternative reading of already existing periodization of US journalism history, one that provides
a different perspective on the newsroom.
The era of the copy desk
The idea that there might have been an era of the copy desk is far from the usual scholarly
narrative. The copy desk has generally been portrayed, when it has been studied at all, as
a place of problems, not power. There has been a persistent stereotype that copy desks
were ‘where grizzled reporters went when they got too old to chase fire engines or police
cars’ (Himmel and Himmel, 2009) or a work home of last resort for newsroom drunks
(Pulford, 2005; Ramsey, 2008; Reed, 2009).
Solomon (1989, 1993) has suggested that the importance of what came to be known
as the copy-editing function declined after it no longer was performed by an assistant to
the city editor. (For a description of the copy-editing function as part of the city desk, see
Williams and Martin, 1911.) As the newsroom division of labor increased, he has written,
the esteem in which copy editors were held fell. To describe the early 20th-century copy
desk, Solomon (1993) drew on a memoir by former New York deskman Charles Stewart
(1943), who referred to the copy editor as one who ‘seldom held his head high … [H]e
had been called the old maid of the profession, he had been accused of murdering the
creative talent of reporters’ (p. 44).
More recently, copy editors have been conceptualized as a ‘special challenge’ (Willis,
1988: 154). Their generally evening work schedules remove them from day-to-day interaction with top editors. Their mandate to be pre-publication advocates for readers puts
them in an adversarial position vis-a-vis reporters, sometimes giving rise to a perception
that they are ‘trolls in the night, slashing’ (Dunlap, 2002: para. 7). Solomon (1994)
argued that the introduction of the video display terminal (VDT), an early type of electronic screen, in the last quarter of the 20th century moved the copy editor away from
being a wordsmith and into work that contained a large component of technological
drudgery. Not surprisingly, then, copy editors were found to be more likely to be psychologically burned out than other newspaper journalists (Cook and Banks, 1993). Some
have reported that they felt as though they were constrained from involvement in newsroom conversations and debates about ethics (Keith, 2005a) and were dissatisfied with
their work (Zahler, 2007), including prospects for advancement (Keith, 2005b).
These fairly contemporary findings, however, are only part of the picture of the copy
desk in US newspaper history. Many former newsroom workers have remembered the
copy desk as a commanding presence. It was the home of ‘important people who did the
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final editing on every story in the newspaper’ (Currell, 2009) at Toronto’s Evening
Telegram in the 1920s. The copy desk shared with the city desk prime placement in front
of reporters’ desks in 1948 at the Indianapolis Times (Wilson, 2006) and occupied a
‘highly visible perch’ at the ‘center of it all’ (Lamb, 2012: para. 3–4) in the mid-1970s at
the Christian Science Monitor. The copy desk was ‘the brain, the nerve center’ (Parker,
1997: para. 2) of the Post-Journal of Jamestown, New York.
Even Stewart (1943), whom Solomon (1993) cited as offering evidence of the sad lot
of copy editors, had more to say about desk work than Solomon quoted. Stewart went on
to write,
I knew copyreaders who could speak seven languages fluently, who could tell you the exact
date of any significant event in history or how far the street numbers ran on Sixth Avenue, who
could imitate a writer’s style more expertly than the writer himself could handle it … and who
knew where to look for every fact that wasn’t at the pencil’s tip. I have suggested that a certain
shyness may account for the fact that some of them chose the copydesk rather than the street.
That was not all. Copyreaders were usually more in demand than reporters. Even though the
technicalities might be easily learned, on the desk it was harder for a beginner to fake an
experience which he lacked. Frequently good newspapermen got sidetracked to the copydesk
because of their special talents. Just as frequently they chose the copydesk because of the
satisfaction of being the last one to see a piece of copy before it went into the paper, of doing
the final polishing, and of making full use of their stores of information. (pp. 44–45)
Similarly, Duscha (2005) recalled that a copy chief of the St Paul Dispatch and Pioneer
Press in the 1930s was working on a doctorate, and Davis (1992) remembered that the
Winston-Salem Journal & Sentinel copy desk was home in the early 1950s to ‘one of the
first of many linguistic geniuses’ (p. 175) he would meet on copy desks. This image of
copy editors as talented storehouses of knowledge complicates the usual narrative of the
US newspaper copy desk.
Also suggesting that it is counterproductive to see the copy desk as an afterthought in
US journalism before 1980 is the fact that the desk was often home to, or at least associated with, the position of telegraph or wire editor. This person, and/or an assistant, evaluated news arriving by telegraph and, later, other electronic means from wire services and
other sources outside the newspaper’s coverage area. The position was established
enough by 1894 that it could be referred to without explanation in a humorous column in
a publication for train engineers and firemen (An office drama, 1894). It continued to be
relevant in US newsrooms, though under different names – such as ‘wire editor’, ‘news
editor’, or ‘national-foreign editor’ – into the 21st century. In 1911, Williams and Martin
noted that ‘although he often receives suggestions from the managing editor and his
work is subject to the latter’s direction, the judging of news is left to the telegraph editor’
(p. 213). That decision-making power also was evident in White’s (1950) study of ‘Mr.
Gates’, a wire editor at an Illinois newspaper shown to be making news selections based,
in part, on his personal biases. Although later work (Whitney and Becker, 1982) raised
questions about whether telegraph/wire editors were merely reproducing choices already
made by wire services, replications of the White research in the 1960s (Snider, 1967) and
1990s (Bleske, 1991) suggested that wire editors contributed their own professional
influence to newspaper content.
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Furthermore, as Nerone and Barnhurst (2003) note, the copy desk served as the vital
link between the editorial and mechanical departments, acting as a funnel through which
all text and images had to pass. Without reporters, one might have produced a newspaper
filled with telegraph/wire copy. Without photographers or artists, one might have published a paper devoid of illustration. But without the copy desk and its special skills, one
might not have been able to publish even a poor edition of the newspaper unless city
editors and other section editors knew copy-desk procedures – including how to use pica
poles, proportion wheels, and paper dummies – well enough to fill in.
Between the 1930s and 1960s, having a strong copy desk became a mark of minimal
competency for a metropolitan US daily newspaper. Publisher Alicia Patterson is said to
have viewed Newsday, serving the New York City suburbs on Long Island, as not as
strong as it could have been in 1954, despite winning a Pulitzer Prize, because its copy
desk was ‘almost nonexistent … leading to amateurish style snafus’ (Harris, 2007: 239).
That was certainly not the case during the 1950s and 1960s at The New York Times,
where Theodore Bernstein – an assistant managing editor, Columbia Graduate School of
Journalism professor, and author of several books on language – lay down rules for
grammar, style, and usage. These rules, Talese (2007) wrote, ‘were memorized by deskmen throughout the newsroom, who were held accountable by Bernstein for the maintenance of his principles; thus the deskmen, in the interest of a more readable and
grammatical newspaper, gained new and rather heady power’ (pp. 109–110).
The era of the reporter/writer
The power of copy desks, however, did not last. Although it is not possible to point to a
precise moment when the age of the copy editor ended in US newspapers – and certain
objects from it, such as stylebooks, remain key newsroom tools in the 21st century – one
place to think about the beginning of the age of the reporter/writer is with the intersection
of the New Journalism, ‘reporter power’, and journalism review movements of the 1960s
and 1970s.
Although non-fiction writers had been using techniques of fiction since at least the
19th century (Hartsock, 2000; Sims, 2008), such work gained new prominence as ‘New
Journalism’ in the 1960s in the writing of Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Gay Talese, Jimmy
Breslin, Norman Mailer, and Hunter S Thompson. New Journalism tended to both highlight the writer and have a political edge. Sims writes, ‘It challenged the authority of
Journalism’s empire of facts and the sanctity of Literature’s garden of imagination …
[and] confronted both Journalism and Literature with the social habits and institutional
structures that sustained them’ (p. 110).
That political edge connects New Journalism with the reporter-power movement,
which during the late 1960s and 1970s attacked the institutional structure of newsrooms,
including the primacy of editors. The movement called for reporters to have a greater
stake in newsroom decision-making and more freedom to pursue various types of stories
in different ways (Diamond, 1970; Dorfman, 1974, 1978), including methods common
to New Journalism. The reporter-power push was part of a broader US questioning of
authority and the status quo reflected in the civil rights movement, anti-Vietnam war
protests, the women’s movement, the American Indian movement, and, at the end of this
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period, the gay rights movement. Schudson (1981) has termed this ‘critical culture’. As
he has written, ‘The rebellion of young reporters in the 1960s, then, was … one manifestation of a social and cultural movement. The movement affected younger journalists
first and most profoundly, but this, in turn, influenced older and more powerful journalists’ (pp. 179–181).
One of the most visible manifestations of the reporter-power movement grew out of
police violence in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Reporters
for the city’s four daily newspapers were dismayed when, after the national press covering the convention left town, local media outlets began to accept Mayor Richard J.
Daley’s revisionist takes on the violence. A group of these journalists created Chicago
Journalism Review (Macek, 2011), a publication designed to examine local media with
a more critical edge than the then-7-year-old Columbia Journalism Review displayed
(Ron Dorfman, interview with the author, 2012). The review inspired, by varying estimates, 25–40 local journalism reviews around the United States, including St Louis
Journalism Review, Philadelphia Journalism Review, Buncombe: A Review of Baltimore
Journalism, [MORE] in New York, and The Unsatisfied Man in Denver (Bertrand, 1978;
Dennis, 2011; Keith, 2013; Klotzer and Block, 1993). James Boylan (1998), a former
editor of Columbia Journalism Review, writes that these publications ‘usually attacked
the residual power of publishers, the authority of editors, or the insufficient zeal of
reporters in discomfiting politicians, business, and the military’ (p. 84).
None of these three inter-connected movements, however, survived intact. New
Journalism ‘died a long time ago’, Weingarten wrote in 2005. Likewise, Boylan (1998)
noted that ‘“Reporter power” enjoyed a brief heyday and then expired’. Struggling with
inadequate financing despite drawing thousands of subscribers, Chicago Journalism
Review lasted only 7 years, and most other reporter-produced reviews, largely run by
volunteers with full-time jobs, succumbed more quickly. (Four reviews associated with
universities survive.) All three movements, however, helped bring reporters increased
recognition and paved the way for other changes that helped to gradually shift the balance of power in US newspaper newsrooms.
Among those changes was the growth of investigative reporting. In the 1970s, Bob
Greene set up an investigative reporting team at Newsday that became a model for others around the country (Aucoin, 2007). Greene also organized The Arizona Project, a
1976 effort in which journalists from around the country spent 6 months in Phoenix
carrying on the work of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles, who was killed in a 1976
car bombing, apparently by someone angered by his reporting on organized crime
(Wendland, 1977). About the same time (1974–1976), Washington Post reporters Bob
Woodward and Carl Bernstein were gaining national renown for their Watergate reporting, though some have suggested that the media’s role in the investigation has been
overstated (Feldstein, 2004). Such projects cast ‘a new romantic aura over a profession
whose entrepreneurial talents had lain largely dormant in the 1940s and 1950s’, Lambeth
(1986: 116) notes.
Meanwhile, several mid-career training and fellowship opportunities for journalists
emerged, joining the Harvard Nieman Foundation fellowships, which started in 1938.
What are now the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford University were
begun in 1966 (Mission and History, n.d.: para. 2). In 1973, the National Endowment for
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the Humanities Journalism Fellowship, now the Knight-Wallace Fellowship, was begun
at the University of Michigan (Past fellows 1973–1974, n.d.). Although these fellowships were not limited to reporters, in reality most of the awards went to writers, further
increasing their newsroom stature. Writers also were the target of many conferences at
the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a training center for working journalists established in 1975 as the Modern Media Institute by Nelson Poynter, publisher of the St
Petersburg (Fla.) Times (A Brief History of the Poynter Institute, 2010).
During the 1980s, especially, star writers began to more often be given the freedom to
write long and spend months on projects (French, 2000). Although some newspapers had
been known before this time as ‘a writer’s newspaper’, it became more common to use
that term to refer to a newspaper that offered more leeway to those crafting stories
(Cumming, 2010; Gaines, 2003; Kaniss, 1991; MacPherson, 2006). In short, as
Underwood (1995) has written, ‘this was the heyday for reporters’ (p. 50).
The era of the designer
The era of the reporter/writer had challenged the power of copy editors, but the next
shift, from the latter 1980s to the early 21st century, constrained both writers and traditional copy-desk operations. In this era of the designer, some writers and reporters
retained power, especially at newspapers known for investigative reporting or longform work. In other newsrooms, however, reporters lost power because design was
prioritized and story length and placement began to be more often determined by efforts
to make the newspaper visually appealing. In addition, newsrooms embraced new
objects of journalism that writers generally did not learn how to use: proprietary pagination systems (such as those created by Harris, Hastech, Atex and, later, CCI Europe) or
desktop publishing software (such as QuarkXPress, launched in 1987, and Aldus
PageMaker, launched in 1985, acquired by Adobe in 1994 and updated to InDesign in
1999) (Chagnon, 2002).
The situation for copy editors was more ambiguous. Some larger metropolitan dailies
moved design from the copy desk to separate design desks (Auman, 1994). At these
newspapers, the copy desk, which had lost power in the era of the reporter, also lost the
ability to influence the display of news. At other newspapers, the copy desk retained the
design function and gained greater control over page production, freed from dependence
on composing-room workers, whose jobs were eliminated (Howells and Dearman,
1996). Copy editors no longer merely conceived of page designs – using pica sticks,
proportion wheels, and paper dummies – they also physically produced the designs,
using some of the newest technology in the newsroom.
This change, however, forced copy desks to take over tasks once assigned to bluecollar workers, taking editors away from what had been their primary duties: editing
stories for errors of fact, spelling, grammar, and style; writing headlines; and writing
photo captions (Brill, 1994). One study found that paginating pages took editors 10–
15 minutes more per page than drawing paper dummies, the equivalent of about five
copy-editing shifts a day for a newspaper that produced 200 pages a day, with zoned
edition and page makeovers (Russial, 1994). Another found that Washington state copy
editors perceived that pagination simultaneously improved and hurt their newspapers,
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making them more attractive but resulting in ‘substantially less emphasis on traditionally
journalistic tasks, such as editing for accuracy and improving text’ (Underwood et al.,
1994: 119). So, in a sense, although the copy editors at these newspapers were the designers in this age of the designer, their new work was displacing some of the traditional role
of copy desks.
The era of the designer was not, however, determined solely by technology. As
Barnhurst (1994) and Barnhurst and Nerone (2001) have persuasively argued, interest in
newspaper design had been building for many decades before electronic tools for designing newspapers were invented. Since at least the 1920s, studies had tried to measure the
legibility and readability of various typefaces, though without, Barnhurst (1994) suggests, much understanding of the structure of type. As early as the 1930s, major dailies
were hiring typographic consultants to redesign their pages with the sensibilities of 20thcentury modernists, rejecting the traditional design they saw as a product of ‘whims of
history, thriving on neglect’ (Barnhurst, 1994: 178). During the 1950s and 1960s, newspaper design consultants continued their work, producing redesigns that emphasized
lightness, white space, horizontal organization of text, and the use of rectangular packages, or ‘modular design’2 (Barnhurst, 1994; Barnhurst and Nerone, 2001).
Although some newspapers, such as The New York Times, retained a traditional look
at least on the front page, design also received increased attention during the 1980s and
1990s because of high-profile cases of new or revamped newspaper products. The most
notable was USA Today, launched in 1982 as a color-filled newspaper with short articles,
relatively large photographs, numerous illustrations, color-coded sections, and a front
page that functions ‘as a bulletin board for what is inside’ (McCartney, 1997: para. 47).
This presentation – designed to promote scannability (Cooke, 2005) – defied the conventions of what a newspaper looked like at the time (Kostelnick and Hassett, 2003) and
mirrored the quick-hit style of news then developing in television journalism. Another
striking redesign was Knight Ridder’s conversion of the Delray Beach (Fla.) News into
a newspaper targeted at the disposable incomes of Baby Boomers. It was reborn in 1990
as the Boca Raton News, ‘a pastel-colored hodgepodge of snippets of news … sold from
pink newspaper boxes’ (Kurtz, 1993: 84). The design and content, which were heavily
influenced by focus groups (Bellew, 1991), included, at least initially, a pink flamingo
incorporated into the nameplate, a ‘no jumps’ rule that kept front-page stories short, and
maps that showed cities that appeared in the datelines of even two- and three-paragraph
stories (Kurtz, 1993; Norman, 2009).
One important component of the shift toward designer power in newsrooms was the
founding in 1979 of what is now the Society for News Design (SND), organized by journalists who had attended the first seminar on design at the American Press Institute. (A
similar organization for copy editors, the American Copy Editors Society, would not
emerge until 18 years later.) SND publishes a glossy magazine, Design, and sponsors an
annual workshop that for several years in the mid-1990s drew more than 700 attendees
(Annual Workshop, n.d.). It also produces an annual book that compiles images of the
best of the previous year’s news design, many examples displayed at near-thumbnail
size. Barnhurst (1994) suggests that such display ‘rewarded only those designs that stood
out when greatly reduced or seen from more than an arm’s length’ (p. 190). As a result,
it was those ‘big, roomy designs’ (p. 190) that were widely imitated.
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The era of the designer ended early in the 21st century, as newspapers struggled
with declining circulations – a drop of about 30 percent between 1990 and 2010
(Edmonds, 2012) – and print advertising revenues that were receding far faster than
online ad revenues grew (Edmonds et al., 2014). With the resulting widespread layoffs
and buyouts, it became less important that every newspaper page always be beautiful.
At some newspapers, design desks were disbanded and copy editors were hurriedly
taught to design and paginate pages, sometimes using a series of basic templates created by the few designers left (Keith, 2009). Several newspaper groups, including the
United States’ largest chain, Gannett Co. Inc., formed centralized design hubs where
pages were created by designers working hundreds of miles from the people who
would read the newspapers (Channick, 2011). As one former journalist put it, ‘Design’s
time as a prominent part of storytelling in print at newspapers seems to have come and
gone’ (Zhu, 2011: para. 4).
Next?
One might reasonably ask, ‘If the era of the designer recently ended, what era is next?’
There is no easy answer, for if it is difficult, as this essay concedes, to precisely label the
beginnings and ends of historical periods, then it is foolhardy to try to label a period that
cannot be seen from some distance, in context with other times.
It does not seem a stretch, however, to wonder whether it would be prudent, some
years from now, to consider whether the second decade of the 21st century might
finally have been an era of news-crafters connected with newspapers’ online or mobile
entities: producers, digital videographers, mobile ‘backpack’ journalists (Martyn,
2009), and even non-professionals who create ‘user generated content’ (Singer, 2010).
Yet newspapers’ slowness to fully embrace digital media (Kirchhoff, 2009), partly
because they did not make as much money as news managers hoped, makes it seem as
though the current period might be merely an interstitial prelude to some other era we
cannot yet conceive.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
Notes
1. The Linotype, invented by Otto Mergenthaler and first demonstrated in workable form in
1886, combined the processes of casting lead type and setting it into lines of text. It had been
widely embraced, even at small newspapers, by the 1930s (Morano, 2002).
2. For a critique of this terminology, see Barnhurst and Nerone (2001: 214–215).
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Author biography
Susan Keith is an associate professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies in the
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545733
JOU0010.1177/1464884914545733JournalismSchudson
Article
What sorts of things are
thingy? And what sorts of
thinginess are there? Notes
on stuff and social construction
Journalism
2015, Vol. 16(1) 61–64
DOI: 10.1177/1464884914545733
jou.sagepub.com
Michael Schudson
Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, USA
Abstract
Actor-network theory may help sociological studies of communication to see some
things that would have been harder to see without it. It is useful and important in calling
attention to the ways that “things” and not only persons can be actors (or “actants”)
in the human social world. Still, it may be the peculiar hubris of the scientific laboratory
that led to the presumption that things do not act in human affairs. In social criticism
and in common sense, we have long known that they do. And we know also that some
“things” are more “thingy” than others – obdurate, with a kind of independent agency.
Hardware is more thingy than software but both are “things.” Actor–network theory
(ANT) raises important questions about the place of things in social life – it does not in
itself provide answers.
Keywords
Actor–network theory (ANT), black-box, actant
Under the inspiration of actor–network theory (ANT), the papers in this volume challenge the sociological studies of communication that have generally assumed that actors
in history are human beings or groups of human beings who act upon or interact with
things or objects of various sorts, whether natural things or things we have made, when
we do science or make music or do absolutely anything. Too often we have ‘blackboxed’ an object or material thing and have thereby failed to look inside at how its active
Michael Schudson, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Pulitzer Hall, MC 3801, 2950
Broadway, New York, NY 10027, USA.
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from jou.sagepub.com at Izmir Institute of Technology on December 27, 2014
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processes shape our affairs, an impact based on its specific features that, in most cases,
could well have been different and might still be made different.
To treat the objects in our environment as actors (of a sort) in social studies of making
and doing seems reasonable to me, and more than reasonable – important. It offers a corrective to certain blind spots and it implies a program of reform or, if that is too grandiose
– at least, it implies a vocabulary for advancing new insights.
Still, this program may be struggling with a straw man. It ascribes to the thinkers it
criticizes the view that there is a radical separation of persons and things in which persons
act and things are acted on. This may be how many scientists picture themselves. It may
be how sociologists of science have pictured the world. But many others have long known
better without the benefit of ANT. I don’t think Ralph Waldo Emerson was an ANT theorist when he wrote that ‘things are in the saddle, and ride us’. He was criticizing the ways
his mid-19th century contemporaries had let new objects – railroads, say, construct their
future. He feared people were ceding agency to these Things, abdicating to them the guiding role in history. He was doing social criticism, not ANT. It is not new to accord a kind
of independence and volition to Things. This is as familiar in the language of social criticism (think of the power of the term ‘Frankenstein’) as ANT is unfamiliar.
It may be that ANT allows us to see some things that we could not have seen so well
without it; and it may allow us to say some things we could not have said so well or so
economically without it. We do, I think, have other language for black-boxing. When we
black-box something, we ‘take it for granted’. When we black-box a thing, we ‘bracket’
it. When we black-box something, we treat it as background and it becomes ‘wallpaper’.
But neither ‘take for granted’ nor ‘bracket’ nor ‘wallpaper’ has quite the richness of associations of black-boxing.
It is no accident that ANT began in the sociology of scientific laboratories. There,
scientists not only use tools they do not interrogate but they frequently design new equipment whose properties they know very well because they have intentionally designed in
those properties. But then, time passes, and the individually designed equipment gets
passed down, unconsciously what was once intentional and well considered gets blackboxed, and the scientists come to believe they are masters of the universe.
But they are not. Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar in their 1986 afterword to
Laboratory Life respond to one reviewer (Ron Westrum) who objected to the book’s lack
of unity or continuous action, the relative incoherence of its narrative. And then they say,
… our aim was precisely to avoid giving the kind of smoothed narrative characteristic of
traditional constructions of the ‘way things are’. For example, we did not want an account in
which the early presentation of dramatis personae implied that humans were to be taken as the
primary category of actors within the laboratory. (Latour and Woolgar, 1986: 176)
And this may be why many more people read The Double Helix than Laboratory Life for
access to what science might be like from the inside. We like to have heroes in our stories
even if in this case author James Watson presents himself as almost an anti-hero, at least,
a picaresque, cantankerous hero.
ANT is unlikely to have emerged in realms where the humans involved are constantly
aware of the agentive powers of non-human actants. Laboratories are consciously
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63
Schudson
engineered to provide an antiseptic environment in which all sources of variation can be
controlled, observed, and measured. The lab is therefore not a seedbed for contamination, but it may be a breeding ground for hubris. It generates the illusion for scientists that
they know exactly what they are up to. ANT is a conceptual apparatus for deconstructing
that hubris. It would not have arisen, say, in the study of agriculture. Farmers do not
consider themselves masters of the universe. Their livelihood depends on the weather,
and they know it. Their daily routine depends on the seasons. Their waking time depends
on the cows. The most important determinants of their days are forces outside
themselves.
Somewhere between the scientists striding through the lab as if they owned every bit
of it and the farmers praying for rain might be the scientists who work with lab animals.
I once visited a biologist who studied frogs in his lab, and I remember that he spoke of
his frogs as if he were an anthropologist, affectionately familiar with his tribe. For him,
the frog tribe was not interchangeable with rats, mice, or fruit flies. He knew a lot about
frog behavior, even about individual frogs and their idiosyncratic behavior, and even if
the behavior was not strictly related to the questions his research addressed. He did not
for a second think he controlled these frogs – each had its own features – frog affordances,
if you will, that made them suitable (but far from perfect) for his purposes. He learned
what they could or could not do; he learned from them what he could or could not do
with them. He would not have found ANT the least bit shocking – of course the frogs
were actants in his research!
But are they the same sort of actants as those that Latour and Woolgar faced – the
mass spectrophotometer, the amino acid analyzer, the radioimmunoassay, or the countercurrent distribution chromatograph? I suspect not. I suspect there are not just Things and
Persons. There are at least Inanimate Things and Living Things and Persons. Among
inanimate things, there are Hard Things and Soft Things and in-between things.
Parenthetically, persons as well as things can be differentiated in ways that influence
their role in the production of scientific knowledge – they differ by rank in an academic
hierarchy. They differ by personality, the more assertive and the more deferential. They
differ by their skill sets. And in relation to the volitional masters-of-the-universe humanness that ANT seeks to de-center, there are the non-volitional bodily aspects of human
beings themselves. Nikki Usher’s paper shows that a basic determinant of the processes
of the global newsroom is that people universally sleep about one-third of the normal
day, and invariably during the night hours of the part of the globe they inhabit. Even
Watson and Crick and Einstein and Newton slept. We carry our own Thinginess in our
Human-ness.
Thinginess, in this sense, is a feature of the world that influences our control of the
action before us without our conscious intent launching it. Thinginess, then, can be inside
our bodies. Moreover, by this account, Things differ in thinginess, too. We conventionally distinguish between hardware and software. Both are things. But hardware lasts a
long time, and it is not easily changed. Software is flexible and can be tweaked, you can
improve it repeatedly over time with relative ease, you don’t have to start over.
Likewise, we conventionally distinguish between legal–political entities that have
some of the hardness of hardware and voluntary civil society entities, that have some of
the flexibility or tweakability of software. Both are things but they are thingy to different
64
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degrees. Even within a legal–political entity, say, the US Congress, there are entities that
do not have formal status and do not require legal approval. The first enduring ‘caucus’
in the US Congress appeared in 1958. It – the Democratic Study Group – and the scores
of other caucuses that sprang up in the decades thereafter – had the great property that no
one had to approve their establishment. They were just established, period, by the consent of any individuals who wanted to sign up. And they could be disbanded just as easily. Human volition was not as constrained by these Things as it was by committees and
subcommittees that required congressional or party approval.
A Thing is no less a Thing for being a cultural convention or a social practice to
which, to some extent, individual human volition must bow. The news interview was
invented in the late 19th century. I don’t think journalists think of the interview as having
been invented but as natural, always there. It has been black-boxed over time. It is a
Thing. But it is a complicated thing, a two-part Thing. It is a social thing – with certain
practices and conventions a reporter employs when doing an interview with a public
official or a bystander at a fire or a wounded victim at a crime scene. And then there is
the interview as a news format, sometimes a transcript of the full interview, sometimes
just brief bits inserted into a news story but, in either case, operating by literary conventions that generally constrain how a journalist conducts or writes up an interview.
Are Things more in the saddle riding us at some historic moments than at others? Do
our understandings about the mutability and tweakability of Things of different sorts
influence what is riding what? I think ANT, as far as I understand it, raises valuable questions. I worry only that this theory like any approach or set of ideas that comes to be
named a ‘theory’ needs to work hard not to become untweakable itself. It gains something – a following, and a vocabulary, and an interacting set of players who improve one
another’s work – but it should do that without fetishizing itself.
Funding
Reference
Latour B and Woolgar S (1986) Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Author biography
Michael Schudson is the author of Discovering the News (1978), The Good Citizen (1998), Why
Democracies Need an Unlovable Press (2008) and other works. His book Opening Up: Where
Transparency Came From, 1945–1975 is forthcoming.
545734
JOU0010.1177/1464884914545734JournalismBoczkowski
Article
The material turn in the study
of journalism: Some hopeful
and cautionary remarks from
an early explorer
Journalism
2015, Vol. 16(1) 65–68
DOI: 10.1177/1464884914545734
jou.sagepub.com
Pablo J Boczkowski
Northwestern University, USA
Abstract
This brief article presents some remarks about the material turn in journalism studies.
It argues that this turn might push these studies in a more cosmopolitan theoretical
direction by inviting analysts to engage with a wide array of fields of inquiry. It also
contends that this turn might unsettle two major common methodological practices
in studies of newswork: a focus on journalists and on newsrooms as the critical actors
and locales. Looking at the objects of newsmaking might reveal the broad spectrum
of actors implicated in this process—not just journalists—and the spatially distributed
network of connections—that include the newsroom as one key locale, but not the
only one—from which the news emerges.
Keywords
Newswork, materiality, Science and Technology Studies
I would like to begin with my own intellectual journey with the hope that it will illuminate broader issues that might be relevant to this Special Issue. I started doing research
on online news production 18 years ago. I was a second-year doctoral student in Science
and Technology Studies (STS) at Cornell University and my favorite hometown newspaper, Diario Clarín in Argentina, had just launched its online edition. I did not have a
professional journalistic background or knowledge of the mass communication literature. I was simply fascinated by what this encounter between the ‘old’ medium of print
and the ‘new’ medium of the web might mean for the process of innovation in the media
Pablo J Boczkowski, Northwestern University, Frances Searle Building, 2240 Campus Drive, Room 2-146,
Evanston, IL 60208-2, USA.
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from jou.sagepub.com at University of Haifa Library on December 27, 2014
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in particular and in other areas of productive activity in general. As a student of Trevor
Pinch, focusing on technology was the obvious thing to do. I knew close to nothing about
journalism, but Bruce Lewenstein in the Cornell’s Communication department was a
great guide to media scholarship. Because of my ignorance, and a larger naivete about
broader social science discourses, I expected to find some readily available theorizing
about the material aspects of newswork. Instead, the more I read, the more I realized that
technology was a vastly under-explored territory in journalism scholarship. Digitizing
the News was my attempt to tackle how materiality matters in newswork, in particular to
understanding the process of innovation in the emergence and early evolution of online
newspapers in the United States.
This Special Issue would have been unthinkable back in 1996 when I began my journey, and even in 2003, when I turned in the final revisions of the book manuscript to my
editor at The MIT Press. But in the past 10 years – which is a very brief period of time for
the typical pace of the academy – things have changed considerably. There has been a
proliferation of studies looking at various aspects of how materiality matters in newswork, and an incorporation of a number of conceptual approaches to do this, dominated
by STS and in particular actor–network theory. Furthermore, there is not only a significant
level of activity but also a lot of excitement about what this activity might mean for the
study of journalism more generally. However, as it often happens with relatively rapid
change, there is comparatively less sense of collective direction. I see this Special Issue as
a potentially critical moment to reflect on where we have been and where to go next, and
applaud the organizers for their leadership in getting us to become more programmatic.
What might the next phase of this material turn mean for the study of journalism?
What are some of the theoretical and methodological challenges that might lie ahead?
Theoretically, the material turn might push journalism scholarship in a more cosmopolitan direction. This domain of inquiry is not the first one in the humanities and social
sciences to experience an interest in material culture over the past decades. There are
insights and lessons to be learned from engaging in conversation with scholars from
these other domains. Such conversation should be approached as a two-way street, trying
to incorporate ideas from other domains but also aiming to influence them. As noted
above, so far the main source of intellectual stimulation for the material turn in journalism studies has been my own field of origin, STS. It has many helpful insights to offer,
but also some limitations that are worth keeping in mind. STS-inflected scholarship has
been excellent in shedding light on the processes through which people and things intertwine. What has come out of this orientation is a special sensibility toward complexity
and relative indeterminacy in sociomaterial life, and an imaginative vocabulary for capturing this complexity and indeterminacy in specific locales. What has suffered from this
orientation is an attempt to grapple with the outcomes of these processes at a systemwide level. Also lacking are causal explanations of variance in outcomes that transcend
the particulars of the case or cases analyzed in a given study. Explanations of variance in
outcomes tend to simplify the complexity of the processes that generate those outcomes,
and yield a picture with relatively limited levels of contingency. Scholars of journalism
have a lot to gain if they can keep incorporating the insights of STS but also generate an
epistemic apparatus that can avoid some of these limitations, an apparatus that they can
in turn offer to STS scholars as an example of the two-way street I mentioned above.
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Boczkowski
The trajectory of my own research program illustrates the power and limitations of an
STS-inflected orientation toward studying the news. Materiality and process were core
themes of Digitizing the News and, as mentioned above, an STS approach was central to
this book. It is worth noticing, however, that despite the centrality of the ‘objects of
(online) journalism’ in that book, the cross-local explanations of outcome variance relied
on factors such as relationships across newsrooms, representations of the user, and the
character of newsroom practices. My second book, News at Work, aimed to understand
the dynamics of monitoring and imitation that generate significant lack of diversity in the
news. Material matters figured in the argument to a certain extent, but I found that a
focus on the objects of mimicry did not have much explanatory power to account for
outcome variance regarding work practices and the resulting news products. My third
book, The News Gap, assesses whether there is a divergence between the stories the
media deem newsworthy and those that interest the public, and, if so, measures this
divergence and accounts for the factors that increase or decrease it. My co-author,
Eugenia Mitchelstein, and I did find that difference in the uptake of technological
affordances is a relevant explanatory factor that accounts for some variance in size of the
news gap. To get at this difference, one does not need the typical constructionist lens of
STS, however. As a matter of fact, this lens would probably obscure rather than clarify in
this case; instead, a more traditional sociological understanding of material practice suffices. My current book-project-in-progress, How Institutions Decay, examines the
demise of print newspapers in Buenos Aires, Chicago, and Paris as a window into understanding how institutions unravel and try to renew themselves. Although the data collection and analysis are still ongoing, an initial read of some of the interview material
suggests that while the historical evolution of information infrastructures have some
heuristic power to account for the dynamics of institutional decay, it is in a way different
from the typical STS take on them. The reason that I bring up the evolution of my own
research program is to offer a cautionary note on the actual promise and potential peril of
a particularly influential form of enacting the material turn in journalism studies.
Methodologically, the material turn might unsettle two major tendencies in studies of
newswork: a focus on journalists and on newsrooms as the critical actors and locales,
respectively. Despite the truism that ‘sources make the news’, most of the scholarship to
date has concentrated on the practices of journalists – and I have contributed my fair
share to this tendency in my first two books. However, if the objects of journalism
acquire a greater prominence in future research than what they had in the past, we will
likely see a broadening of the actors having central roles in our inquiries: programmers,
technicians, data visualization experts, bloggers, and so on. This would reflect changes
that have been already going on in news organizations around the world. More radically,
a focus on objects might also entail adding techniques of artifact analysis to the traditional ethnographic and content analysis tools that we have normally deployed in studying journalism. In this day and age, it is not only sources but also algorithms what make
the news, as witnessed by the adoption of tools such as Google Analytics, Chartbeat and
in-house systems inside news organizations, and the public success of Google News and
content farms such as Demand Media. Understanding the causes, dynamics, and consequences of this algorithmic trend will require broadening our methodological apparatus.
The material turn has also called into question the inevitability and centrality of the
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newsroom as the critical locale of newsmaking. This is not to say that newsrooms have
become irrelevant, but that they have to be placed within a larger and more intricate web
of content creation, as Chris Anderson’s brilliant analysis of the contemporary news
ecosystem in Philadelphia has clearly shown. From journalists and newsrooms to geeks,
graphistes, bloggers, algorithms, and news ecosystems, if allowed to grow to its fullest
potential, the material turn will bring some powerful methodological renewal to the
study of news and newsmaking.
Funding
Author biography
Pablo J Boczkowski is the author of Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers (MIT
Press, 2004), News at Work: Imitation in an Age of Information Abundance (University of
Chicago Press, 2010), and The News Gap: When the Information Preferences of the Media and
the Public Diverge (MIT Press, 2013; joint with Eugenia Mitchelstein), and co-editor, with
Tarleton Gillespie and Kisten Foot, of Media Technologies: Essays on Communication,
Materiality and Society (MIT Press, 2014).
545738
JOU0010.1177/1464884914545738
Article
Research that empowers
responsibility: Reconciling
human agency with
materiality
Journalism
2015, Vol. 16(1) 69–73
DOI: 10.1177/1464884914545738
jou.sagepub.com
David Domingo
Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium
Abstract
Despite the virtues of an emphasis on materiality in Journalism Studies, such an approach
risks dis-empowering journalists as agents of change in the evolution of their profession.
The principles of actor-network theory offer an opportunity to reconnect studies that
are sensitive to the role of technology in the newsroom with the agency of the human
actors that use it. By exposing the contingent nature of news practices, researchers can
encourage journalists to take responsibility on the configuration of their work and the
technical tools they use. The article proposes as well a collective discussion about the
normative position of researchers and their engagement with fostering social change in
the media industry.
Keywords
Actor-network theory, materiality, journalism, agency
The articles collected in this special issue demonstrate the value of putting an emphasis
on materiality and the agency of technology in order to explain the nuances of news
production processes in the newsrooms. However, in our quest to render the objects of
journalism visible, I worry that we are taking some risks regarding the actual social
impact of our research results: by emphasizing the agency of materiality, we may involuntarily dis-empower the journalists who are part of our ethnographies and surveys. In
the following pages, I defend the need for a collective discussion about the role of
David Domingo, Département des sciences de l’information et de la communication, ReSIC, Université
Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), 50 avenue F. D. Roosevelt CP 123, 1050 Brussels, Belgium.
70
Journalism 16(1)
Journalism Studies in the debates about the evolution of journalism as an institution, and
about the normative position of researchers and their engagement with fostering social
change. The strong magnetism of materiality as an element in our current objects of
study makes this debate more urgent than ever, as we run the risk that journalists may
delegate theresponsibility for changes in their practices to technological innovations.
In the context of this debate, I want to vindicate the contribution of actor–network
theory (ANT) to Journalism Studies, in part because it is at ease with the agency of materiality, but most importantly because it proposes a role for researchers that could help us
in finding our place in these times of uncertainty about the social practices of journalism.
‘Whatever a scholar does when she writes an account, she is already part’ of the reality she
is researching, argues Latour (2005: 258). He invites us to be self-reflexive, not only to
avoid imposing our analytical categories in the analysis but also to accept and make
explicit our engagement as researchers with improving the society we serve. We do not
usually verbalize it, but many of us study journalism because we adhere to those normative principles that connect it to a healthy democracy and engaged citizenry, and because
we are worried that trends in the media industry may be harming our aspirations for a
journalism that better serves our societies. Much of the ‘second wave’ of newsroom ethnographies (Cottle, 2000) has focused on explaining the factors that prevented innovations such as the Internet to reshape journalism in the direction of utopian discourses
(Domingo, 2008), hoping that journalists would act upon those factors to consciously
develop new forms of news production that break away from these constraints. My feeling
is that we have not equipped journalists well enough with our research results, and we
have not given them the knowledge they would need to transform our findings into social
action. And the way we have dealt with materiality is at the center of this problem.
ANT has been accused of being apolitical, as it seems to flatten social structures into
networks of associations between a heterogeneous collection of actors that includes people, ideals, symbolic constructions, and material elements, seen as equally important
elements to analyze (Plesner, 2009). On the contrary, instead of erasing power and inequality from our research vocabulary, ANT invites us to not take it for granted, to trace
when power is exerted through action. As researchers, we cannot assume that actors have
power, but we can see them exerting power when they manage to make other actors do
what they want, to shape their actions (Latour, 2005: 66). This is how ANT has contributed to rescue materiality from oblivion, by demonstrating that technological artifacts, as
an actor in the network, can shape the work of journalists. Nonetheless, while ANT in
science and technology studies has focused on the process of definition of innovations,
in Journalism Studies, it has focused on the adoption of technologies, usually blackboxing previous steps in the development of those technologies before landing at the
newsroom. We should not limit ourselves to the analysis of the interactions between
technology and humans and their ‘mutual shaping’ (Boczkowski, 2004). We should trace
the networks of relationships that have configured each technical tool and each journalist
that uses it, their histories and multiple alliances beyond the newsroom. Technology, in
its materiality, has embedded values, definitions of ideal users, and ideal uses (Williams,
1981), which were negotiated already long before they entered a newsroom. Technology
is therefore configured in ways that may be fragile or strong, it brings a baggage with it
that will determine how much journalists will be able to reshape it or be reshaped by it.
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Domingo
Content Management Systems (CMSs) are a good example of a technology in the
newsroom that can benefit from a reconstruction of its process of conception and development (see both Anderson and Kreiss (2013) and Rodgers, this volume, for a further
elaboration of this point). In a Catalan newsroom where I conducted an ethnography
between 2003 and 2006, the CMS for the news website had initially been created inhouse by the computer systems department without involvement of journalists (Domingo,
2006). Once an online news team was established, the liaison between the technical staff
and the journalists was the online editor-in-chief, who was comfortable with programming languages, but was not involved in daily news production. The consequence was
that his decisions on the evolution of the CMS were more aligned with what the computer systems department saw as potentially viable than with what the online journalists
felt was necessary to make their work smoother. Requests based on the daily news production experience were usually disregarded as being the result of the lack of advanced
knowledge about online publishing: web reporters mainly had a print journalism background and had learned to work for the new medium by doing, once they were assigned
to the online team. What at first sight looked as the agency of technology shaping many
of their news practices was in hindsight the result of a long process of definition of the
CMS where interactions between different human actors privileged certain workflows
over other possible alternatives.
The only chance for these dis-empowered online journalists to rebel against the
agency of materiality was to boycott some of the tasks inscribed in the CMS: they were
not able to change it, but they could still slightly adapt its use to what was more convenient to their practices (Schmitz-Weiss and Domingo, 2010). And here is where I defend
that we should reposition materiality in its relationship with humans, in order to empower
them, in order to encourage social action that overcomes situations of injustice, big or
small. As researchers, we have the moral commitment of trying to make the world a better place to live in. Latour (2005) urges the researchers of the social to ‘explore what is
possible’ (p. 261), rather than focusing on the description of the structures that constrain
our actions. By tracing the ways in which some actors have managed to exert power over
others, how their relationships have been configured over time, without imposing aprioristic explanations, we may be able to provide narratives that show how contingent any
configuration is, and therefore how prone to change it may be once actors see themselves
in research results that render visible and explicit the associations mobilized in a specific
social context.
In this research agenda, committed to understanding change in order to foster change,
the agency of materiality should not become a wall so solid, so thick, that journalists
cannot look inside to act upon it. We may not have the intention of dis-empowering
humans with our research results, but it is a good precaution to include a vaccine against
technological determinism in the ontological principles that guide our research design.
While ANT acknowledges the agency of materiality, Hemmingway (2008) proposed that
we should also recognize that technologies do not have the ‘self-reflexivity’ of humans
and therefore are not ‘capable of intentionality and motivation’ (p. 180) – and that is still
the case with newsgathering hardware and content-generating algorithms. This step
should not take us toward social determinism, neutralizing the agency of materiality, but
rather toward reclaiming the responsibility of humans in shaping their own future – much
72
Journalism 16(1)
of which occurs before eventually black-boxed technologies are introduced to social settings. The agency of technology can be very powerful in shaping human actions, but it is
cold, deprived of an intentionality of its own, and predictable as soon as we trace the
origins of its configuration. Software has been designed by humans, who embedded definitions in it that, once put in circulation, may exert power over its adopters with the
implacability of materiality.
In short, the risk of emphasizing the agency of technology is that we may foster that
journalists give up their responsibility, delegate it to the machines, and convince themselves that they can only follow the flow of technological change. The interviews with
some online news pioneers by the Riptide project bluntly illustrate how eagerly journalists adopt this attitude, arguing that ‘a distributed and aggregated system of news works
fine, and the withering of traditional journalism is thus no great loss’ (Edmonds, 2013).
Instead, by tracing the intentionality and motivations of human decisions in the processes
of technological design and adoption, we may be able to fulfill the moral imperative of
our role as researchers: we can expose the contingent nature of news practices and journalism as an institution, we can show human actors how much they are responsible for
the current configuration of their work, and we can encourage them to take that responsibility in order to fight for a change in whatever they do not feel comfortable with, collaborate with them to explore the alternatives.
Part of this process necessarily includes problematizing the normative definitions of
journalism (Domingo et al., 2014), treating them as another actor in the network.
Normativities are constantly (re)defined by the actions of journalists and technologies
but, at the same time, normativities shape these actions the moment that actors invoke
them to justify (consciously or not, through discourses or through algorithms) their practices. And in this, we as researchers also need to be transparent in our engagement, selfreflexive about our own normative ideals of journalism, and responsible about the
contribution we want to make to society. With ANT, we force ourselves to be very systematic at collecting evidence on continuity and change in journalism, avoiding to
impose predefined categories, and, in a second step, we should acknowledge that we are
part of the network we are tracing and share our results as engaged actors committed to
foster social action (Latour, 2005: 256–257).
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or
References
Anderson CW and Kreiss D (2013) Black boxes as capacities for and constraints on action:
Electoral politics, journalism, and devices of representation. Qualitative Sociology 36(4):
365–382.
Boczkowski PJ (2004) The processes of adopting multimedia and interactivity in three online
newsrooms. Journal of Communication 54: 197–213.
Cottle S (2000) New(s) times: Towards a ‘second wave’ of news ethnography. Communications:
The European Journal of Communication Research 25(1): 19–41.
Domingo D (2006) Inventing online journalism: Development of the Internet as a news medium in
four Catalan online newsrooms. PhD Thesis, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona.
73
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Domingo D (2008) Interactivity in the daily routines of online newsrooms: Dealing with an
uncomfortable myth. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13(3): 680–704.
Domingo D, Masip P and Costera I (2014) Tracing Digital News Networks: Towards an integrated
framework of the dynamics of news production, circulation and use. Digital Journalism.
Epub ahead of print 2 July. DOI: 10.1080/21670811.2014.927996.
Edmonds R (2013) ‘Riptide’ project explains how legacy media got washed out to sea by digital currents. Available at: http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/business-news/the-biz-blog/223087/
riptide-project-explains-how-legacy-media-got-washed-out-to-sea-by-digital-currents/
(accessed 10 May 2014).
Hemmingway E (2008) Into the Newsroom: Exploring the Digital Production of Regional
Television News. London: Routledge.
Latour B (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford:
Plesner U (2009) An actor-network perspective on changing work practices: Communication technologies as actants in newswork. Journalism 10(5): 604–626.
Schmitz-Weiss A and Domingo D (2010) Communities of practice innovation processes in online
newsrooms as actor-networks and communities of practice. New Media & Society 12(7):
1156–1171.
Williams R (1981) Communications Technologies and Social Institutions in Contact: Human
Communication and Its History. New York: Thames & Hudson.
Author biography
David Domingo is Chair of Journalism at Université Libre de Bruxelles (Brussels). He specializes
in the evolution of online journalism, focusing on innovation processes in the newsrooms and the
redefinition of the profession in digital communication spaces.
549294
JOU0010.1177/1464884914549294JournalismNeff
Article
Learning from documents:
Applying new theories of
materiality to journalism
Journalism
2015, Vol. 16(1) 74–78
DOI: 10.1177/1464884914549294
jou.sagepub.com
Gina Neff
University of Washington, USA
Abstract
This article briefly reviews theories of materiality emerging in communication technology
studies and organizational communication and then suggests three ways that journalism
scholars might apply these theories to studies of news production. How journalists work,
how journalism is shaped within newsrooms, the ways the news industry is changing, and
ultimately, the effects of digital transitions can all benefit from including a focus on the
‘objects of journalism’. First, objects, such as documents, help scholars describe the
social settings where objects are found. Second, the objects of journalism help scholars
uncover lines of authority, contexts of news routines, and richness and persistence of
news practices. Third, studying the objects of journalism can help explain the persistence
of so-called residual practices that might otherwise seem dysfunctional in digital news.
Materiality theories can help journalism scholars explain the impact of the transition to
digital news on the work and practices of journalists and the news industry as a whole.
Keywords
Materiality, technology, Science and Technology Studies, ethnography, theory
Journalists, like many other creative and cultural workers, find that they must rapidly
make sense of changing conditions within the digital economy. New digital technologies
change old organizational routines and workplace practices in ways that can be surprising and unexpected, and in most workplaces, the transition to digital is far from a straightforward, one-to-one substitution of one set of tools for another. Instead, it entails changes
in work practices and organizational routines along with changes in medium.
Gina Neff, Department of Communication, University of Washington, 102 Communications, Box 353740,
Seattle, WA 98195, USA.
from jou.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on December 27, 2014
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Neff
My aim here in this essay is to suggest how to apply the theories of materiality emerging in the subfields of communication technology studies and organizational communication to scholarship on news media and journalism. I argue that scholars can use these
emerging theories of materiality to describe how journalists work, how journalism is
shaped within newsrooms, the ways the news industries are changing, and ultimately, the
impact on the products of the news industry. Materiality theories can help scholars
explain the impact of this transition on both the news industry and the work and practices
of journalists.
Newsroom ethnographies, like other qualitative studies, have been very good at
assessing how people assign meanings to everyday objects in social settings. What the
new literature on materiality affords scholars are tools to extend these socially constructed meanings of things to their social functions and in the process highlight the
social roles that these everyday objects play. These new theories emphasize what things
do, rather than what things mean to people. Materiality theories can therefore help scholars uncover the less apparent functions, processes, and roles that these objects can support in social settings. Materiality, done right, helps scholars see the physical evidence of
social structure, or in the words of Bruno Latour (1991), ‘society made durable’.
Communication scholars have rediscovered materiality because theorizing the process of digital change has required it. ‘The unfinished project’ for communication technology studies, according to Leah Lievrouw (2013), has been to find a path between the
social construction of technology’s multiple meanings while veering clear of strongly
deterministic accounts of technology’s power to change society. With new theories of the
importance of materiality in communication, technology scholars are beginning to recognize ‘the social and material character of communication technology [are] equally
definitive and co-determining’, as opposed to previous paradigm that viewed technology
from a broadly constructivist and culturalist lens, holding that material objects are
dependent entirely on the humans around for social meaning (Lievrouw, 2013). In other
words, the return to studies of materiality suggests that the medium matters after all.
Journalists, like other knowledge workers, produce meanings for a living. But the tools
that shape their work and the material properties of the media through which they communicate can have an enormous impact on how they do that work. Part of the challenge
for communication scholars is to wrest objects away from our disciplinary tendency to
connect them to the production of intended meaning of human communication. As
Lievrouw (2013) puts it, scholars have been more likely to see technology as the ‘outcomes or products of abstract social forces, cultural discourses or economic logics’ rather
than as having material properties that influence their social roles and functions. This
requires a bit of intellectual courage within a field that has positioned humans squarely
in the center of meaning-making. Anthropologist Ian Hodder (2012), who has written
about the ‘entangled’ sets of relationships and dependencies between humans and things,
shows the degree to which this is challenging for social scientists and humanists: ‘It is
one thing to say that humans identify with things. But it is another to say that humans
only exist in their relation to things’ (p. 27). Qualitative research in media and communication is quite good at examining the human meanings invested in things. But the field
has yet to develop a rich theoretical language and methodological toolkit for studying the
things of social life on their own terms. For an example of material studies, consider
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Gupta’s striking ethnography of the state violence inflicted on India’s poor through ‘red
tape’. Forms and other bureaucratic writing do not just communicate messages, though
they do that. They also form a ‘constitutive role as that which defines what the state is
and what it does’ (Gupta, 2012). In other words, how documents circulate, who has
access, and how they are stored may be as important for the social role that they end up
playing as the messages written on them are. Documents ‘materialize’ organizational
communication (Ashcraft et al., 2009).
Thinking through documents
Documents are particularly interesting objects because they are ubiquitous in practically every workplace and the basis of almost all knowledge and bureaucratic work. As
Lisa Gitelman (2014) has written, ‘Documents are important not because they are ubiquitous … but rather because they are so evidently integral to the ways people think and
live’. Yet, media and communication scholars have until recently treated documents
literally as products and process of human meaning-making rather than as material that
shapes how organizations work. Documents, broadly defined, have three main roles that
arise from their material affordances: (1) recording actions, (2) circumscribing the
organization, and (3) supporting conversation (Neff et al., 2014). The change of a
medium, say from paper documents to digital documents, can have an enormous impact
on how these roles play out.
The stability of the medium for a document can provide a record of a ‘meeting of
minds’ (Kaghan and Lounsbury, 2006). The flexibility of the medium of documents can
support brainstorming among ‘communities of conversationalists’ (Taylor and Van
Every, 2000: 32). The mobility of the medium of documents carries information across
different contexts and also ‘enforce humans to follow specific organizational pathways’
(Cooren, 2004: 388). Documents serve to materialize thoughts, literally helping shape
the process that Kuhn and Jackson (2008) call ‘accomplishing knowledge’ in which people frame, reframe, and resolve problematic situations in order to realize a capacity to act
(p. 461). Documents make certain problems and solutions visible and thinkable, functioning as ‘epistemic objects’ (Knorr Cetina, 1999). The question remaining for scholars
who watch people work documents is, how to analyze these multiple uses, functions, and
roles in ways that neither seep into technological determinism nor ascribe all of documents’ power to the intended meanings of their authors? In other words, can we bring
thoughtful ways of considering the role of media and technology in the work that people
do every day with documents and how might this be applied to journalism studies?
Applying materiality theories to journalism studies
What follows are three suggestions on how to bring materiality to journalism studies.
First, things matter because of the social settings that they are embedded in. One does not
need to ascribe to the ideas of agency within actor–network theory in order to take seriously the set of interconnections between things and people. By extension, sets of relationships in newsrooms can be studied through the ‘objects of journalism’. How are
newsroom practices structured through particular kinds of databases, workflows, and
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Neff
physical configurations? When do changes to these objects reconfigure journalists’ practices easily and which are the ‘sticky’ older practices when new tools and objects appear?
Scholars can use the objects of journalism to map out the contours and boundaries of new
production, and this will become increasingly important as the ‘where’ of journalism
shifts with digital production. Second, the objects of journalism serve to mediate authority, routines, and practices. Focusing on objects can help show the lines of authority, the
contexts of routines, and the richness of practices within organizations, including news
organizations. All bureaucratic functions are mediated at least partially through objects.
Analysis of the objects of journalism can help show scholars how decisions are made,
what work is done, and who collaborates. In this way, objects stand in as the actors playing the part of social structure: authority, hierarchy, and power are all enacted through,
with, and sometimes despite objects. Social scientists should pay attention to them.
Third, the materiality of what counts as evidence will change, but not necessarily in the
short run. Professional codes, legal regulations, and industry standards all take time to
adopt and adjust to new kinds of objects. In our own research, virtual teams struggled to
recreate the ‘messy talk’ practices of face-to-face meetings around paper documents
when digital technologies made online meetings possible (Dossick et al., 2014; Dossick
and Neff, 2011; Neff et al., 2010). The ‘imbrication’, or interlocking, of social actions
and technology means that social practices may take time to change to new technologies
even though in the long run they co-constitute one another (Leonardi, 2012). For journalism studies, this means the move to digital will come with all sorts of residual practices
geared toward paper even as those practices are increasingly and seemingly dysfunctional in a digital environment. The sanctity and protection of the reporter’s notebook
have long legal precedent but not the smartphone, even though it increasingly functions
as such. What counts as evidence, or legally protected, or organizationally manageable
takes time to shift through different sets of objects.
On a concluding note, journalism scholars who want to study the organizational processes of news production, distribution, and consumption should consider including an
analysis of objects. The challenge for qualitative scholars closely attuned to finding
meaning is to account for objects’ social functions in these settings as well, and the field
of communication has a growing theoretical and methodological toolkit to borrow.
Including objects in our analysis does not diminish the role for human agency. Rather,
scholars can more fully account for it with attention to the roles that objects play.
Funding
References
Ashcraft KL, Kuhn TR and Cooren F (2009) Constitutional amendments: ‘Materializing’ organizational communication. Academy of Management Annals 31: 1–64.
Cooren F (2004) Textual agency: How texts do things in organizational settings. Organization
11(3): 373–393.
Dossick CS, Anderson A, Azari R, et al. (2014) Messy talk in virtual teams: Achieving knowledge
synthesis through shared visualizations. Journal of Management in Engineering. Available
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Dossick CS and Neff G (2011) Messy talk and clean technology: Communication, problem solving
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Harvard University Press.
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Essays on Power, Technology and Domination. London: Routledge, pp. 103–131.
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Communication, Materiality, and Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 21–52.
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Author biography
Gina Neff is an associate professor of communication at the University of Washington and at the
School of Public Policy at Central European University. She is author of Venture Labor: Work and
the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries (MIT Press, 2012) and co-editor of the collection
Surviving the New Economy (Paradigm, 2007), which addresses workplace changes across news
and media industries.
545739
JOU0010.1177/1464884914545739JournalismFord
Article
Infoboxes and cleanup
tags: Artifacts of Wikipedia
newsmaking
Journalism
2015, Vol. 16(1) 79–98
DOI: 10.1177/1464884914545739
jou.sagepub.com
Heather Ford
University of Oxford, UK
Abstract
Wikipedians use a number of editorial elements, including infoboxes and cleanup tags
to coordinate work in the first stage of articles related to breaking news topics. When
inserted into an article, these objects are intended to simultaneously notify editors about
missing or weak elements of the article and to add articles to particular categories of
work. This categorization practice enables editors to collaborate iteratively with one
another because each object signals work that needs to be done by others in order
to fill in the gaps of the current content. In addition to this functional value, however,
categorization also has a number of symbolic and political consequences. Editors are
engaged in a continual practice of iterative summation that contributes to an active
construction of the event as it happens rather than a mere assembling of ‘reliable sources’.
The deployment and removal of cleanup tags can be seen as an act of power play between
editors that affects readers’ evaluation of the article’s content. Infoboxes are similar sites
of struggle whose deployment and development result in an erasure of the contradictions
and debates that gave rise to them. These objects illuminate how this novel journalistic
practice has important implications for the way that political events are represented.
Keywords
User-generated content, participatory media, journalism practice, Wikipedia,
materiality, power, actor networks, socio-technical systems
Constructing news narratives
Journalism is in the process of being re-imagined as the number and variety of journalistic
sources continues to multiply. This re-imagining is being driven both by traditional news
organizations that are starting to incorporate participatory journalism aspects into their
Heather Ford, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, 1 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3JS, UK.
from jou.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on December 27, 2014
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Journalism 16(1)
work (Deuze et al., 2007) and by amateur media workers, technologists, and institutions
such as governments and non-governmental organizations becoming key players in the
business of producing news (Powers, 2014). In this changing environment, there is a
growing blurring of boundaries between what constitutes journalists, journalism, and the
media (Mitchelstein and Boczkowski, 2009).
Participatory journalism, also known as networked (Jarvis, 2006), open-source
(Deuze, 2001), or citizen journalism (Goode, 2009), is defined by Deuze et al. (2007) as
‘any kind of newswork at the hands of professionals and amateurs, of journalists and citizens, and of users and producers benchmarked by what Yochai Benkler calls commonsbased peer production’ (p. 323).
The promise of participatory journalism is that it will enable ‘the people, formerly
known as the audience’ (Rosen, 2006) to sidestep traditional gatekeepers of the news so
that they can narrate their own stories. Wikipedia is often provided as a poster child of
this promise. According to Dan Gillmor (2008), Wikipedia is an example of a wave of
citizen journalism projects initiated at the turn of the century in which ‘news was being
produced by regular people who had something to say and show, and not solely by the
“official” news organizations that had traditionally decided how the first draft of history
would look’ (Gillmor, 2008: x). For Benkler (2007), a project like Wikipedia
enables many more individuals to communicate their observations and their viewpoints to
many others, and to do so in a way that cannot be controlled by media owners and is not as
easily corruptible by money as were the mass media. (p. 11)
Although Wikipedia opens up its representations to the authorship of many more individuals, this does not necessarily result in a less restrictive environment for the development of diverse narratives about the world. Researchers have found that articles about
cities, towns, and regions still reproduce traditional asymmetries in the representation
of place (Graham, 2011), that Wikipedia’s coverage of history suffers from an overreliance on foreign government sources (Luyt, 2011) and that there are significant genderassociated imbalances in its topic coverage (Lam et al., 2011). These asymmetries are
often attributed to a lack of editors from certain groups (Graham, 2011) or a culture that
is alienating to certain groups (Reagle, 2013), but there is less analysis of how the tools
and practices that Wikipedians employ may have a significant bearing on the narratives
that dominate the encyclopedia.
In this article, I start to address this gap by examining the tools and practices that
Wikipedians use to construct a single narrative about a political event (what journalism
scholars have traditionally called ‘news’). I look, in particular, at two types of Wikipedia
tools: infoboxes and cleanup tags that were used extensively in the ‘Egyptian Revolution
of 2011’ Wikipedia English article. Infoboxes are summary tables on the right-hand side
of an article that enable readability and quick reference, while cleanup tags are notices at
the head of an article, warning readers and editors of specific problems with articles.
By discussing the use of these tools in the context of Bowker and Star’s (2000) theories of classification, I argue that these tools are not only material but also conceptual and
symbolic. They facilitate collaboration by enabling users to fill in details according to a
pre-defined set of categories and by catalyzing notices that alert others to the work that
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they believe needs to be done on the article. Their power, however, cannot only be seen
in terms of their functional value. These artifacts are deployed and removed as acts of
social and strategic power play among Wikipedia editors who each want to influence the
narrative about what happened and why it happened. Infoboxes and tabular elements
arise as clean, simple, well-referenced numbers out of the messiness and conflict that
gave rise to them. When cleanup tags are removed, the article develops an implicit
authority, appearing to rise above uncertainty, power struggles, and the impermanence of
the compromise that it originated from.
Wikipedia, journalism, and non-routine work
The majority of Wikipedia research by journalism scholars has focused on traditional
media’s experimentation with wiki technologies and processes (see, for instance,
Bradshaw, 2007 and Glaser, 2004) or traditional media’s use of Wikipedia as a source (by
Lih, 2004; Messner and South, 2011, for example), but there is still little research on
Wikipedia’s coverage of breaking news as a serious journalistic endeavor. A notable
exception is the work of Brian Keegan (2013) on the history of Wikipedia’s coverage of
breaking news topics, the rapid growth of breaking news articles as a proportion of the
entire corpus (Keegan et al., 2013), and the large-scale network dynamics of breaking
news articles (Keegan et al., 2013). Although Keegan’s work effectively demonstrates a
big picture perspective on Wikipedia breaking newswork, we still know little about the
practices that structure the narratives it produces.
One of the defining features of the work processes related to Wikipedia articles is the
vast quantity of automated and semi-automated tools that are used to coordinate work on
the platform. Over the 13 years of Wikipedia’s existence, volunteer editors have created
templates, bots, statistics, and snippets of code – some that are automatically triggered by
a particular user action, others that become part of normative practice over time. These
tools are used by Wikipedians under the framework of its ‘Neutral Point of View’
(NPOV) policy to form an assemblage of components that must be examined together to
understand how Wikipedians are able to rapidly collaborate to produce a single narrative
in environments of high variability.
Two articles published in 2010 emphasize the role of objects – particular automated
objects or ‘bots’ (short for robots) in the smooth functioning of Wikipedia. Niederer and
van Dijck (2010) expose the increasingly important role of bots in the rise of Wikipedia,
arguing that it is impossible to understand Wikipedia’s response to vandalism without an
appreciation of the encyclopedia as a socio-technical system driven by collaboration
between users and bots. Geiger and Ribes (2010) demonstrate the role of non-human
actors in the process of vandal banning, arguing that the decentralized activity enabled
by automated and semi-automated tools is a type of ‘distributed cognition’ that delegates
important moral decisions about what should be included and excluded from the encyclopedia to non-human actors.
More recently, Geiger (2014) has examined the role of ‘bespoke code’ on Wikipedia in
supporting and structuring work and by algorithmically enacting a particular vision of what
encyclopedia is and ought to be. Geiger (2014) defines bespoke code as ‘a software code
that runs alongside a platform or system, in contrast to code that is integrated into server-side
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codebases and runs on the same servers that host the platform or system’ (p. 3) and describes
a range of bespoke coded tools, such as bots, semi-automated tools, and templates, urging
others to continue to emphasize the ‘concrete, material, local, and specific conditions that
make projects like Wikipedia operate in the manner that they do’ (p. 12). It is two of these
bespoke coded objects (infoboxes and cleanup tags) that this study focuses on.
This study
In order to understand how a narrative is constructed in the context of a rapidly evolving
news article on Wikipedia, I look at the development of the ‘Egyptian Revolution of
2011’ article on English Wikipedia, with a particular focus on some of the bespoke coded
objects that editors used in developing the narrative as events progressed. I chose this
case because its subject is situated outside the main frame of reference of the majority of
English Wikipedia’s mostly Western editors, creating the potential for a wide diversity of
viewpoints to be exhibited in the article’s construction.
I employed a ‘trace ethnographic’ (Geiger and Ribes, 2011) approach to studying
grounded practices of the ‘2011 Egyptian Revolution’ Wikipedia article. Geiger and
Ribes call this technique ‘trace ethnography’ because the researcher is able to reconstruct a social situation by observing the traces left by Wikipedians in pursuing their
work and craft these traces into rich, thick descriptions (Geertz, 1994) of the process of
the article’s construction. Trace ethnography combines deep ethnographic understanding of practice through participation in a particular community with the ability to reassemble social action using the traces that participants leave when navigating Wikipedia’s
socio-technical spaces.
I supplemented this detailed examination of traces by interviewing four frequent editors of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution article. I selected editors who were the most frequent contributors to the article and its talk pages and interviewed those who responded
positively to my email invitations and to introductions by fellow interviewees. These
interviews served not only to verify my perceptions about what happened during the time
of the events in Egypt, but also added information necessary for me to develop a rich
description of the article’s construction process. My use of trace ethnography in this
instance is informed by about 10 years of involvement in the Wikipedia community as an
advisory board member of the Wikimedia Foundation, educator, activist and, only more
recently, as an editor.
In this study, I chose to focus on the objects used directly in the shaping of articles
relating to breaking news of political events in order to understand how the Wikipedia
assemblage resulted in the particular narrative that it did in the context of rapidly evolving
information. Looking at these mundane artifacts provides an opportunity to understand
what work these objects are doing for editors and for Wikipedia as a whole – an understanding of how ‘individuals and communities meet infrastructure’ (Bowker and Star,
2000: 22). Such an understanding was obtained by engaging in what Bowker and Star
(2000) call ‘infrastructural inversion – learning to look closely at technologies and
arrangements that, by design and by habit, tend to fade into the woodwork’ (p. 34).
This ‘close looking’ involved a detailed observation of the first 24 hours of edits of
the 2011 Egyptian Revolution article, reconstructing an account of what happened by
analyzing ‘diffs’ (two versions of an article with their differences highlighted), and
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following discussions about templates and other objects that were employed during this
time. I then used grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006, 2013) to analyze the 100+ pages of
‘talk’ during the next 18 days leading up to the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak
on the 11 February 2011. I did this by developing an iterative coding scheme according
to questions about what was happening in the data and following up on related edits and
related articles about the use and development of tools used in the article.
It was important not only to analyze data specifically within the frame of the article,
but to follow up on discussions relating to the deployment and removal of particular
artifacts, their relation to policy, and a host of other ‘process’ documents since these
conversations form such an integral part of Wikipedia’s socio-technical space. I looked
at the first 2 weeks because this is when editorial elements were chosen and stabilized –
acting to frame the narrative of the page, classify it into a particular category of event,
and display relevant warning signs.
In this study, I focus on two objects that have particularly important implications in
the construction of articles relating to breaking news: cleanup tags and infoboxes.
Cleanup tags and infoboxes are two types of Wikipedia’s bespoke coded ‘templates’.
These templates consist of snippets of code that are used across a variety of pages and
include boilerplate messages, standard warnings or notices, cleanup tags, infoboxes, and
navigational boxes.
Cleanup tags are specialized templates that are appended to the head of an article by
editors who wish to alert editors and readers about particular changes that need to be
made to the article. An example is the ‘copyedit’ tag that appends a notice about the state
of the article and a request for assistance:
This article may require copy editing for grammar, style, cohesion, tone, or spelling. You can
assist by editing it.
In practice, cleanup tags have the dual function of warning users about potential weaknesses of the content and alerting editors in particular work groups or ‘WikiProjects’
(Morgan et al., 2013) about the existence of new content or new work to be done.
According to best practice, cleanup tags should be temporary, not permanent, and they
should be accompanied by explanations on the article’s talk page about what the problem
is and how it might be fixed. Editors are discouraged from using tags to perform ‘tag
bombing’ (adding numerous tags to pages or one tag to multiple pages unjustifiably) or
from employing tags to show that they disagree with the article. In practice, however,
editors do sometimes use these methods for subtly voicing their disagreement. Because
any editor has the ability to add (or remove) a cleanup tag to an article, this act is the
equivalent to a TV viewer being able to add warning messages about the accuracy of the
content before others watch it.
An infobox template, such as the infobox template for a ‘news event’, is a type of
template formatted around a particular set of categories that provide summary details of
articles with a common subject. According to the infobox help page (Wikipedia authors,
2013a), Wikipedia’s infoboxes grew out of so-called taxoboxes (taxonomy infoboxes)
that users developed to visually express the scientific classification of organisms. Today,
infoboxes are used for a wide variety of topics – from mathematics to history and events,
and from arts and culture to science and nature.
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Figure 1. An early version of the infobox used in the 2011 Egyptian Revolution article on
Wikipedia (11 February 2011).1
These elements played an important role in the development of the article dedicated
to documenting the events, reasons, and responses of the protests that occurred in Egypt
in early 2011 (Figure 1).
‘The 2011 Egyptian Revolution’ article
Day 0: 24 January 2011
A day before major protests were scheduled in Egypt, Egyptian Wikipedia editor, The_
Egyptian_Liberal (or ‘AB’ as he called himself in the interview) prepared an article
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entitled ‘2011 Egyptian Protests’ for posting the next day. Although Egyptian local media
as well as blogs and social media were publishing news stories about calls for protest on
National Police Day in Egypt the next day, there were few stories in the international
media covering planned events.
The_Egyptian_Liberal, who was a university student at the time, believed that the
protests the next day would be significant.
AB: I thought the thing was going to be big … before the revolution became a
revolution. Two days before I thought: this is going to be big.
HF: Why did you think that?
AB: The frustration in the street. And especially what happened in Tunisia. There
were a few self-immolations in Egypt that weren’t covered in the media and
by bloggers as much as Bouazizi in Tunisia. When people set themselves on
fire you know something is seriously wrong with the society you live in.
(Interview, October 2012)
The_Egyptian_Liberal was not the only person to edit the article under that username.
For security reasons, three other people were editing the article from the same account
during events in Egypt in the following days:
During the revolution it was not only me editing from the page. I had different people who
didn’t have an account on Wikipedia who wanted to edit Wikipedia especially at the time of the
revolution they really wanted to help. So we were three different people with different writing
styles … Two that were helping most were not Egyptian. (Interview, October 2012)
In the following weeks and months in which the article developed, The_Egyptian_
Liberal, as the only significant Egyptian editor of the article, played a major leadership
role, forming alliances with other key editors and spurring editors to keep working as
media attention died down.
Day 1: 25 January 2011 (first day of the protests)
The_Egyptian_Liberal published the article on English Wikipedia on the afternoon of
what would become a wave of protests that would lead to the unseating of President Hosni
Mubarak. A template was used to insert the ‘uprising’ infobox to house summarized information about the event including fields for its ‘characteristics’, the number of injuries, and
fatalities. This template was chosen from a range of other infoboxes relating to history and
events on Wikipedia, but has since been deleted in favor of the more recently developed
‘civil conflict’ infobox with fields for ‘causes’, ‘methods’, and ‘results’ (Figure 2).
The first draft included the terms ‘demonstration’, ‘riot’, and ‘self-immolation’ in the
‘characteristics’ field and was illustrated by the Latuff cartoon of Khaled Mohamed Saeed
and Hosni Mubarak, with the caption ‘Khaled Mohamed Saeed holding up a tiny, flailing,
stone-faced Hosni Mubarak’. Khaled Mohamed Saeed was a young Egyptian man who
was beaten to death reportedly by Egyptian security forces and the subject of the Facebook
group ‘We are all Khaled Said’ moderated by Wael Ghonim that contributed to
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Figure 2. Infobox from the first version of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution (then ‘Protests’) article.1
the growing discontent in the weeks leading up to 25 January 2011. The infobox would
ideally have been a filled by a photograph of the protests, but the cartoon was used because
the article was uploaded so soon after the first protests began. It also has significant emotive power and clearly represented the perspective of the crowd of anti-Mubarak demonstrators in the first protests.
Upon its publication, three prominent cleanup tags were automatically appended to
the head of the article. These included the ‘new unreviewed article’ tag, the ‘expert in
politics needed’ tag, and the ‘current event’ tag, warning readers that information on the
page may change rapidly as events progress (Figure 3). These three lines of code that
constituted the cleanup tags initiated a complex distribution of tasks to different groups
of users located in work groups throughout the site: page patrollers, subject experts, and
those interested in current events.
The first tag was automatically appended to the article when it was created using the
‘Article Wizard’, a series of forms that takes new editors through the process of creating
an article. This was the first (and perhaps the most significant) challenge faced by the
article. As soon as an article is published on Wikipedia, it is added to a list of unreviewed
articles watched by page patrollers who then review the article and determine whether it
qualifies for speedy deletion, whether it should be nominated for deletion (involving a
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Figure 3. The three cleanup tags automatically appended to the article when it was published
at 13:27 UTC on 25 January 2011.1
more lengthy, consultative process), or whether it should be allowed to continue.
Administrators are able to speedily delete an article without consensus on a number of
grounds, including for copyright violations or ‘no indication of importance’. Over half of
deleted articles are deleted via this process, with the rest determined by the more lengthy
process where regular editors are able to nominate an article for deletion and have a discussion about whether it should remain (Geiger and Ford, 2011).
Editors working on Wikipedia’s ‘new pages patrol’ are presented with a list of new
articles tagged with red alerts if an article has no categories, no citations, or is not linked
to any other articles in Wikipedia. This article contained one reference to a mainstream
news source, Agence France-Presse (AFP) that described how Egypt was bracing for a
day of nationwide anti-government protests, ‘with organisers counting on the Tunisian
uprising to inspire crowds to mobilise for political and economic reforms’ (AFP, 2011).
The article also linked to other Wikipedia articles and contained a list of categories including ‘Riots in Egypt’ and ‘2011 in Egypt’.
It is entirely possible that this article could have been removed for attempting to
‘forecast’ the future by including a citation that reported only what was expected to
happen and not what did, in fact, happen. Wikipedia attempts to prevent writing about
events too soon and before their significance is recognized. This is expressed in the
policies entitled ‘Wikipedia is not a crystal ball’ and ‘Wikipedia is not a newspaper’
(Wikipedia authors, 2014).
The second cleanup tag (that help was needed from an expert in politics) alerted users
in the WikiProject Politics group to the existence of the article when it appeared in a list
of other articles seeking assistance from WikiProject participants. The third cleanup tag
(‘current related’) alerted users to the rapidly developing nature of information on the
page and added the article to the category of pages entitled ‘current events’.
Despite the existence of these warning tags, the article endured, as mainstream
media started to report on what was becoming a significant protest. As the day progressed, The_Egyptian_Liberal continued to fill out the ‘Background’ section of the
article, listing individuals who had set themselves on fire in protest against worsening
economic conditions, and adding to the growing list of references. About 2 hours later
another editor joined him, removing the ‘new article’ template and ‘political expert’
needed tag, improving the grammar, adding links to other Wikipedia articles, and listing relevant categories. The actions of these two editors at the beginning stages of its
development were crucial in solidifying the long-term future of the article.
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Days 2–4: 26–28 January 2011
Protests continued to spread throughout Egypt and the death count rose to seven. By this
stage, editors who would become the article’s main contributors and coordinators had
joined the article. The majority of these editors were American or lived in the United
States at the time of the protests. They included Ocaasi, SilverSeren, Aude, and Lihaas.
These editors joined The_Egyptian_Liberal in coordinating work on the talk page, mediating disputes, and discussing the overall trajectory of the article and others relating or
spinning off from it.
Some of these editors had worked together on articles before, and they quickly settled
into a routine, falling into roles based on their strengths and expertise in relation to one
another and to the needs of the article. Many of them were avidly watching the live feed
of events on Al Jazeera English TV as they edited, and editors would edit in informal
shifts in order to cover events as they progressed in Egypt. Ocaasi and The_Egyptian_
Liberal formed a partnership in leading work on the page. Ocaasi is a native English
speaker and had seriously started editing Wikipedia a few years before. The_Egyptian_
Liberal is not a native English speaker but, as the only significant Egyptian contributor
and with connections to important political players in Egypt, he was able to play a key
role in highlighting who was notable in the new political environment and to verify information that required contextual knowledge:
We developed a highly symbiotic relationship. (The_Egyptian_Liberal) knew who was an
important in Egypt… he had the connections while I had the ability to research and write
particularly well in English. (Interview with Ocaasi, October 2012)
Aude was a seasoned Wikipedian who had lived in Egypt before and had some knowledge of the political context there. She maintained a list of reliable sources on her talk
page, chimed in on debates, and coordinated attempts to get Al Jazeera to license their
photographs under Creative Commons, when the editors were struggling to find
openly licensed images. SilverSeren was a university student at the time who worked
on finding sources, verifying information, and contributing to debates on the talk
page. Lihaas contributed significantly to the talk pages and was a frequent editor of
the article.
Days 5–8: 29 January–1 February 2011
As widespread protests continued in Egypt and the death toll rose to at least 100, the
position of the army continued to be ambiguous. Soldiers were ordered to use live ammunition but refused and protest groups gave their support to ElBaradei to negotiate the
formation of a temporary national unity government.
Wikipedia editor, Knockledgekid87, nominated the article for a ‘POV (point of view)
check’ by inserting the NPOV tag into the article. He alerted editors in the talk page as to
the rationale for the tag by arguing that Carlos Latuff’s political cartoons, used to illustrate the article, ‘seem(ed) to side with the protesters’ (Wikipedia authors, 2013b). Other
editors proceeded to argue against the presence of the tag and then to discuss possible
compromises.
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Ocaasi wrote that merely adding pro-Mubarak cartoons to balance the pro-protester
images could not solve the problem since the format of political cartoons lent themselves
to a particularly popular perspective. ‘Political cartoons’, he wrote, ‘don’t usually side
with oppressive regimes’. After conceding to the request by replacing most of the cartoons with photographs of the protests (Figure 4), Ocaasi removed the tag at 04:55 UTC
on the 29 February, writing in his edit summary,
removing NPOV check tag. most issues resolved. no ongoing disputes on talk. npov will
continually be checked and improved, but no obvious issues warranting the tag.
Later, the same day, Michaelzeng7 added the ‘news release tag’ warning (Figure 5)
that the article ‘reads like a news release, or is otherwise written in an overly promotional
tone’ and pointed to the ‘Wikipedia is not a newspaper’ section of the ‘What Wikipedia
is not’ policy (Wikipedia authors, 2013b). This policy indicates that ‘Wikipedia should
not offer first-hand news reports on breaking stories’ and that, although ‘editors are
encouraged to include current and up-to-date information within its coverage, and to
develop standalone articles on significant current events’, not all newsworthy events
‘qualify for inclusion’ (Wikipedia authors, 2014).
Ocaasi responded on the talk page that editors were already dealing with the problems
indicated by the tag and that it was therefore unnecessary. He wrote that editors were
‘trying to integrate a ton of new information in an encyclopedic way already’ and that he
would ‘vote to ignore all rules while they worked it out’. ‘Ignore all rules’ (IAR) is one
of three Wikipedia ‘principles’ that states, ‘If a rule prevents you from improving or
maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it’ (Wikipedia authors, 2013c). IAR has a controversial
history vis-a-vis the encyclopedia because it has been used by some editors to disrupt
Wikipedia in the past (Ford, 2013). Here, it was being used to try and counter what was
seen as a rebuke to the work of editors.
Day 9: 2 February 2011
In central Cairo, Mubarak supporters on horses and camels armed with swords, clubs,
stones attacked anti-government protesters in what was later known as the ‘Battle of the
Camel’.
Keeping track of death counts in the article had been an issue of contention before this
day but it came to a head when anonymous user, 94.246.150.168 (Internet Protocol (IP)
address resolves to Poland), complained that numbers of dead in the article contradicted
numbers in the table (Figure 6) and that the table should be removed. The editors argued
about whether the table should be moved or kept in the main article, with some complaining that editors might be doing ‘original reporting’ by synthesizing data from a
number of sources. ‘Original research’ is forbidden by Wikipedia policy and defined as
‘material – such as facts, allegations, and ideas – for which no reliable, published sources
exist’ (Wikipedia authors, 2013d).
The Poland-based user 94.246.150.168 continued to complain about ‘outdated figures’ in the tables, the fact the numbers did not add up and that they were different from
what reliable sources were reporting. The argument about the validity of the table reached
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Figure 4. The existence of the ‘POV’ tag resulted in all cartoons (except for the cartoon of
Mubarak ‘pulling the plug on the Internet’) to be removed.1
Figure 5. News release tag warning.1
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Figure 6. A death count table from the 13:11 UTC, 31 January 2011 version of the ‘2011
Egyptian Revolution’ article.1
breaking point when The_Egyptian_Liberal wrote that these death counts were more
than just numbers in a table:
Listen dude, I honestly cant be bothered fighting with you. I have family in Egypt that I am
worried sick about. The last time I checked the numbers it said the total was 149 in the table.
We can make sure it stat(e)s the right numbers. A lot of people come to Wiki to know how many
people have died where their family lives (due) to the lack of communication in Egypt. so keep
that in mind.
The ‘fatalities’ category was a constant issue of contention since there was no one source
that had a complete list of casualties and editors had to stitch together a number of sources
as the numbers rapidly increased. Poland-based editor 94.246.150.168 argued against
using the wording ‘confirmed death toll’ when sources were reporting ‘unofficial estimates’ due to ‘confusion on the streets’. S/he also noted the difficulty of deciding which
deaths should be directly attributed to the protests since there were also deaths relating to
looting and jailbreaks that occurred at the same time. Lihaas countered,
Absolutely it should be included, prison deaths too, because they are a result of the protests and
what goes on now. Sure someone who gets a heart attack fishing on the nile wont be, but then
again that would never be in any source so it wont be included.
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As with the majority of disagreements that occurred in the writing of the article, these
interactions centered on disagreements on how to classify: whether deaths attributed to
looting, for example, should be included in the death toll for the protests as a whole.
Disagreement was tense and extremely personal when the significance of these numbers
surfaced; these were not only numbers on a page but deeply affected the lives of those
who were personally affected by the story.
Days 10–17: 3–10 February 2011
By the second week of major protests, there was still a heavy military presence in Cairo
but Interior Ministry stated that the army remained neutral. Lihaas wrote on the talk page
that the infobox had been changed from a ‘civil conflict’ to a ‘military conflict’ template
and wondered aloud whether it was ‘too soon’ for this change.
The ‘military conflict’ infobox (sometimes referred to as a ‘warbox’) on Wikipedia
is used for conflicts including ‘a battle, campaign, war, or group of related wars’,
whereas examples for the ‘civil conflict’ infobox includes what editors deem a ‘protest,
clash with police etc’. The insertion of this infobox reflected growing concerns about
whether the military was siding with the government against protesters. This was a
subtle attempt to change the classification of the event from a conflict between the
public and the government to a conflict driven by the military. Wikipedians recognized
that classification of the article was significant – even if only through this subtle means
– and so, after some discussion, the infobox was reverted back to the ‘civil conflict’
infobox template.
Day 18: 11 February 2011 onward
In the second instance of what had been called the ‘Friday of Departure’ by the opposition movement, there was an escalation of protests, with the presidential palace, parliament, and state TV buildings remaining surrounded by protestors. Mubarak and his
family reportedly left the palace by helicopter headed for Sharm el-Sheikh and Vice
President, Omar Suleiman announced after 18:00 Cairo time that the presidency had
been vacated and that the army council would run the country. Mubarak’s resignation
was followed by nationwide celebrations.
Soon after the resignation announcement, editors conducted a poll on whether to
change the title of the article from ‘protests’ to ‘revolution’ as it was already being continually changed and then reverted by other editors. The result of the extensive poll in
which a number of editors added their voice to the decision (some bringing extensive
lists of references to mainstream media sources that were calling events in Egypt a ‘revolution’) was a decision to move the article to ‘2011 Egyptian Revolution’. On Wikipedia,
articles can be found using different titles but they must resolve to a single title. In this
case, searching for 2011 Egyptian protests will take users to the article now entitled
‘Egyptian revolution of 2011’.
By about March 2011, edits to the article had stabilized. As of 10 April 2014, there
have been 7765 edits to the article with almost 2000 distinct authors.
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Discussion
Looking at the diffs in the first day of the article’s growth, it becomes clear that the article
is by no means a ‘blank slate’ that editors fill progressively with prose. Much of the activity in the first stage of the article’s development consisted of editors inserting markers or
frames in the article that acted to prioritize and distribute work. Cleanup tags alerted
others about what they believed to be priorities (to improve weak sections or provide
political expertise, for example), while infoboxes and tables provided frames for editors
to fill in details iteratively as new information became available.
The act of inserting an infobox with categories that require updating as the event progresses, or cleanup tags alerting editors to the weaknesses of the article sets off a number
of signals to editors about what work needs to be done on an article. The choice of the
‘uprising’ infobox, for example, provided the frame for other editors to understand the
context of the event so that they could use their knowledge of this particular type of event
to fill out the details of the article.
The modularity of infoboxes in particular enables faster distributed collaboration among
editors with varying levels of subject expertise. Editors can look for specific missing information such as casualty numbers without knowing too much about the current affairs of
Egypt, for example. In addition, infoboxes’ modularity has proven particularly useful in
helping to coordinate translation into other language Wikipedias. These simply summarized
tables have meant that ‘repeated items can be more easily translated, rather than having to
interpret long sentences with complex verb and clause structures’ (Wikipedia authors, 2012).
Translating an infobox that starts with the category ‘population’ requires a single noun translation – something that can be achieved much more easily than a complex sentence about the
population of a particular country. This modularity has driven the recent Wikimedia
Foundation initiative, WikiData, which aims to develop a semantic approach to Wikipedia
infoboxes by being able to populate, alter, and translate data from a central location.
Infoboxes are examples of Wikipedia editing tools that enable the kind of rapid collaborative editing seen in articles relating to breaking news events. These tools are, however, not only material but also conceptual and symbolic (Bowker and Star, 2000). Their
symbolic power is exposed when information resists categorization such as when editors
were trying to combat the fact that composite figures were not yet available in the form
the infobox or casualty tables required. Taken far from its origins in taxoboxes, the inadequacies of the infobox were exposed when The_Egyptian_Liberal revealed in a moment
of frustration what this was really about: not numbers, but people – people who were
dying and families who were worrying about those ‘back home in Egypt’.
Classification work, as Bowker and Star argue, is intensely political. And much of
Wikipedia work, especially in the beginning stages, is classificatory. A key principle of
Wikipedia editing is that each article be linked to other Wikipedia articles and to the
Web. According to Bowker and Star, ‘every link in hypertext creates a category. That is,
it reflects some judgment about two or more objects: they are the same, or alike, or functionally linked, or linked as part of an unfolding series’ (Bowker and Star, 2000: 7).
The editing of Wikipedia articles involves continuous linking and classifying.
Alternative article titles are linked together by virtue of being automatically redirected to
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the primary title (‘2011 Egyptian Protests’, the earlier title, now redirects to the new title
‘Egyptian Revolution of 2011’, for example). The choice of words and phrases classifies
the subject of the article according to particular classes of event (such as ‘protest’, ‘uprising’, ‘revolution’, or ‘military intervention’) and editors list other articles they believe
are related in the ‘See also’ section (linking the article to the Algerian and Tunisian protests in the first version). They also link to categories of articles in the list of categories
at the foot of the page (including ‘2011 riots’ and ‘riots in Egypt’, for example).
In the same way that classification work is embedded into the fabric of everyday life,
classification work on Wikipedia is similarly embedded and thus ordinarily invisible. As
Bowker and Star argue, these standards and classifications only usually become visible
when they break down or become objects of contention. The title of the Egyptian Revolution
article, for example, endured much debate, with editors arguing whether to call the events
a ‘protest’, ‘uprising’, or ‘revolution’, among others. Editors also complained about the
way in which editors were ‘forecasting the future’ with the use of the future tense in the
article. One editor complained early on about the opening phrase of the article that stated
protests took place ‘from January onwards’ when it was still January. S/he complained that
the article was written as though it was predicting the future with phrases weighing up relative scale of events when the significance could not have been foreseen.
Transparency is an important axis of control in Wikipedia articles – especially in the
first phase of their development. It is at this stage that editors leading the direction of the
page were engaged in a contest with those who were questioning the quality of the article
using cleanup tags. Editors continuously added cleanup tags relating to the instability of
the article due to its current event status and what they believed to be attacks against
NPOV at a time when the article was highly unstable. Cleanup tags were consistently
removed because editors argued that they ‘were already working on the issues’ noted in
the tags. Yet the removal of such tags to the casual reader may give the illusion of a return
to stability before such stability had been reached. In the context of this article, battle
over the visibility of cleanup tags could be seen as reflective of personal battles between
editors, and less about warning readers of possible problems.
This illusion grows steadily with time as infoboxes and tabular elements with their
clean, well-referenced numbers, and short, simple phrases develop an implicit authority
– erasing the earlier resistance to the tabular form. Like Bowker and Star’s analysis of the
International Classification of Diseases, these translated tables and infoboxes can be read
as ‘a kind of treaty, a bloodless set of numbers obscuring the behind-the-scenes battles
informing its creation’ and that ‘this dryness itself contains an implicit authority, appearing to rise above uncertainty, power struggles, and the impermanence of the compromises’ (Bowker and Star, 2000: 66).
When infoboxes and tables are translated, they lose their link to the messiness that
gave rise to their initial development. This messiness is parallel to the struggle to turn
competing voices (sources) into a single, clean narrative on Wikipedia. Such messiness
resulted in some battles being waged and won – not necessarily because of any particular
merit on grounds of truth or even accuracy, but because it made more sense for the rapid
development of the article. In many ways, the opportunity for such battles is lost as time
goes on since it is much more difficult to shift information when it becomes lodged in the
tight tabular form.
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The appearance and disappearance of cleanup tags and the development of infoboxes
facilitate the kind of rapid collaboration Wikipedia is becoming known for but they have
two important political effects. The first is the potential of obscuring the battles fought
behind the scenes of an article when cleanup tags are removed and infoboxes translated.
The second is that these objects also contain an implicit authority – appearing to rise
above uncertainty, power struggles, and the impermanence of the compromise that originated the information contained by them.
Conclusion
Wikipedians use a number of technological tools to coordinate work on the encyclopedia. Cleanup tags set in motion a number of specialized work routines and warn users
about the instability of the article, while infoboxes provide spaces for iterative work by
editors who may not possess in-depth subject knowledge but who are able to more easily
fill in the spaces provided by editors leading the overall direction of the article.
In addition to enabling rapid collaboration, however, these artifacts also have conceptual and symbolic effects. Cleanup tags, when removed, give an illusion of stability
before such stability may have been achieved. Infoboxes lend information a degree of
authority by their material form, legitimating certain knowledges at the expense of others. This has the effect of erasing information’s messiness as the ‘spill over’ of excluded
knowledges loses their connection to the process that enabled their classification –
especially in the case of translations.
When this happens in the realm of a rapidly developing article about a political event,
it has a significant effect on framing the narrative of what happened and why. When the
event is still ongoing and the stakes are high, these tools can have enormous political
effects that remain invisible to both the average user who is unaware of the reasons that
editorial elements are removed or added, as well as to the majority of editors who are
looking for whether individual facts are accurate rather than whether they preclude or
frame the narrative as a whole.
While we may look to bots and other automated forms to observe the delegation of
power to technology, these more mundane classification technologies may be as powerful and less visible. Because they are deeply embedded in daily practice, they require a
close following of human editors in order to understand how editors achieve both material and symbolic effects by their choice of classification technologies and systems. As
Bowker and Star note, classification works beyond the individual level of the individual
‘mind’. ‘Classifications as technologies are powerful artifacts that may link thousands of
communities and span highly complex boundaries’ (Bowker and Star, 2000: 287).
Rediscovering the messiness of their origin and exposing the communal nature of knowledge building highlights the ways in which what looks to be merely technical decisions
almost always have social and political effects.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Gillian Bolsover, Eric Meyer, and the anonymous reviewers of this article for their
invaluable comments and suggestions, and to the Wikipedians who I interviewed for their generosity and dedication.
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Funding
not-for-profit sectors. The author’s PhD work is funded by the University of Oxford’s Clarendon
Fund and the Desmond Tutu Award.
Note
1. All Wikipedia screenshots are licensed by the Wikimedia Foundation under a Creative
Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by-sa/3.0/
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Author biography
Heather Ford is a PhD student at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford where
she studies how Wikipedians construct public accounts of history as it happens. She has worked as
a researcher, activist, journalist, educator, and strategist in the fields of online collaboration, intellectual property reform, information privacy, and open-source software in South Africa, the United
Kingdom, and the United States.
545740
JOU0010.1177/1464884914545740JournalismGraves
Article
Blogging Back then: Annotative
journalism in I.F. Stone’s Weekly
and Talking Points Memo
Journalism
2015, Vol. 16(1) 99–118
DOI: 10.1177/1464884914545740
jou.sagepub.com
Lucas Graves
University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA
Abstract
This article develops the concept of ‘annotative journalism’ through a close review of
two muckraking investigations, 50 years apart, by the newsletter I.F. Stone’s Weekly and
the website Talking Points Memo. These cases stand out in hindsight as investigative
coups, though neither relied on the tools we associate with that kind of journalism:
anonymous sources, secret documents, and so on. Instead, both investigations
proceeded mainly through the analysis of published texts, in particular news reports,
in light of a wider media and political critique. Annotative journalism unsettles core
practices and assumptions of objective reporting. It rejects narrative coherence in
favor of a set of critical textual practices, revealing reporting routines to the reader
and building explicit arguments from and about the work of other journalists. And it
troubles the professional distinction between reporting and opinion; these ‘scoops’
came through, not in spite of, the politics of the journalists who worked on them.
Keywords
Annotation, blogging, I.F. Stone, intertextuality, muckraking, objectivity
Introduction
Online journalism in general, and blogging in particular, have invited frequent comparisons to earlier eras of journalism: to ancien regime France, to pre-revolutionary pamphleteering, to the party press of the 19th century (e.g. Barlow, 2007; Darnton, 2010).
This article proposes a very particular comparison, to a mid-century, muckraking newsletter, in order to highlight the material, textual practices of blogging as a form of
Lucas Graves, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 821
University Avenue, Suite 5115, Madison, WI 53706, USA.
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newswork – one that defies customary distinctions between factual reporting and opinion
or commentary. I call this annotative journalism, defined simply as journalism that proceeds mainly through the critical analysis of published texts, where those may be news
accounts, official documents, or other material, publicly available texts.1
Annotative journalism is not simply investigative reporting, but rather a style of
newswork that unearths new facts by publicly dissecting and comparing news accounts
and other evidence through the lens of a wider media and political critique. This larger
critical-political framework obviates the narrative coherence of conventional American
news, so central to classic studies of news and newswork (e.g. Lule, 2001; Tuchman,
1978; Zelizer, 1992). The result is an ideological journalism which is nevertheless more
transparent in important ways than its objective counterpart. It reveals reporting routines to the reader and builds explicit arguments both from and about the work of other
journalists, making visible the intertextual nature of news production. The annotative
journalism developed by a network of blogger–journalists over the last decade finds a
remarkable precedent in the work of I.F. Stone, and especially in I.F. Stone’s Weekly, the
newsletter he produced from January 1953 through the end of 1971.
The muckraking tradition has often been seen as an antecedent of blogging (e.g.
Barlow, 2007; Cohen, 2008; Rosenberg, 2009). The obvious parallel is that like the bestknown blogger–journalists, Progressive-Era muckrakers did not strive to be dispassionate presenters of fact. Consider Lincoln Steffens’ (1904) frank disavowal of journalistic
detachment, offered in the introduction to a collection of his essays on urban blight and
corruption. ‘This is all very unscientific, but then, I am not a scientist. I am a journalist’,
Steffens (1904) wrote, continuing,
I did not gather with indifference all the facts and arrange them patiently for permanent
preservation and laboratory analysis. I did not want to preserve, I wanted to destroy the facts.
My purpose was … to see if the shameful facts, spread out in all their shame, would not burn
through our civic shamelessness and set fire to American pride. That was the journalism of it. I
wanted to move and to convince. (p. 12)
But beyond that political parallel lies an important material one: the distinctive set of
textual practices invited by a journalism that seeks ‘to move and convince’. Informed by
the Progressive faith in science and reason, turn-of-the-century muckrakers practiced an
evidence-driven, argument-building brand of reporting (Swados, 1962; Weinberg, 2001).
They assembled facts and gathered documents on an unprecedented scale from diverse
textual sources, including news accounts – data that gained coherence in the broader project of progressive political and economic reform.2 As Guttenplan (2009) writes, ‘it was
the Populist critique of the economy that gave the facts so painstakingly assembled by the
muckrakers their significance’ (p. 53). Stone learned his craft, in the 1930s, in newspapers
which were the inheritors of that tradition. In his own weekly newsletter, free from the
format and genre constraints of newspaper journalism, Stone married the muckrakers’
document-driven methods to an annotative style of presentation. What the following analysis of the Weekly will show is how a critical politics affords uncommon latitude in working with texts. Stone’s approach yielded a precursor of the transparent, fragmentary, and
relentlessly intertextual style of news which has come into flower on the Internet.
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Method and literature
This article illustrates annotative journalism through close study of two cases separated
by a half-century. Both stand out in hindsight as major investigative coups, though neither relied on the tools we associate with that kind of journalism: anonymous sources,
secret documents, ‘shoe-leather’ reporting, and so on. Instead, each investigation drew
mainly on published reports in other news outlets. The first case is Stone’s exposure of a
government conspiracy to misrepresent the results of a 1957 nuclear test in order to discredit opponents of such testing. (Another story Stone worked on, the 1964 Gulf of
Tonkin incidents, will be reviewed briefly.) The second major case is the award-winning
work done by the blog Talking Points Memo (TPM) to uncover a ‘purge’ of federal prosecutors at the Justice Department in 2007.
These two cases stand out, it has to be acknowledged. The news analysis and media
criticism on news-related blogs do not usually lead to major investigative breakthroughs.
Similarly, I.F. Stone’s newsletter (modeled on George Seldes’ In Fact of the 1940s, ‘an
Antidote for Falsehood in the Daily Press’) mostly reacted to headlines and rarely broke
news. At the same time, some of the reporting work described below would be familiar
to any investigative journalist. This is why annotative journalism, in its complex, ecological relationship to traditional news, deserves closer attention. These cases highlight
annotative techniques which have a long history outside of the journalistic mainstream
and which are increasingly basic to the vocabulary of media production today – on blogs,
in professional newsrooms, and across a wider news landscape that includes venues from
Fox News to The Daily Show and Democracy Now!.
This raises an important point: Not all blogs are the same. The boundaries of ‘blogging’, always contested, have only become murkier as traditional news organizations
embrace the genre and as prominent blogs have professionalized and been incorporated
into elite media-political networks. (This is one good reason for scholars to focus instead
on categories of practice, such as annotative journalism.) This study takes TPM as
emblematic of that class of news-and-politics blogs which has most interested journalism
studies, for their practice as well as their critique of journalism. The site has been involved
in several of blogging’s signature ‘scoops’ over the last decade and figures prominently
in academic literature.
The defining feature of this class of blogs for scholars has been their oppositional
stance toward traditional news outlets, yielding a news discourse organized ‘around the
idea of challenging mainstream journalism’ (Matheson, 2004: 452; Park, 2009). Many
studies read this antagonism as an ideological challenge to journalism’s always-tenuous
professional project (Lewis, 2012; Schudson and Anderson, 2009). In the same vein,
scholars have seen traditional news outlets responding with efforts to ‘domesticate’ the
new medium in a way that preserves professional norms and status (Domingo et al.,
2008; Robinson, 2006; Singer, 2005).
Blogging’s critique of journalism has invited an ecological approach to understanding
its role in a wider news environment. Any number of studies point out that blogs engage
in little primary reporting and instead rely on the work of other (especially elite) news
outlets (e.g. Reese et al., 2007; Reich, 2008). Blogs have been assigned a downstream
role in established models of political communication, engaging in ‘second-level
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agenda-setting’ which tells readers how to interpret the issues which journalists report on
(Meraz, 2009; Murley and Roberts, 2006). They may operate not as gatekeepers but
instead as ‘gatewatchers’ who publicize and prioritize stories from the body of news
produced every day (Bruns, 2005: 17–23). At the same time, top bloggers can set the
wider news agenda because ‘opinion-makers within the media’ take them seriously
(Drezner and Farrell, 2008: 29–30). Anderson (2010) complicates the distinction between
reporters, bloggers, and activists with his notion of ‘fact entrepreneurs’ who promote and
shape a developing story in a local news ecosystem.
Annotative journalism as conceived here fits squarely within this broader ecological
understanding of newswork. In an early report on ‘participatory’ media, Bowman and
Willis (2003) identified ‘annotative reporting’ that supplements a news account with a
‘point of view, angle or piece of information … missing from coverage in the mainstream
media’ (pp. 34–35). However, annotation can do more than ‘supplement’ the news; as
practiced over time, in the context of an unfolding story, annotative techniques may yield
vital new information even in the absence of original reporting. As I argue elsewhere,
news-related blogs have advanced major stories through a kind of ‘distributed news analysis’: Collectively they can act ‘as an engine for distilling and dissecting news accounts,
testing them against one another and against established facts to solidify … the real,
factual context for future news accounts’ (Graves, 2007).
This study seeks to draw our attention to the material, textual practice of annotation
as a kind of newswork. An annotation acts upon another text. It opens up a critical distance between two or more texts and constructs meaning by exploiting that distance. This
textual awareness affords a particular economy of communication, visible in various
annotative genres which have emerged historically. Thus, for instance, in medieval
florilegia – collections of excerpts meant to serve as guides to a work, an author, or a
topic – the mere fact of a passage’s selection, or its position within an anthology, conveys
valuable information. Moss (1996) writes that florilegia ‘compose a signifying universe
which is wholly literary, in which texts illuminate texts in a self-sufficient environment
where dialectical inference and extra textual reference are only minimally necessary’ (p.
106). In the same way, annotation may structure an argument from news texts with the
simple juxtaposition of clashing accounts or by adding an ironic headline to a copied
passage – a favorite tactic of bloggers (and of programs like The Daily Show) also applied
in Stone’s Weekly.
Annotation runs counter to the narrative logic of conventional reporting. Emile
Benveniste writes that ‘the objectivity of narrative is defined by the absence of all reference to the narrator … Here no one speaks. The events seem to tell themselves’ (quoted
in White, 1980: 7). This sense of narrativity underlies Tuchman’s (1978) notion of the
self-validating ‘webs of facticity’ produced in objective news accounts. In contrast,
annotative journalism is critical, evaluating and assessing news texts within a larger normative framework. It thus challenges traditional journalism’s constantly reinforced distinction between original reporting and opinion or comment. The cases reviewed below
will illustrate how annotative reporting, by juxtaposing and dissecting news texts, may
unearth new facts, drive a story forward, and even yield decisive scoops. Both cases
highlight an intertextuality that is deeply unsettling to objective news accounts in which
the facts seem to speak for themselves.
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I.F. Stone and the nuclear testing controversy
Two episodes from Stone’s career will illustrate how the Weekly married documentdriven muckraking to the newsletter format in a way that anticipated the annotative journalism practiced online today. The first, which Stone would call ‘the biggest scoop I ever
got’ and the best illustration of his reporting style, was the Weekly’s unmasking of an
official campaign to discredit the nuclear test-ban movement – and to forestall a resumption of US–Soviet talks over a ban – with misleading seismic data. (Accounts of this
episode are in Alterman, 1988; Bruck, 1973; Guttenplan, 2009; Patner, 1988.) Opponents
of banning nuclear tests, led by Dr Edward Teller, had argued that the Soviets would be
able to cheat by testing weapons in secret, underground. On 6 March 1958, the Atomic
Energy Commission (AEC) gave ammunition to those arguments by publishing the
results of the first US underground nuclear test, carried out in Nevada the previous
September. The AEC report claimed seismologists had not been able to detect the blast
beyond a radius of about 250 miles – far less than the roughly 600 miles between ‘seismic
listening posts’ that Moscow had tentatively agreed to. In a matter of days, however,
Stone’s reporting would force the AEC to retract its claim.
The most remarkable feature of this reporting coup is that Stone accomplished it using
only public documents and news reports. National reporters had been invited to Nevada
to cover the underground test in September 1957. The New York Times reported from Las
Vegas that the test ‘seemed to have conformed with predictions of A. E. C. scientists that
the explosion would not be detectable more than a few hundred miles away’ (Hill, 1957).
As Stone would later explain, however, his edition of the Times included a tiny ‘shirt-tail’
reporting a claim that the blast had been detected in Toronto; later editions had similar
bulletins from Rome and Tokyo (see Figure 1). The Times did not acknowledge the contradiction or follow up in the months to come. But it caught Stone’s eye. Lacking even
the resources to cable those cities for more information, Stone filed the clippings away
(Guttenplan, 2009: 337, 442–445).
When the AEC report on the underground test finally came out 6 months later, national
reporters enjoyed a tour of the blast site and reported on the peacetime nuclear applications to be yielded by this safe new testing regime (e.g. Herbert, 1958). Stone, however,
saw the report as an obvious effort to bolster the case against disarmament. The cover
story of the 10 March Weekly took aim at Dr Teller’s ‘hint-and-run’ campaign against
nuclear disarmament (Stone, 1958a). To undercut pro-nuclear arguments, Stone relied on
an annotative technique he used often in the Weekly: quote boxes, freestanding textual
excerpts offered with no editorial comment beyond a provocative title or a jarring juxtaposition. (The first issues of the Weekly, from 1953, featured a straightforward layout
with no text boxes or lengthy excerpts. By the late 1960s, the newsletter included at least
one quote box, and usually two, on every page.)
Thus, a quote box on the front page, titled ‘Dr. Teller’s Point of View’, united the
scientist’s claim that because of cheating ‘disarmament is a lost cause’, from a recent
appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, to a more disturbing argument he had advanced in
a 1957 magazine article: ‘We must overcome the popular notion that nuclear weapons
are more immoral than conventional weapons’. The subtext was clear: However pragmatic he sounds now, Teller’s opposition to a test ban is ideological. A quote box on the
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Figure 1. I.F. Stone clipped ‘shirt-tails’ from the Times indicating the 1957 US nuclear test was
detected far more widely than officials claimed.
Source: New York Times, 20 September 1957.
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Figure 2. The Weekly used boxed quotes with ironic headlines or jarring juxtapositions to
make editorial points.
Source: I.F. Stone’s Weekly, 7 March 1958.
last page asked, ‘Is Fallout as Negligible as Dr. Teller Says?’ over a quote from the scientist likening nuclear fallout to smoking a cigarette every 2 months – followed by a
contradictory passage from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (see Figure 2). Fully
half of the four-page newsletter was excerpted from the Congressional Record; Stone
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carefully selected passages of recent testimony from a prominent test-ban advocate,
using boxed quotes and boldface subheads to guide the reader and reinforce the argument. Stone’s own words fill just a third of the issue, though his voice is everywhere.
That 10 March Weekly also noted the New York Times ‘shirt-tails’, from September,
that seemed to contradict the new AEC report, though Stone still had not confirmed the
bulletins. As the issue went to press, he lodged a request for information with the Coast
and Geodetic Survey in the Commerce Department, which, as he later reported, ‘seemed
to be unaware of the AEC release’ (Stone, 1958b). Within days, the government scientists gave Stone a list of 19 seismic stations across the United States and Canada that had
recorded the nuclear test. He confronted the AEC with the new information. By the time
the 17 March Weekly came out, the AEC had issued a ‘note to editors and correspondents’
amending its earlier report to say ‘earth waves’ from the blast had in fact been detected
more than 2000 miles away. Stone’s (1958b) cover story provided a blow-by-blow
account of his own reporting under the headline, ‘Why the AEC Retracted that Falsehood
on Nuclear Testing’.
Stone thus produced a remarkable piece of investigative journalism about a vital area
of national security policy without any inside or anonymous sources. However, it is crucial to understand that Stone supported nuclear disarmament and had often used his
newsletter to argue for the cause. In July 1957, Stone dedicated an entire issue of the
Weekly to reprinting official statements from a meeting of top scientists convened by
Bertrand Russell to discuss the nuclear threat. Stone inserted provocative subheads –
‘War Would Leave No Country Unscathed’ – to organize the scientists’ message. (He
also faithfully highlighted conclusions that complicated the anti-nuclear argument, for
example, ‘Medical X-Ray Worse Than Fallout’.) ‘The Scientists Warn Mankind’, the
cover bellowed, followed by a brief editor’s note that took direct aim at establishment
journalism:
As we went to press on July 18 not a single newspaper in the United States had been sufficiently
interested to publish the text of the warning issued by twenty world famous scientists of the
Soviet and Western blocks after a historic meeting in the little Nova Scotian fishing village of
Pugwash the week before. (Stone, 1957a)
Stone was also already suspicious of the AEC and its ‘Madison Avenue Techniques’, in
the words of an October 1957 headline in the Weekly. That article used Vance Packard’s
The Hidden Persuaders, then newly released, to frame an analysis of government efforts
to downplay nuclear risks – most dramatically in choosing the name ‘Project Sunshine’
for a study of nuclear fallout. ‘It is as if from the very start the intent was to make us
assume that the radioactivity let loose by nuclear testing was something like sunshine
and natural radiation’, Stone (1957b) wrote. The story went on to dissect Senate questioning of a top AEC scientist, annotating the exchanges with notes on the motives of the
lawmakers. The result reads like a pre-digital blog post, with boldface doing the work of
indentation to move between textual registers (see Figure 3).
In this way, Stone’s opposition to nuclear testing and his critical view of the news
media informed the annotative, document-driven approach that yielded his big scoop.
He filed away the suspicious ‘shirt-tails’ because he put little faith in either the AEC or
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Figure 3. Stone often annotated published texts. Here, his editorial remarks guide readers
through a congressional hearing about ‘clean’ nuclear weapons.
Source: I.F. Stone’s Weekly, 21 October 1957.
the New York Times. Stone’s progressivism provided the analytical context in which a
discrepancy between documents becomes a ‘story’ worth reporting. This approach
demands that documents be treated explicitly as such – as texts to be labeled and analyzed. Throughout these issues of the Weekly, Stone referred directly to news articles,
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government reports, congressional transcripts, and even press releases, rather than
weaving their contents into a narrative whose material seams and sources are hidden
from the reader.
The coherence of this annotative approach assumed as much about the Weekly’s readers as about its author. A shared critique of the political and media establishment permitted reporting and presentation to be fragmentary and unfinished. Stone did not have to
wait until he had the whole story. He could present inconclusive but suggestive bits of
evidence – like his first mention of the ‘shirt-tails’, or in the same issue, the point that an
above-ground Soviet test had been detected and thoroughly analyzed by the United
States in a matter of hours (Stone, 1958a) – because his readers shared an interpretive
framework and understood where the story might lead. Likewise, a few sentences from
either friend or enemy could stand alone in a quote box, with only an ironic headline to
add context, because annotator and reader would see it the same way.
It is worth briefly reviewing a case that shows the same annotative techniques at work
in a much larger controversy. Stone played a decisive role in uncovering the truth behind
the Gulf of Tonkin incidents of 2 and 4 August 1964, and more generally behind the
escalation of US involvement in Vietnam. His reports quickly cast doubt on the circumstances of the first Tonkin incident, suggesting that it may have been provoked, and on
whether the second incident had occurred at all. In this case, however, no official retraction was forthcoming; although Stone pursued the issue doggedly in the Weekly and
elsewhere, his suspicions would not be confirmed until the release of the Pentagon
Papers in 1971. (In the 2003 documentary ‘The Fog of War’, Robert McNamara admitted
that the second incident never took place.) Still, Stone had the contours of the story
within weeks of the incidents – again, relying entirely on public documents and news
reports. As one historian has observed,
It was one of the most remarkable accomplishments in history of investigative journalism, I
think you could say, given his physical condition. He was practically stone deaf at this point in
his life, so he couldn’t go to cocktail parties, he couldn’t chat it up with inside dopesters. He
could only look in the public record. But, at the same time, he did have a larger critique in mind,
and that is that the Vietnam War was sparked by anti-colonial nationalism and not by Moscow.
(Jackson Lears interviewed by On the Media, 2009)
As in the nuclear testing stories, that larger critique made Stone suspicious of official
accounts and sensitive to contradictory data. One source of such data was the overseas
press. In the 10 August Weekly, which went to press just 2 days after the first Tonkin
incident, Stone (1964a) cited North Vietnamese radio reports suggesting it was a response
to shelling by US and South Vietnamese warships. The 24 August issue featured a boxed
quote from Le Monde, reporting on the secret history of US operations against North
Vietnam (Stone, 1964b). The front page of the 28 September Weekly excerpted a skeptical analysis of the Tonkin incidents from the Peking Review, an organ of the Chinese
Communist party (Stone, 1964c).
However, Stone’s main source of information was again the elite US press. The first
issue after the incidents cited three New York Times reports and one from the Washington
Post to make a point the papers themselves had not: that the Pentagon had been ‘carrying
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on war behind our backs’ (Stone, 1964a). As in the test-ban controversy, Stone’s annotative analysis was framed by a deep skepticism about the elite news media and its cozy
relationship with official Washington. The 24 August edition opened by flatly asserting
that the ‘American government and the American press have kept the full truth about the
Tonkin Bay incidents from the American public’ (Stone, 1964b). Building his case from
congressional testimony and various press accounts, he concluded,
The process of brain-washing the public starts with off-the-record briefings for newspapermen
in which all sorts of far-fetched theories are suggested to explain why the tiny North Vietnamese
navy would be mad enough to venture an attack on the Seventh fleet, one of the world’s most
powerful. Everything is discussed except the possibility that the attack might have been
provoked. (Stone, 1964b)
The piece cast doubt on whether the second confrontation had occurred at all:
It is strange that though we claim three boats sunk, we picked up no flotsam and jetsam as proof
from the wreckage. Nor have any pictures been provided. Whatever the true story, the second
incident seems to have triggered a long planned attack of our own.
Once again, the Weekly’s annotative layout reinforced its critical stance. ‘Prize
Explanation’, announced one quote box, over Sen. McCarthy speculating on CBS’s Face
the Nation that the North Vietnamese attacked the US Navy because ‘they were bored’
(Stone, 1964b). In the 28 September Weekly, Stone contrasted the language in a New York
Times report with a more skeptical Associated Press (AP) account, calling the former an
example of ‘phony news stories’ that advance the cause of war. He took particular exception to the use of anonymous sources to advance the White House line (Stone, 1964c).
Several years later, in a series of articles in the New York Review of Books (NYRB),
Stone would build a decisive case that the United States had begun a major escalation in
Vietnam well before the Tonkin incidents. He could not take the same liberties of style
and format in the NYRB, but Stone’s reporting in these articles reads like forensic document analysis, parsing phrases and comparing dates to find the gaps in official accounts
(e.g. Stone, 1968). Once again, news stories, press releases, and congressional testimony
were not just sources of information but texts to be deconstructed. Any good reporter
reads between the lines. But Stone’s politics allowed, and his annotative methods
demanded, that he make those readings explicit for readers.
TPM and the ‘running massacre’ of federal prosecutors
Perhaps the best illustration of annotative journalism online is the work of the news
blog TPM, launched in 2000 by Joshua Marshall. TPM has been compared in its idiosyncrasy to I.F. Stone’s Weekly, and the similarities are unmistakable. Marshall’s handful of major reporting successes have all come by focusing on stories or on angles
which, as his posts often point out, are being neglected in mainstream coverage. When
one of these stories does break into national headlines, due in part to TPM’s persistent
focus, the blog appears in hindsight to have been ahead of traditional news outlets.
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(The Trent Lott affair of 2002 is a much-studied example; see Glenn, 2007; Rosenberg,
2009; Scott, 2004.) And, like Stone, Marshall has been open about his progressive
political views as well as his criticism of conventional journalism. TPM found its voice
as part of a network of progressive blogs focusing on scandal and corruption in the
White House of George W. Bush.
More important here, TPM also bears a strong material resemblance to the Weekly.
Like other news-related blogs, TPM excerpts heavily from published sources. Quotes
from public figures are almost always borrowed from a newspaper or broadcast outlet.
Marshall has explained that he tries not to draw a bright line between original reporting
and this kind of news ‘aggregation’. The bloggers at TPM also develop their evidence
over a period of weeks or even months, in full view of (and with assistance from) their
readers, rather than amassing it for a single, airtight exposé. ‘We have kind of broken
free of the model of discrete articles that have a beginning and end’, Marshall has said.
‘Instead there are an ongoing series of dispatches’ (Cohen, 2008). The effect has been
likened to reading an investigative reporter’s private notebook (Apple, 2007).
Journalistic encomiums to TPM have recognized its challenge to the traditional division of labor in newswork, in mixing ‘liberal opinion with original reporting’ (Apple,
2007) and in ‘synthesizing the work of other news outlets with original reporting and tips
from a highly connected readership’ (Cohen, 2008). What has been difficult to recognize
is that the site’s reporting successes come not in spite but because of a wider political
critique that frames its annotative journalism. This was clearly illustrated in TPM’s most
celebrated work, covering a scandal that enveloped the Justice Department in 2007. That
work earned a Polk Award for Marshall and his staff, the first time a blog had received
the honor. The award citation noted that TPM had ‘connected the dots and found a pattern of federal prosecutors being fired for failing to do the Bush administration’s bidding’, and that its ‘tenacious investigative reporting sparked interest by the traditional
news media and led to the resignation of Attorney General Albert Gonzales’ (cited in
Cohen, 2008; see also McDermott, 2007; McLeary, 2007).
TPM’s bloggers ‘connected the dots’, as usual, by reading the news – in this case,
local press accounts of federal prosecutors being dismissed in early 2007. ‘What’s the
White House Doing to Prosecutors?’ asked the headline of the first post to establish a
suspicious pattern, in mid-January, linking to local reports of seven firings in six states
(Rood, 2007). Soon TPM was offering line-by-line analysis of reported speech, official
statements, legal documents, and other texts that emerged in the widening scandal.
Typical of TPM’s reporting was its campaign, in early March, to identify a pair of
Republican lawmakers who had pressured a federal prosecutor in New Mexico to
announce indictments against state Democrats. TPM meticulously compared evidence
from multiple news outlets – one brief post cites McClatchy, radio station KQRE,
National Public Radio (NPR), the AP, the Washington Post, and the Seattle Times – in
order to highlight discrepancies and assemble the most comprehensive picture of the
incident. On the basis of these comparisons, the site could identify errors in news reports,
endorse those that were on the right track, and establish what would be at stake in upcoming congressional hearings (e.g. Kiel, 2007a, 2007b).
TPM also maintained a master timeline of the affair which indexed all of the relevant
documents and events, reaching back to the start of the Bush Administration (TPM,
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2007). This remarkable document grew to more than 11 pages spanning hundreds of bulleted entries, linking to scores of news items and other sources. Called simply the ‘TPM
Canned US Attorney Scandal Timeline’, it offered a guide to journalists and others interested in the story. But it also acted as an indictment – an annotated argument that the
events deserved the label TPM had given them.
Relying on news accounts as evidence demanded critique of those accounts. It meant
assessing them for accuracy and completeness and also reading between the lines to
determine who their sources were and what interests they served. On TPM (as on other
news-related blogs), criticism of the mainstream media (‘MSM’) offers a ready framing
device for analysis that runs counter to conventional news narratives. An irony-laden
post by Marshall (2007) in March 2007 opened this way alongside an excerpt from the
Washington Post and a headshot of its reporter:
So there you have it: the White House’s side of the canned US attorney story provided by the
Post’s John Solomon. … It turns out the whole thing is just one of those unfortunate
misunderstandings the Bush White House now and again finds itself in.
More than a scathing review, though, the critique offered the clearest formulation
Marshall had yet given of why the ‘canned US attorney story’ mattered – a scaffold for
his argument that the firings amounted to a political purge. He analyzed anonymous
leaks to the Post for what they revealed about the Administration’s strategy for handling
the crisis: ‘when a White House tries to get out ahead of a story like this it’s key to note
the admissions of salient facts that come along with the larger bamboozlement’ (Marshall,
2007). Like Stone, Marshall offered readers an account of what insiders, including
reporters, were saying or thinking in private. As he had explained several years earlier,
‘If all the journalists in Washington kind of know something and no-one’s talking about
it, I’m enough of a populist to think more people should know that, let’s get it out there’
(Marshall, 2003).
The scandal came to a head in March of 2007, as TPM’s persistent attention drew
other reporters to the story. Congressional hearings and a trove of Justice Department
emails added fuel to the fire. Several glowing profiles that month focused on the site’s
role in driving coverage of the affair. In an interview, Marshall resorted to ecological
language to explain his site’s impact: ‘This is sort of the nature of our role in the journalistic ecosystem … Once a story catches fire, the big players are going to start getting the
big scoops’ (quoted in McLeary, 2007; see also Niles, 2007).
But that understates the resistance TPM’s narrative encountered at first from its better-established peers. Two months earlier, when the site was all but alone in covering the
‘running massacre’ of federal prosecutors, Time magazine’s Washington bureau chief
took issue with that framing. ‘It’s all very suspicious-sounding’, Jay Carney wrote on
Swampland, the magazine’s political blog. ‘Of course! It all makes perfect conspiratorial
sense! Except for one thing: in this case some liberals are seeing broad partisan conspiracies where none likely exist’ (Carney, 2007b). Later the reporter reversed course, declaring that Marshall ‘and everyone else out there whose instincts told them there was
something deeply wrong and even sinister about the firings’ had been right. He explained
why he had believed there was less to the affair than met the eye:
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When this story first surfaced, I thought the Bush White House and Justice Department were
guilty of poorly executed acts of crass political patronage. I called some Democrats on the Hill;
they were ‘concerned’, but this was not a priority. The blogosphere was the engine on this story,
pulling the Hill and the MSM along. As the document dump proves, what happened was much
worse than I’d first thought. I was wrong. (Carney, 2007c)
Critics read the fact that Carney’s reporting amounted to calling ‘some Democrats on the
Hill’ as further proof of mainstream journalism’s subservience to political interests. Just
as illuminating, however, is the un-self-conscious way the reporter, describing his own
journalism, applied the evidentiary language of ‘facts’ and ‘proof’ to the prosaic reality
of sourcing a piece of political news. Carney had objected earlier that TPM’s analysis
‘was purely speculative. Suspicions aren’t facts’ (Carney, 2007a). But he didn’t say what
kind of facts his own calls to Capitol Hill might have turned up – a Democrat willing to
supply evidence that the affair was a conspiracy, or one willing to supply a quote calling
it a conspiracy? Everyday news practices can elide the distinction between facts in a
statement and the fact of a statement.
Similarly, Carney didn’t specify what evidence in the ‘document dump’ now made it
objectively factual to speak of a broad conspiracy. What is clear is that by mid-March, it
was becoming uncontroversial to use the language of scandal and conspiracy. This was
due not only to new evidence, but also to changing political circumstances: the fact of
growing media attention, the fact of the congressional hearings, the fact that Justice
Department officials began to resign, the fact that President Bush distanced himself from
Attorney General Gonzales, and the fact that political leaders, including some
Republicans, were calling for Gonzales to resign.
In one sense, then, Marshall won a prestigious reporting award for the triumph of an
argument about how the affair should be read, an argument subsequently borne out by
events which TPM itself helped to set in motion. The site’s reporting through the scandal
consisted mainly in gathering public texts and arraying them in damning fashion; even
today, the clearest evidence of a ‘conspiracy’ or ‘purge’ at the Justice Department remains
the simple pattern of sudden firings TPM identified at the outset. Of course, that a consensus would emerge so quickly around TPM’s version of events was not inevitable. I.F.
Stone, moved by similar distrust of the White House, had sketched the outlines of a grave
conspiracy to lead the nation into war within weeks of the Gulf of Tonkin incidents. But
it would be decades before his account was completely ratified.
Discussion: Objectivity and intertextuality
The decades of the Weekly’s publication coincide with what Hallin has called the ‘high
modern’ period in American journalism. Dominated by the Cold War political consensus,
this was an era ‘when the historically troubled role of the journalist seemed fully rationalized, when it seemed possible for the journalist to be powerful and prosperous and at
the same time independent, disinterested, public-spirited, and trusted and beloved by
everyone’ (Hallin, 1992: 16). The doctrine of journalistic objectivity which took shape
after World War I was, by the 1950s and 1960s, deeply entrenched (Schudson, 1978).
Stone’s politics made the Weekly an outlier, a bridge of sorts between Progressive-Era
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muckrakers and the advocacy journalism and investigative reporting that would thrive
again in the 1970s. The Weekly was part of the long parallel tradition we now call ‘alternative’ journalism, so named precisely for rejecting the profession’s reigning orthodoxy
(Atton, 2002; Schudson and Anderson, 2009).
But to focus on advocacy or partisanship is to miss half of the story. A faithful midcentury reader of the New York Times or the Washington Post who came across the
Weekly would have been struck by any number of jarring textual practices, practices
common on news-related blogs today. Newspapers occasionally excerpt official documents or other print sources; the Weekly did this every issue and often at great length. (In
this respect, Stone’s newsletter might have been more familiar to readers in previous
centuries.)3 Professional reporters almost never cite one another’s work; the Weekly was
filled with direct references to other news outlets. News reports often fail to specify the
documentary source of a claim or a quote, especially when that is a press release; Stone
invariably gave his readers this material context. Most striking is what’s missing from
the Weekly: human sources. Stone rarely quoted from personal interviews and did not
rely on anonymous sources.
The muckraking newsletter and the pioneering blog both exhibit a promiscuous intertextuality that objective reporting generally abhors. Hallin (1992) writes of the ‘wholeness and seamlessness’ that characterized the high-modern self-understanding of
professional journalists (p. 14). The same adjectives apply to stories produced under the
objectivity norm, which guides reporters to obscure not only their politics but also their
reporting practices and their position in a political economy of information. The textual
isolation of conventional news is so common that its strangeness eludes notice: the fact
that news organizations, so interdependent in their daily work (Reinemann, 2004; Reese
and Danielian, 1989) and so overlapping in the texts they produce, are nevertheless so
reluctant to acknowledge one another within those texts. Some of the frankest statements
of the routine copying and cue-taking in the news business have come in court. For
instance, an amicus brief by Google Inc. and Twitter, Inc. (2010) declares that ‘for decades, television and radio news stations have broadcast information obtained from newspapers. And newspapers and Internet news organizations learn and write about events
originally reported on television’ (or see the 1930s ‘press-radio war’; Jackaway, 1994).
It is important not to overstate the case. Newspapers do sometimes carry lengthy
excerpts from reports or speeches, in extraordinary instances – the Pentagon Papers or
the WikiLeaks diplomatic cables – as well as more routine ones. Zelizer (1995) has
remarked on the latitude reporters enjoy in choosing between ‘text’ and ‘talk’. But textual excerpts are vastly outnumbered by reported speech in conventional news accounts,
and they are often deployed in the same fashion as reported speech: to buttress the narrative of the story (e.g. the key findings of a report) rather than to sustain a critical analysis.
Journalists increase their own authority, Zelizer argues, by using quotes to emphasize
proximity to events or to powerful individuals and ‘to make claims without the accompanying responsibility’ (1995: 35). Elsewhere, she has written that ‘reporters use quoting
practices to create the illusion of a whole’, in a way meant not to clarify discourse but to
‘blur its spatial and temporal parameters’ (Zelizer, 1989: 372–373).
In other words, traditional journalistic quoting practices are narratival rather than
critical. The use of irony offers a revealing lens. In the cases above Stone and Marshall
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both employed irony liberally in critiquing textual excerpts or arraying them against each
other. Conventional reporting by contrast adopts the ironic voice warily and only when
moral circumstances permit – for instance, Ettema and Glasser argue, to subvert the
claims of an official who has been revealed to be corrupt. In such cases, an ironic juxtaposition ‘transfigures the conventions of journalistic objectivity so that the very textual
devices intended to assure the differentiation of fact and value become the means to
express their fundamental unity’ (Ettema and Glasser, 1994: 5). The investigative reports
that permit such ‘condemnation’ cut against the grain of conventional objectivity in the
news, invoking an evidentiary rather than detached and neutral basis for the reporter’s
authority.
More than one factor accounts for the aversion to intertextuality in traditional journalism. One durable explanation is competitive pressure, both professional and commercial,
that makes reporters reluctant to credit other news outlets or to send audiences their way.
But the counterexample of annotative journalism underscores how intertextuality also
violates objective reporting’s standard of internal completeness and coherence (touched
on in Gans, 2004 [1979]: 162, 172). It reminds us that other versions of the story exist,
and in this way, it draws attention to the behind-the-scenes work of story construction.4
Intertextuality invites scrutiny of the choices different reporters make.
A large tradition in journalism research has focused on techniques of story construction designed to efface the reporter’s role and make it seem, in Tuchman’s (1972) phrase,
as if ‘the facts speak for themselves’. The reporting studied here also seeks to make the
facts speak, but in a way that does not obscure the journalist’s role in giving them voice.
Annotative journalism lacks the seamless narrative coherence of news reports carefully
grounded in a place and time – the ‘dateline’ – but not in the web of documents and
sources from which they are built. Its intertextual style of newswork breaks down the
cardinal distinction between original reporting and opinion, yielding news reports
grounded in a political and media critique. In this way, it highlights the interlinked material and ideological dimensions of journalism – the relationship between political commitments (including the commitment to ‘neutrality’) and reporting strategies, textual
practice, and the affordances of a communications medium.
Funding
Notes
1. The phrase appears to have been first used by Nora Paul (1995), a specialist in computerassisted reporting, to suggest a novel online story format in which reporters would annotate a
political text (such as a presidential speech) with explanatory or analytical captions.
2. Garvey (2013) finds an early example in the annotation and recontextualization of ads for
runaway slaves by the abolitionist press, which she calls ‘a close ancestor of those forms of
muckraking’, like I.F. Stone’s, ‘that have depended … on sifting public documents and putting their information into new juxtapositions’ (p. 91).
3. Colonial and early American newspapers featured bulletins copied, often verbatim, from
other (often European) newspapers. Early papers also dedicated a great deal of space to
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4.
printing official transcripts, public announcements, laws, and so on. (Clark and Wetherell,
1989; Schudson, 1995).
One thinks of Didion’s (1988) account of the collaborative staging of campaign press events,
with television cameras all oriented to hide the backstage throng of reporters and technicians
and equipment – and thus to reinforce the naturalness of a candidate’s seemingly impromptu
game of catch on an airport tarmac.
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Author biography
Lucas Graves is an Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at
the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research focuses on new organizations and practices in
the emerging news ecosystem.
545743
JOU0010.1177/1464884914545743JournalismUsher
Article
The late great International
Herald Tribune and The New
York Times: Global media,
space, time, print, and
online coordination in a 24/7
networked world
Journalism
2015, Vol. 16(1) 119–133
DOI: 10.1177/1464884914545743
jou.sagepub.com
Nikki Usher
The George Washington University, USA
Abstract
This article provides an empirical, field-based study of the production processes
of transnational media outlet, the International Herald Tribune, as it negotiates and
coordinates workflow and content with The New York Times. Using Manuel Castells’
concept of the space of flows, the article provides additional nuance to understand the
relationship between material constructs and networked information. Time zones and
geolocation remain important; the biggest node in the network does direct information;
and the coordinated capacity for 24/7 content is more difficult that perhaps imagined
by networked scholars. Both people and product are considered here in an effort to
bring added nuance to the tension between materiality and networks in the production
of information. While the International Herald Tribune has now been rebranded as the
International New York Times, the same considerations and questions remain.
Keywords
Online journalism, news ethnography, news production, networks, castells
In October 2013, The New York Times Company rebranded the storied International
Herald Tribune (IHT) as the International New York Times. The newspaper’s own coverage described the move as part of a strategy to slim down but raise influence, stating that
Nikki Usher, School of Media and Public Affairs, The George Washington University, 805 21st Street NW,
Washington, DC 20052, USA.
from jou.sagepub.com at UNIV FED DO RIO DE JANEIRO on December 27, 2014
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Journalism 16(1)
the move was a ‘central component of a stepped-up global growth strategy’ (Haughney,
2013). For the first time, IHT editors would be able to explicitly direct The Times correspondents in both Europe and Asia (Greenslade, 2013). Yet the organization would face
the same slate of questions as it had before, name change notwithstanding: how to coordinate a material product across three geographic zones and five products, namely,
nytimes.com, the global online site (global.nytimes.com), a print Asia edition, a print
Europe edition, and a print US edition.
Whether transnational means a ‘single version to the world’ or not (Reese, 2010: 346)
is contested among global communication scholars – The Times global approach is nonetheless exemplary of a cross-boundary approach to news production and dissemination
– and its products ultimately reach people in 130 different countries.
There are not many news organizations of this ‘transnational’ stature, though more are
emerging. The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times are daily newspapers with
three region-specific print products, The Guardian has recently created a US edition, and
the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, and Sky offer good broadcast examples; Time and The
Economist magazine offerings – and these all – have in common products that are created
as intentionally cross-border with some differentiation. Certainly, wire news has flowed
across the globe for decades (Boyd-Barrett and Rantanen, 1998), but as a wholesale product, this has generally been intended as raw content for a geo-located artifact – either physical or online. However, there are an increasing number of transnational news outlets, and
the influence and reach of these existing institutions make inquiry into their production
practices significant for understanding the global flow of news with changes in the density,
speed, and technology of this information (cf. Chalaby, 2005, 2009; Thussu, 2006).
This specific case study investigates the global news production routines of The Times
and the IHT before its rebranding in order to explore how news and information move
across the networked society – bringing to light the tensions between coordinated global
flows of information through the creation of material and online products and the effect
upon work. Using ethnographic data gathered from The Times, the IHT-Europe in Paris,
and IHT-Asia in Hong Kong, I examine the impact of physical location, product goals,
human labor, and specific time and space orientation in a global, instant, and networked
world. On one hand, it is easy to assume an uninterrupted flow of information via 24/7
news from around the globe. However, we need to consider the implications of what it
takes to create this news. This article poses the following major questions: What are the
practices behind transnational news production? What does it mean to have different
geographically specific sites responsible for this content? What is the impact of different
time zones on information creation?
There is generally wide agreement that we have indeed entered a distinct era of global,
digital information exchange enabled by networked communication. For example,
Castells (2001, 2008) argues that we have fundamentally entered a new era of information
distribution; the new capacity to share knowledge in near instant time has created fundamental social changes. Thussu (2006) has written about the rise in new communication
technologies whereby Western and non-Western media offers us content that is both
global and local at the same time. Sassen (2001) has theorized extensively about the
linked and node structures of global flows, with communication networks enabling the
production and distribution of new information and capital from centralized and emerging
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Usher
nodes. While these theorists offer examples, a more specific, nuanced, and detailed portrait of how information is produced and created to support this networked information
society is needed.
This article is not about the definitional arguments that all too often plague global
journalism studies (Reese, 2008, 2010). Rather, I seek to interrogate a much broader
question about the relationship between space, place time, and material production in the
creation of information in the networked society. I rely on Castells (2001) because his
work crystallizes some core questions about how to create information in a global environment – with animating questions such as whether place and time matter and how
information flows across networks.
After outlining the methods and the case, I showcase three core aspects of global
information production: shaping the print paper across three time zones, content adjustment in the expat and American world, and online coordination and dissonance. I also
offer a microstudy of a single breaking story written for the IHT-Hong Kong (IHT-HK)
and The New York Times (NYT). Ultimately, I conclude that we need more nuance to our
understanding of the networked flow of information, that production practices and contexts still matter, and more simply, that there is also a human cost to creating a 24/7 flow
of information.
Global networked flows of information
The undergirding argument Castells (2001, 2008) makes across a variety of books and
articles is that we have entered the ‘networked society’, which consists of interconnected
hubs, nodes, networks, and spaces that facilitate the rapid exchange and dissemination of
information and means a fundamental reconfiguration of state, public, media, governance, economics, and urbanization. Castells (2001) specifically addresses the nature of
physical space in the networked society through his conception of the ‘space of flows’ or
the ‘transformation of location patterns of core economic activities under the new technological system’ (p. 408). This is opposed to what we more commonly understand as
‘space of places’. Castells acknowledges, of course, that space is distinctly material –
and includes people, social relationships, practices, and social action. However, the
space of flows is enabled by electronic exchange built on information technologies, and
a common logic organizes various sectors of production thanks to this enhanced communication technology.
Time and place in a networked society are less relevant: ‘places do not disappear, but
their logic and meaning become absorbed in the network’ (Castells, 2001: 48). This is not
to say that cities don’t matter, but that they marshal resources into a larger information
ecology. For example, the material concentration of resources is absolutely essential to
create information across the globe. As Castells maintains, in this new society, knowledge is centered around these information flows that do not rely on physical contiguity.
Perhaps, then, the importance of geo-located time does not matter anymore – instead, we
engage in ‘time-sharing social practices that work through flows’ (p. 442). In practice,
though, this may be more difficult than it seems.
Others have recognized how this theoretical background may be helpful to understanding global news, but there have been notably fewer production studies. For instance,
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Gasher and Klein (2008) use Castells’ framework to analyze the flow of information
across The Times of London, Liberation Paris, and Haaretz, arguing that place still
defines information in a global world, while Heinrich (2008, 2011, 2012) looked at
global rise of new nodes and networks for journalism. Significantly, Reese (2010) argues
for the importance of production-based research, using Castells as an imperfect theoretical background, noting, ‘Underlying these circuits of global flows are structures of people in professional and institutional roles. In more concrete terms, these are the agents
who form the infrastructure of the global in specific local settings’ (p. 348). This leads to
the question of how professionals work in these global and specific settings to construct
these information flows. Thus, not only are we interested here in the dynamics of information production as content but also the actors engaged in its creation.
The empirical research generally does not focus on actual work production and process, though it does offer important insights into global information work. An important
caveat is that this work makes clear that the very words globalization, glocalization,
transnational, international, cross-border, flow, contra-flow, and beyond inspire spirited
debate (Berglez, 2008; Reese, 2008, 2010).
One key question has been to ask ‘what is global’ and whether ‘global’ news/media is
actually possible (Hafez, 2007; Reese, 2008, 2010; Sparks, 2005). As if to echo Reese
empirically, Cottle and Rai’s (2008) analysis of CNN International (CNNI), BBC World,
and for-profit Fox News and Sky News’ frames suggests that global news production
does not simply fit under the two labels as either ‘global dominance’ or ‘global public
sphere’. Other work probes cross-border power relations, political systems, and normative relations through media (Beck, 2005; De Beer and Merrill, 2008; McPhail, 2010).
Still other scholars are intrigued by the emergence of the global public sphere in journalism (Hjarvard, 2001; Volkmer, 1999), or more critically, point to signs of media imperialism (Boyd-Barrett and Xie, 2008). Clausen’s (2003) work looks at a series of public
broadcasts and framing to think about the homogenization of international news through
news agencies and found that news is locally produced and locally created, with the
exception of foreign news stories. Thurman (2007) has looked at the global audience’s
use of news Web sites, pointing to the extension of the global in the 24/7 Web era.
Scholars argue that international news services like the BBC can provide a sorely
needed alternative news consciousness to a locally situated public (Bicket and Wall,
2009), and locally produced media may be strengthened by exposure to more global
information flows (Rao, 2009). Others, like Volkmer (1999), argue that there was a possibility for a global public and regional specificity. With this empirical and theoretical
research in mind, this study seeks to build on the theoretical backbone of ‘space of flows’
contrasted with ‘space of places’ and empirical research that investigates how transnational news moves across global networks.
The case
The case presented here looks at the material and the online construction processes of
networked news production at the IHT and The Times through their two online and three
print products. The Times is a significant site of inquiry as a key influencer in setting the
US agenda (Walgrave and Van Aelst, 2006) and reaches policy-makers, corporate
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executives, and an audience with an average household income of more than USD90,000
(Media Kit: New York Times, n.d.). Despite struggles with the general ‘newspaper crisis’, The Times has introduced an aggressive paywall model that CEO Mark Thompson
has called the ‘most successful decision in years’ (Roberts, 2013); nytimes.com still
remains among the 10 most read news sites in the world and gets over 29 million unique
visitors a month. The staff of The Times itself is about 1000 strong.
The IHT also had a storied history; it was founded in 1887 as The Paris Herald by
James Gordon Bennett, Jr, and was intended as the European edition of the New York
Herald. At the time, it reached an audience much like it did prior to rebranding: rich
expatriates hoping for an international view of the world but with a slice of news from
the United States (Alison Smale, executive editor, the IHT, 26 April 2010, personal communication). The Washington Post and The Times became joint owners in 1967, an
agreement that unraveled in 2003, with The Times assuming complete control. In 2005,
The Times created an Asian-specific edition of the IHT and opened an office in Hong
Kong. Circulation is currently split 60/40 between Europe and Asia (Media Kit: New
York Times Global, n.d.). Within The Times Company, there was indeed a sense in which
the IHT is the ‘B-team’ for New York; however, I was less interested here in internal
cultural politics and more interested in the impact of physical place, space, and time on
news production, though this subtext was of course at work. At the time, the IHT had
approximately 80 people in Paris and 60 in Hong Kong.
From New York, The Times is responsible for the print imprimatur, and 24 hours a day,
New York-based Web producers put up content from around the globe on nytimes.com
and global.nytimes.com. The Times also supplemented its print and Web coverage with
IHT coverage, especially in the business section. The origin of new content for the Web
depended on what time it is: at 9 p.m. in New York, it is 3 p.m. in Paris, and 9 a.m. in
Hong Kong, but there was a felt urgency at The Times for ‘fresh’ content (Usher, 2014)
that motivated continuous, round-the-globe demand for news. The Times and the IHT ran
on different content management systems, and as a result, The Times, which had a bigger
site, controls the ultimate version of a story because it must be posted to the Web from its
Web site. This has broader significance as we will see.
Method
This article emerges from a larger ethnographic project on the NYT. I spent a total of
5 months at the newspaper between January and June 2010 conducting ethnographic
field work. I spent over 700 hours in this newsroom and conducted over 80 interviews. I
observed workflow, both print and online, attended Page One and business desk meetings, and ‘shadowed’ 32 journalists across newsroom hierarchy, watching them work
throughout the day. My principal site of research was the business desk of The Times. I
visited the IHT-Europe (Paris) in April 2010, midway through my time at the NYT, as it
had become clear to me that the IHT and NYT business desks had a close relationship
worth exploring.
To understand this coordination, I spent 6 days in the Paris newsroom and 4 days in
Hong Kong. In Paris, I attended daily news meetings, observed general newsroom workflow, and conducted a total of 20 interviews lasting between 30 minutes to 1 hour with
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people across the newsroom hierarchy, selected based on a convenience sample based on
who was available in a busy newsroom. This included IHT-Asia and IHT-Europe editorin-chief, the managing editor, reporters, editors, and copy editors. In June 2010, I visited
the IHT-Asia (Hong Kong). I followed a similar research schedule and interviewed 13
journalists, most of whom were editors and print and online production focused. At the
time, there were only three official IHT-Asia reporters. The questions were asked about
news production between New York, Paris, and Hong Kong and were incrementally
adapted building upon new data. Across all research sites, some journalists requested
anonymity, but my agreement with these journalists and the Institutional Review Board
(IRB) was that I could use their names unless they requested otherwise.
I kept jottings (down to the level of specific verbatim quotes in meetings) in a notebook throughout the day of conversation and took notes verbatim for interviews on my
laptop. My work was guided by Glaser and Strauss’ (1967) constant comparative method.
This method informed my ability to recognize and code themes based on their prominence and evaluate them in terms existing the theory and literature. I had previously
coded my Times data for ‘Times interaction with IHT’. For this project, I coded for a
variety of categories related to this interaction, from 24/7 Web operations, to print perspective, audience perception, and reporter workflow. I then collapsed these categories
into broader themes regarding global news production: audience difference, print production, online coordination, and online/print coordination.
Shaping the print paper
On one hand, Castells suggests that specific locations are significant because they are
sites of production that are responsible for generating information for a larger information ecosystem. On the other hand, though, physical contiguity should matter less because
in a networked society, as time-sharing makes place less important. Arguably, if information production is concentrated, this has less to do with geography because these cities
are engaged in process rather than product. What we see in the case of the three Times
Co. news outlets is that information does not flow easily from place to place because
time still matters in shaping physical production. Similarly, there is an uneasy relationship between process and product.
In New York, there is little consideration for The Times paper’s existence outside of
the United States. However, the creation of the print paper in New York has significant
consequences for the IHT’s print paper. New York is the dominant point for all information distribution. The Times has two Page One meetings: one at 10 a.m. to set the day’s
agenda and another at 4:30 p.m. intended to finalize the front page. New York sets the
tone for what will be the most important print coverage, choosing from an array of enterprise stories with a longer shelf life and breaking news stories. Enterprise stories are like
a game of cat and mouse: the story will be offered to the top New York editors for 2 or
3 days, as editors don’t want to lose their chance at having a Page One story, but when
they will run is unclear.
But when Paris calls in for the 10 a.m. New York meeting – which is 4 p.m. Paris time
– Paris needs to be able to plan for its 9 p.m. print deadline. This means hoping that New
York will have a good sense of what stories it can use, so Paris can begin creating a plan
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for its front page. A number of examples illuminate the difficulty in coordinating the
material news production for Paris based simply on time.
On 26 April 2010, business editor Larry Ingrassia presented a story slugged WIND to
the morning Page One meeting. He said, ‘There’s a story about a wind farm off Cape
Cod. It’s contentious because rich people don’t want it in their backyard. It’s a test case
for wind power if the administration says yes or no’. It met with almost no feedback or
interest. Ingrassia tried to push his story with more urgency and said, ‘They are going to
decide in a day or two’.
As the last person to pipe in over the teleconference, Smale from Paris noted, ‘We
would really like WIND’, and after the Page One meeting, she conferred to her colleagues, ‘This will be nice for our readers, how America is behind in wind’. (This
comment also reflects the Europe-focused sentiment, in this case, about the wind
industry).
Smale had to know the following: Would New York use WIND that day? Would it be
on the front page? That day, she got lucky, and Ingrassia told her she could have it, as
saving it for Page One seemed to be a lost cause and he wanted to run the story.
The following day illustrated more dramatically the difficulty of having something
from New York meet the Paris print deadlines. Goldman Sachs was defending itself
against mounting evidence that it had purposely shorted the housing market. The situation was developing in New York, but whether there would be an analytical story in time
for Paris was unclear. ‘We have [two reporters] blogging …’ Ingrassia added. Assistant
Managing Editor Jim Roberts told Smale, ‘We’ll try to have something for you’ (Field
notes, 27 April 2010). Paris made the best out of an early draft.
The situation is peculiar for Hong Kong, which prints a paper with news from the
United States, that is, as Asia Editor Philip McClellan noted, ‘30 hours behind New York’
(14 June 2010, personal communication), or as another editor noted, ‘We publish a dayold newspaper’. The conundrum is that The Times produces the bulk of material for the
IHT-Asia, but most of the stories that Hong Kong can run in its newspaper will have
already been up on the Web page. The saving grace is the Reuters business news supplement that adds to print content, according to Tom Sims, business news editor in Paris.
The conundrum for Hong Kong is particularly difficult when it comes to choosing
photos. ‘There is not a lot of art that moves from Asia’, in part because there are fewer
Times and wire agency photographers located there. Sims continued, ‘There’s only so
many times you can put rioting Bangladeshis on the front page … and you don’t want an
American photo that is a day old …’ So the editors resort to finding photos from wire
services when possible, but are left with few options.
In an age of networked information, it would seem like it makes little sense to even
bother with a print product. All these headaches would be erased. Yet the reliance on the
print product reveals that we have not completely moved to a world where information
exchange is indeed reduced to networked global information flows. There is a reason still
for creating material, physical information: it sells and funds The Times Co. The IHT,
while costly to produce, offers a high-income audience and, as a result, high advertisement rates (USD240,000 per home; front-page advertisements for USD110,000), and
will for now remain in print. Similarly, despite circulation declines, The Times makes
most of its money from its print product.
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The coordination of whose content belongs where and when belies the easy transfer
of information suggested by Castells. On one hand, we are still dealing with a material
information exchange. For Castells, however, even manufacturing can fit into this networked flow; physical production in turn may be facilitated through information
exchange. However, in this case, what makes coordination complicated is that one site of
information production, The Times, has most of the control over what information is
available to the IHT. A significant portion of intellectual resources and labor come from
New York; Paris and Hong Kong can’t alone fill their newspapers without The Times.
This would point to the importance of a single place marshaling the resources of the
material concentration of information exchange and sharing it, suggesting more difficulties than predicted between material and networked coordination. The IHT is not freed
from the space of places, time zones, and physical contiguity.
Content adjustment in the expat and American world
The larger debates about global journalism, and globalization more generally, have pitted
whether it is possible to actually have global content. Castells’ work suggests that content can be locally produced but have global ramifications, offering other nodes of the
network greater insight. One example is the case of the Mayo Clinic’s capacity to have
top doctors working in Rochester, Minnesota, but through teleconferencing and other
means, this knowledge can be shared and locally integrated into other medical communities. One of the most difficult aspects to rectify within the networked society is this
conflation of local and global experience, and what we can see through The Times and
the IHT is that information does require local interpretation. Nonetheless, he argues that
information can come from any point in the network and be reinterpreted by any other
point in the network in an exchange that was previously far more difficult.
Geographical perspective colors content creation. In New York, business news editors
were concerned with global issues, but their approach belied an American understanding
of global dynamics. For example, Times journalists were often critical of the European
social welfare state, with editors asserting that it was ‘unsustainable’ (Field notes, 3
March 2010). In another case, a reporter offered a story about the Greek origin of the
debt crisis – tax evasion. Business editor Larry Ingrassia noted, ‘The Greeks need to stop
living beyond their means’ (Field notes, 7 March 2010). ‘Greeks just don’t pay their
taxes. They have swimming pool[s], and then they say they don’t have any money’, as
one editor expounded, ‘It’s ridiculous the kinds of claims that are made. It’s like culturally no one pays taxes’ (Field notes, 14 March 2010).
On the other hand, The Times also looked for IHT stories to inform New York about
the European debt crisis because these writers had more intimate knowledge of the
Eurozone finance conditions, suggesting that information could come from other nodes
in the network. Yet that European Union (EU) story was different for The Times than it
was for Paris. One IHT business writer noted,
There’s a European edition for the IHT, which you really want a smart lede which you want
may have global ramifications and ramification for Europe and you need to think with a big
voice … If it is a really important story you are going to be working … another version to file
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for The Times – you write [for example]: a lot of this affected the American market … (21 April
2010, personal communication)
The personal technology page offers a good example of the tension between creating
content for a global marketplace and serving three distinct audiences. In New York, the
personal technology page was a Thursday section that previewed the latest and greatest
apps, the gizmos perceived as up and coming in the world of technology, tech writer
David Pogue’s column, and other tidbits. Because both Paris and Hong Kong do not
produce enough of their own original content to fill the business pages, they rely on the
personal technology content for the print paper.
For Paris, two problems emerged with this section: availability of the gadgets and
European mindsets about technology. ‘They do a lot more consumer friendly stuff, with
the latest gadget and they have the bodies. But they did a lot on the iPad and it will be a
day and forever until it comes out [here]’, said John-Paul Rofe, tech editor at the time
(Field notes, 26 April 2010). Similarly, what if an app wasn’t available on a European
Smartphone? And as IHT-Europe media and tech writer Eric Pfanner noted, ‘This content doesn’t always work for us. People in Europe have much more concerns about privacy than in the United States. We aren’t so utopian’ (Field notes, 26 April 2010).
In Asia, the opposite problem emerged. As editor Mike Wolengarter noted to me,
‘People here already have the latest stuff. We’re ahead of the U.S. We know what’s going
on before they do. We just don’t have the bodies that The Times has to cover it’ (Field
notes, 16 June 2010). So the content was not appropriate to the audience, and there was
specific geo-located information.
In this instance, we can see signs that Castells’ broader explication of information flows
as dehierarchial and disembedded from physical contiguity does not quite make sense. But
other parts of his assessment do make sense: that The Times, as a central node, offers information to other parts of the network, which then take up this information – knowledge is
distributed in this sense rather than centrally held. And the IHT, then, provides additional
information back into this globally dispersed information ecosystem. Nonetheless, The
Times is the source of information; it offers a product that must be further disaggregated. The
American perspective of technology must be adjusted for more global needs. This suggests
the importance of recognizing more uneven balance of global information flows.
Online coordination (and dissonance) in the networked
public sphere
So far, we have examined material production and content creation, but have not addressed
perhaps the richest site of inquiry into global flows of information: the transfer and
exchange of networked, online news across the three Times outlets. The data offer compelling support for the potential for Castells’ theorization of a global information distribution
through a 24/7 networked information environment. But what we have less insight into is
the actual coordination and human costs required to create this global coordination; from
our desks or our phones, it is easy to imagine information coming to us at any time when
we want it, but the process is far from simple, as this production process suggests. The case
of the markets story and breaking news out of China help elucidate this nuance.
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On one hand, time is an absolute requirement for organizing the transfer of global information; without clear coordination between time zones, the quest for the 24/7 nytimes.com
would be impossible. On the other hand, the space of flows is perhaps best represented
through online production as ‘time-sharing social practices’ (Castells, 2001); access to information is not bound by any one material time zone; and work processes themselves create
global flows. Gerry Mullany, the night Web news editor expressed this sentiment: ‘The New
York Times never sleeps. Somewhere it is always morning’ (5 April 2010, personal communication). But making the site ‘always morning’ requires careful handoffs for this globally
accessible online product. Similarly, some information does actually vanish because of the
networked efforts, and more significantly, there is a human cost to this 24/7 operation.
The markets story – the chart of the rise and fall of markets across the world – offers
insight into the kind of global handoff required for information to flow from node to
node. Each day, the markets story begins in Hong Kong. But the Hong Kong reporter
must be focused on New York. ‘I check my Blackberry while still in bed …’, she
explained. She continued to detail the continuous updating process:
I write about how New York finished [indicates] how Asia will do … literally I’ll do that as my
first thing – I’ll keep readers informed about the market sentiment and as the day progresses I’ll
make updates, and the Asian markets all close at different times.
During this time, she and her editor are in touch with New York, where it is the middle
of the night. Yet even online, information loses currency as it moves across the globe –
and across time. The reporter explained, ‘For European editions it needs to be more
Europe focused, and by the time we progress to the US markets whatever Asia has done
has been rendered irrelevant’ (14 June 2010, personal communication).
Then in Paris, journalist David Jolly picks up the markets story that the Asia reporter
has been working on all day. He begins again constant Web updates, filling the nytimes.
com Web site with news of the latest jitters in the European marketplace in pre-trading
hours. Jolly explained his mandate: ‘There is a constant appetite from New York for us
to produce whatever we can produce …’ This process then continues in New York, with
reporter Javier Hernandez taking over the story for premarket trading. But even before
he gets to work, his editor, Mark Getzfred, prepares for the New York day deleting most
of the Asian markets information and topping the Europe markets information with new
paragraphs about US premarket trading. In an effort to keep up with the global flow of
finance, older information is dropped from the story in favor of updated information
focused on each trading sphere. Because this information is edited online, it also dies
online. If a New Yorker wanted to look online in the afternoon about how the Asian markets performed that day, that information simply wouldn’t exist on nytimes.com – even
though it had been there just hours ago.
The handoffs are well coordinated but require considerable communication, with editors from two time zones always in touch with each other during the few hours they
overlap. The Asia editor touches base with the Europe editor who touches base with New
York editors who then prepare to be in touch with the Asia editor again. For the periods
of overlap, the editors chatter back and forth about reporters on duty, where stories are in
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the system and what each has been able to catch about the next opening market to help
that editor and reporter start their day.
At the end of the US day, Hernandez is responsible for providing an overall recap for
what has happened across the markets. The goal, according to Getzfred, is to provide a
thorough, more analytical look at what happened rather than the moment by moment – a
take-out story. But Hernandez’ story is a US markets story, with nary a mention of Europe
or Asia, and this, ultimately is the story that lives online. But this means that Jolly and
the Hong Kong reporter rarely see a byline. As Jolly puts it, The Times ultimately treated
his Europe story as ‘wire copy … they can do whatever they want to it’. And for him, that
meant real consequences. ‘I will be working on a story all day and sometimes not even
receive a contributing line for it … and that kind of stuff happens with depressing frequency’ (Field notes, 27 April 2010).
From the perspective of journalists working on the story, those attached to the information they have gathered and created, this disjuncture of information and ownership
over the story means something to them. For Hernandez, the byline remains his. But for
the Hong Kong writer and for Jolly, their efforts are lost to the global exchange. This is
an illustration of perhaps something forgotten about global information exchange:
through information churn, people whose work has intellectual value to them may get
lost in the global shuffle for the desire for fast, efficient information.
The human cost goes beyond just bylines and disconnect from intellectual effort,
though. Answering to a 24/7 operation that can be focused across entirely different global
zones is simply physically exhausting for a journalist. The online and print coordination
of the NYT and IHT for a breaking story illustrated this difficulty – made especially more
demanding by the need to also meet hard physical deadlines.
NYT reporter Keith Bradsher consults with the IHT and NYT Shanghai bureau chief
for direction on stories. He shared with me the process of working on a breaking story
of a rare protest march of Chinese workers striking at a Honda plant in Zhongshan,
China. On 10 June 2010, Bradsher arrived in the evening at the site of the strike and sent
an email ‘revised Bradsher whereabouts’ and told his editors at 8:33 p.m. Zhongshan
time that he planned to file for the IHT late print deadlines. He got an email back
20 minutes later from New York, with an editor asking him to file as soon as possible.
Bradsher replied, ‘Yes, my plan is to file in one hour from now. I have a lot of writing
to do to hit that goal, however’. He then began filing the story for New York, updating
the story after finding out new information about an independent union (rare in China).
Bradsher noted,
This additional information meant that I kept rewriting and expanding the story in my laptop.
New York waited a couple hours for me to refile before deciding to go ahead and putting the
IHT version up on the web without waiting for me any longer.
Although Bradsher was pleased to have the story go up, the pace of the process illustrates
the intensity of his work. The NYT posted the story at 10 p.m. Zhongshan time. Bradsher
updated the story again at 11 p.m. his time. He gave more information in to New York at
12:00 a.m., or roughly 12:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (EST). He told me about the
process:
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I finally went to sleep at 3:40 a.m., then got up at 6 a.m. to go through New York’s edited
version and have breakfast. The web had posted my full story with the 8 a.m. protest march at
about 4:45 a.m. That was too late for other reporters in Hong Kong to make it to Zhongshan in
time for the march. I went back out to the strike around 7 and called in to New York with
updates from the protest march and brief confrontation with riot police. I was the only reporter
at the march who was on deadline.
The email traffic he shared with me showed a conversation between him and the New
York copy desk at 5:24 a.m. and 6:00 a.m. Zhongshan time, respectively.
Bradsher was covering a breaking story with many moving parts: a big protest out China.
But he was coordinating between filing for a print deadline before the IHT-Asia deadline
and then working with NYT editors after the IHT finished up for the evening. He focused on
the IHT version of the story for the Web version at first and then put up a full version later
on the next morning. This meant he slept just over 2 hours to keep this constant flow of
information going. The global flow of information was coming 24/7 from a single person,
not from multiple nodes in the network. And this was not even an A-1 story for New York.
So here is the cost that seems especially trenchant: for the global flow of information
to proceed smoothly, something material must be sacrificed. It may not be a product like
content, but human capital. In this case, the global flow of information would not have
been possible without one reporter sleeping 2 hours to make sure the story had the most
updated information for both sides of the world. The demand for content made Bradsher
a central node in the network offering a constant flow of news. But Bradsher is just one
person – up for 24 hours. Someone could always be working with him, and he always had
a way to distribute information to a global audience.
This human toll of labor asked of the ‘flexible worker’ (Harvey, 1991) is something
we may miss if we focus too much on the information itself rather than the process.
Global flows (or microflows) of information through a single person are more likely
when the person has a continued and coordinated potential for the distribution of his or
her news content. But 24-hour coverage seems unreasonable even if it is possible. The
desire for the news organizations to be constantly updated creates physical wear and tear
on the people producing the content, whether it be tired night editors in Hong Kong making sure that the early morning New York markets editor really has a clear sense of the
wrap-up or the reporter on the scene filing for multiple Web and print deadlines. In this
way, global flows are deeply rooted to the material; people create the content for instant
information access, and the networked society may require a mental and physical sacrifice from workers whose organizations make money from offering this information.
Space, time, and global information flows of information in
news production
This article has aspired to shed light beyond the language of global flows to explore more
specifically the production processes and people behind the information society and to
explore the relationship between their local situation and their place in the global information ecology. Castells offers an important starting point to begin this inquiry because
he aptly provides a framework to understand the transfer of information across the globe
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in near instant time through the networked society as a series of flows that displace the
importance of physical space in favor of process, larger and smaller nodes, and the deemphasis of time bound by space as a way to experience the information society.
From the perspective of an information-seeker, the existence of 24/7 readily available news
from all over the world seems to embody the reality of these global information flows. And
while Castells has applied his analysis equally to finance and to manufacturing, what we know
less about is the experience of the actual production that enables this information ecology. The
case of The Times and the IHT underscores the complicated relationship between production
and global demands for information; time, and time zones, in particular, play a significant role
in the physical coordination of material production. Content creation across the United States,
Europe, and Asia underscores the importance of making information locally relevant and
reveals that particular nodes in the information environment may take on possibly more hegemonic positions due to their capacity to create content. And while online coordination across a
24/7 global news landscape is facilitated by the networked society, this may mean the actual loss
of information. More significantly, there is a real human cost to this 24/7 production.
Castells suggests that global flows render time as disembodied from space. Yet when it
comes to journalism – a critically important source of information in, well, the information age
– time does matter. The news cycles still follow a diurnal process that begin and end according
to when the day begin and ends in a particular time zone. The Times produces content that can
fill its global offshoots, but the centrality of New York as the key source of information means
that both the IHT-Europe and IHT-Asia must follow its lead. The size and power of this node
as a key producer of information means that it dominates the resulting physical transfer of
information to the Paris and Hong Kong newsrooms. This suggests a more hegemonic perspective of global information transfer: one node can dictate the availability of news to another
node in the network. The exchange of information is not so easily facilitated.
Content creation, too, raises larger issues about the relationship between global and
local. Other scholars (perhaps most notably Appadurai, 1996) – notes that global hegemonic constructions become deeply imbedded in the local imaginary, adapted for consistency but nonetheless bearing the stamp of the point of origin. In a networked society,
Castells does suggest that certain centers will become the central source for information,
but that this information will be easily shared across and through networks, enabling
greater connections where location is less important than the knowledge itself. Yet content, as we see here, is not disembodied from location. New York has an American audience; the content it offers must be recreated for European and Asian audiences – and at
times, the original content may make little sense when distributed across global nodes.
The markets stories reveal the actual disappearance of locally created information
from Europe and Asia in favor of the end-of-day New York story. Ultimately, the existence of a content management system organized and based in New York that dictates the
presentation of the Web and the final archiving of the stories means that global information available to the world through networked space is ultimately processed through one
information hub. This suggests the need to understand content creation in a more nuanced
way that addresses where information comes from and how it is distributed rather than
looking at the process through which people are able to access this information.
Finally, what has been under-explored and needs further consideration are the consequences of the networked society on individual workers. Harvey’s (1991) assessment of
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flexible workers begins to address some of the demands placed on workers in a postFordist world, displaced from traditional institutions and organized, time-bound workflow. But this article offers some insight into just how difficult it is for workers to be
actually bound to the demand for constant information in a 24/7 information cycle;
Bradsher’s work on China illustrates that the worker is expected to be divorced from
time and location in order to respond to the demand for global information flow from
multiple nodes in The Times and the IHT online and print networks. And psychic demands
for credit and ownership over content creation are subsumed across the larger information environment. Some have addressed the constant 24/7 multiplatform demands of
journalists (Deuze, 2007); this global demand for information may go one step beyond.
When thinking broadly about global information flows, the networked society offers
rich potential for information exchange that can, indeed, be widely dispersed and disaggregated from place and time. But this does not mean that the actors themselves engaged
in this information creation are also swept up by the ease of global information flows; for
them, as we see in the case of news production, material considerations matter, physical
space matters, and time matters. This complicates what we know about the people and
processes behind information distribution and begs additional study.
Funding
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Author biography
Nikki Usher, PhD, is an assistant professor at The George Washington University’s School of
Media and Public Affairs. She is most recently an author of the book Making News at the New
York Times, the first in-depth ethnographic portrait of the newspaper in the digital age. She
received her PhD and MA from the Annenberg School of Communication, University of
Southern California.
558347
JOU0010.1177/1464884914558347JournalismLe Cam
Article
Photographs of newsrooms:
From the printing house to
open space offices. Analyzing
the transformation of
workspaces and information
production
Journalism
2015, Vol. 16(1) 134–152
DOI: 10.1177/1464884914558347
jou.sagepub.com
Florence Le Cam
Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
Abstract
Evolving from a small room at the heart of the printing house to a large, mobile
open office, the newsroom is a concept that allows us to contemplate the changes
that have transformed journalism over the past century. This article proposes a
preliminary analysis of a corpus of photographs of media newsrooms in France,
Canada, and Belgium at various points in history (from the end of the 19th century
up to today). The analysis of newsroom photographs is necessarily multidimensional.
It allows us to conduct a socio-historical study of how workplaces are created and
structured and how information is produced. It paves the way for an analysis of the
media’s modes of representation within the logic of external communication (to
establish and promote its brand image through videos or pictures). It also permits
us to make inferences while analyzing the organizational and managerial aspects of a
company, and reveals the value of examining the objects used by journalists in their
trade. Our goal is to clarify the various indicators and avenues for research that
emerge from this corpus. This step will allow us to defend a specific approach to
analyzing the material dimension of journalism.
Keywords
Material traces, methodology, newsrooms, photographs, socio-historical perspective,
Western media
Florence Le Cam, Université libre de Bruxelles, CP 123, 50 av. F. D. Roosevelt, 1050 Bruxelles, Belgium.
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The newsroom is a symbol, but also the physical space that gives birth to the production of information. Evolving from a small room at the heart of the printing house to
a large, mobile open office, the newsroom is an important notion that allows scholars
to contemplate the changes that have transformed journalism over the last century.
Concentrating on the ‘newsroom’ can enable us to analyze the history of at least three
shifting elements: the location of the newsroom, the spatial organization of the newsroom, and the objects within the newsroom. The first element refers to the advent of
the very notion of a ‘newsroom’ and its location (Lévrier, 2011). The emphasis placed
on the installation of newsrooms by media owners allows us to consider not only their
placement next to the printing workshop, above the rotary presses or in a media center,
but also their address, their position in the city, in what kind of buildings they can be
found. The location of newsrooms is informative as it reveals the successive economic and editorial strategies of media entrepreneurs. Our second focus is on spatial
organization, which allows us to observe how the workplace of journalists (Monjaret,
2002) has evolved over the years, bringing with it a shift in professional and hierarchical relationships. As Tuchman (1978) showed, physical space is more important in
organizing networks of journalists than dividing them into topical areas. We must thus
focus our attention on how workspaces are organized, where editors-in-chief are
located within these configurations, where meetings take place, and so on. Finally, the
third dimension of our analysis examines all the objects present in the newsroom (the
typewriters, pens, computers, telephones, and smartphones). Changes in the presence
of these tools in newsrooms can teach us about the material conditions of media production, but also about the more or less rapid transformation of journalists’ daily use
of tools.
The approach defended here begins from socio-historical perspective and studies
the visual representations of the workplaces of journalism, defined as a collective
place belonging to a media company. Visual representations include photographs of
newsrooms and buildings, architectural plans, birthday albums of the media companies, drawing of the newsroom made by journalists or researchers themselves.
Methodologically, the article draws from a corpus of photographs of media newsrooms
in France, Canada, and Belgium at various points in history (from the end of the 19th
century up to today). Pictures are both sources and histories in themselves (Osmond,
2008). Here we are in keeping with the perspective adopted by Brennen and Hardt
(2002), who argued that ‘photographs representing aspects of newswork may offer
especially appropriate insights into the understanding of the professional self under
specific social and institutional circumstances within media organisations’ (p. 12).
This article explains how the organization of physical workspace, called the newsroom,1 is important to an understanding of the constraints and flexibilities that journalists
had been forced to live with during their daily work lives, as well as how the spatial
environment of journalism has been imagined by others and contains ideological underpinnings. A few researchers have examined the newsroom as an object in its own right.
Recently, Akhteruz Zaman (2013) has interviewed journalists about how they, as news
workers, describe the newsroom, opening up the possibility of thinking about the newsroom as a real and at the same time an ideal space.
By reintegrating (in the first part of the article) this perspective into the tradition of
studies on industrial photography, and in the tradition of ‘historiophoty’ (White, 1988),
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we seek to explain, in a second part, the heuristic scope of this approach and elaborate
upon the methodological difficulties encountered in both assembling and analyzing the
required corpus. Finally, the third part of this article will present the results of the crosscase analysis of the photographs as a whole. Our goal is to clarify the various indicators
and avenues for research that emerge from this corpus. This step will allow us to defend
a specific approach to analyzing the material dimension of journalism.
A new approach: Analyzing media companies through
photography
The study of changes in the world of journalism has often taken the form of analyses of
contemporary transformations (multi-platform production, the use of social networks,
evolving media coverage, new relationships with the public, etc.), or of historical evolution
(the transformation of professional identities, the development of production and media
coverage processes, shifts in the labor market, relationships to the public or original sources).
This article takes a different look at the dialectics of continuity and change within journalism
(Le Cam and Ruellan, 2014), thanks to the analysis of newsrooms photographs. This perspective has rarely been adopted in studies of media and journalism. Brennen and Hardt
used a newsroom photograph from the 1930s to illustrate the value of photographic analyses
of workplaces. And yet, journalism studies have rarely considered the visual representation
of how work is organized, as evidence of this world’s transformations, both material and
symbolic. Where they are taken into account, photographs of newsrooms appear as ‘visual
facts’, ‘apparently bearing no relation to the written word and bundled together at the center
of a book for what seems to be purposes of light relief’ as noted about photographs in sport
history (Bale, 1998, quoted by Osmond, 2008).
Our work is not directly rooted in visual anthropology or visual analysis. Instead, we
have attempted to establish a connection with the more limited domain of the analysis of
industrial photography and what White (1988) has called historiophoty, as the ‘representation of history and our thought about it in visual images and filmic discourse’ (p. 1193).
We consider then pictures as the material vestige of their subject (Sontag, 1982, quoted
by Osmond, 2008). Imagistic helps to understand
the way things may have appeared to the agents acting on a given historical scene. Imagistic
(and especially photographic and cinematic) evidence provides a basis for a reproduction of the
scenes and atmosphere of past events much more accurate than any derived from verbal
testimony alone. (White, 1988: 1194)
Studies in industrial photography have used pictures to gain access to a type of reality
relating to the organization of workspaces. Through analysis, studies of industrial photography have managed to describe and examine working conditions, organizational configurations, and the role of ‘objects’, ‘machines’, and people in professional environments. These
studies have been useful for our work, as images of newsrooms share many traits with
industrial photographs. In large part, they illustrate the ‘machinery’ of journalism that
defines individuals as part of an industrial process (Brennen and Hardt, 2002: 26).
Following in the footsteps of Dewerpe’s (1987) work on industrial photography at
the beginning of the 20th century in Italy’s Ansaldo engineering company, here we
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have chosen to consider photographic documents as primary sources for our research.
We collect these pictures as traces of the history of the media. It is only during a second stage that these images are connected with a number of explanatory texts. These
photographs are considered as the nodal point of our research, in order to save them
from being solely archival resources or the mere ‘residue’ of written texts (Dewerpe,
1987: 1079). The debate still rages about the following question: ‘Can photography or
film be at the heart of an investigation, or will they always be relegated to a marginal,
secondary function as mere illustration?’ (Rémy, 2007: 89). Lurking behind this question is also an ethno-methodological approach that uses photography as a means for
analysis: a researcher takes photographs himself, which he then uses as his raw material. In writings on industrial photography, authors do not generally adopt this perspective. They use images as the trace of a certain reality, albeit an imperfect and
biased one, and these images constitute the source documents of their work.
These still images, created in factories, industries, and the business world, grant us access
to a representation fixed in time and consequently reveal the tangible configuration of work,
locations, tools, and often anonymous individuals. Assembled into a historical corpus, such
images allow us to measure the scope of changes within a given company and consequently,
to analyze the material and symbolic transformations of physical workspaces, organizational configurations, the objects used, and so on. Photographs have been widely used in
cultural history, where they succeeded in revealing entire swathes of society (the world of
agriculture, representations of immigration, etc.) to the public at large. However, they have
to a large extent overlooked by media studies (Brennen and Hardt, 2002).
Nonetheless, photography is not a technique that merely represents the real. Studies
on photography of workplaces have adopted a two-fold perspective: on the one hand,
photographs give us access to the tangible, material organization of sites of production,
but on the other, they are also simultaneously the images offered up by a company, its
attempt at presenting and representing itself to the outside world. Dewerpe (1987) also
reminds us of the duality of the system of representation conveyed by photographs,
which connects the constructed image (the manifest image – which is a strategy of selfrepresentation, in particular for companies), and the proffered image of industrial work
portraying the representation of labor, and thus processes in the making (p. 1080). In
visual representations of factories from the beginning of the 20th century, photography
seems to function as a form of ‘cultural coherence’. ‘For industrial and financial tycoons,
these representations simultaneously ratified their visionary talent and the validity of
their economic beliefs […] They reassured citizens with regard to the social, sanitary and
moral quality of their society’ (Aubert, 2001: 38). As is the case in studies of the automobile industry, photographs can also symbolically represent an entire nation and depict
this industrial sector as one of its ‘vital and venerable organs’ (Lannoy, 2010: 115). In the
world of media, some photographs are also used to this end: to portray the media’s power,
its productivity, and its importance for society. Such photographs are especially potent
when they are assembled into albums2 or special issues commemorating media events.
Nevertheless, not all photographs are disseminated to the public. Many images, especially those involving the editorial process, are conserved internally. In such cases, these
images are thus perhaps indicative of a desire to follow the news organization’s evolution, to depict organizational changes (a new office, a new technical object), or to conserve an internal record of media history. These pictures are official, as they have been
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taken by someone ‘from’ the news organization, and archived as traces of the evolution
of the news organization. We don’t know if the photograph had a permission or not, if he
was the official photographer or not.
With regard to the corpus assembled, our hypothesis here opens up photographic representation to something other than a mere depiction of businesses, brands, and reputations.
We argue that photographs also attest to production processes and the organization of labor,
which possess as many repeatable levels in the image. The messages conveyed by photographs reveal the different ways in which industrial labor is codified, thus also illustrating
the specific discourse that an industry uses with regard to itself and its environment.
According to Dewerpe (1987), there are three different types of discourses (p. 1080). First
of all, photographs reveal technical processes: the machines, the stages of production, and
the production cycle. They also illustrate factory landscapes and the environment’s topography: the surrounding areas, how much the factory stands out, the fencing off of the factory’s
perimeter, the buildings’ morphology and aesthetics, the visibility of the name, and so on.
Finally, photographs also allude to the social reality of labor (Dewerpe, 1987), as they
expose the specific levels of discourse and representation involved. Certain formal traits are
specific to particular work environments and their representation. A work environment may
be ‘visible’ (in which case it serves as a pretext for something else), contingent (it appears in
a photograph but is not the main subject of representation), or real (the photograph represents it in a direct fashion; Rouillé, 1984: 32).
Scholars like those mentioned above worked off a series of photographs, which
allowed them to classify the representation of workplace environments. In our study on
newsrooms, photographs are first used as evidence of the organization of the workplace
and organizational changes in the world of journalism. Our cross-case analysis of all the
photographs in our corpus tries to identify the indicators of change and continuity, as
revealed by the material traces the photographs allow to shine through.
Examining these photographs naturally requires us to address several traditional
aspects of visual analysis, which is a matter of describing techniques, styles, and themes.
Photography can be viewed as a form of historical recontextualization, and interpreting
it must take into account its dual meaning, both as conveyed by the photographer and as
contained in our ultimate interpretation. However, due to the very nature of newsroom
photographs, we are dealing with a specific kind of photographical discursivity (Véron,
1994). These images are not fine art photographs, family snapshots, or personal artifacts.
They belong to a particular ‘social discursivity’ that seeks to show the process of labor, a
company, its organization, and its employees. Consequently, they constitute a serial discourse (composed of specific entities) which must be linked in our analysis, and which
permits a cross-case study of the discourses portrayed by photography. This research into
newsrooms thus does not attempt to conduct a visual analysis of photographic composition, but rather to examine the social discursivities of journalists, journalism, and the
news organization as revealed by photographs.
Composing a corpus of newsroom photographs
One could compose a corpus of newsroom photographs in a variety of ways. First of all,
one could gather together photographs of buildings, which would allow for an analysis
of the outside appearance of media companies, their place in the city landscape, and their
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architectural and physical integration into neighborhoods. The façade of buildings can be
seen as the public image that a media company wishes to portray, an expression of the
place it hopes to occupy within the urban landscape. Moving office buildings, renovating
the outside and changing configurations are all instances of a media establishment trying
to alter its public brand image and to integrate in its own territory. A second possibility
would be to compose a corpus of photographs of all the workspaces of a given newspaper company: editorial offices, advertising and marketing departments, production studios (rotary presses, assembly sites, sound stages), documentation units, studios,
newsrooms, and so on. This perspective would allow for an understanding of the general
organization of the media world, the successive configurations of production spaces,
media diffusion, and marketing. Analyzing how floors, offices, partitions, departments,
and units are divided or grouped together tells us about how the media perceives and
structures its general organization and about the strategies it wishes to implement.
Finally, the third possibility is the one we have adopted in this study: focusing on a collection of photographs depicting the particularly meaningful space of newsrooms. Here
we share the same perspective as Brennen and Hardt (2002), who stated that
although [the photograph of a newsroom] projects the presence of a variety of discernible
individuals and objects and their physical relations as a ‘slice of time,’ it also produces a specific
worldview. The photograph is not a conventional image of an editorial staff but rather a distinct
visual statement about the newsroom as a symbolic space of human labor. (pp. 25–26)
Starting with an analysis of newsrooms gives us access to the depiction of the materiality
of labor organization, production processes, and working conditions. The snapshot of a single instant is thus fixed in time. Multiplying these static images and not concentrating on a
single photograph, but considering them instead as part of a series, allows us to conceive of
the newsroom as the material ‘object’ in which journalism is produced, practiced, and experienced. In this sense, composing a corpus means elaborating a kind of photo-ethnographical
narrative, presented as a series of ‘photographs, in relationship with each other and which
compose a sequence of visual information’ (Achutti, 2007: 112).
The first step of the research is constituting a corpus. With regard to photographs of
newsrooms, this is not always an easy task. Not all media companies have systematically
archived internal photographs such as these. Some images were meticulously conserved
because they were used in supplements or commemorative issues. Others are still subject
to copyright. The scattering of photographs across time and space presents an obstacle
toward assembling a corpus. We must negotiate access to the full corpus of photographs,
not simply those pre-selected by the company in question. Some pictures are not captioned;
others do not even mention the date of the shooting or the name of the photographer. At this
stage, the first phase of on-going research, the corpus of photographs collected comprises
a patchwork of photographs of newsrooms, mainly from three territories: France, Canada,
and Belgium. This collection is based in the research in databases (Gallica, for example, for
France), on the search engines and contacts with journalists or managers of newsrooms.
The latter entrance is very promising, because the images of workplaces may also have
been taken by the employees themselves on various occasions. Asking for photographs of
individual journalists opens a new avenue: the collection of memorial traces taken all along
the path of the journalist, who can comment the shot and the context.
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Our research used three different types of images. On the one hand, photographs can
represent a media company, on a given day, at a particular time. They may belong to a
group of images dating from a specific era, offering a sort of panoramic view (this is the
case below with the Journal de Roubaix, a daily French newspaper). These collections
illustrate a time, T, within a given company, featuring its various components and units
in a synchronic way. On the other hand, our corpus was also assembled thanks to a more
systematic organization of historical series. We conducted our work in collaboration with
media staff, in particular company documentation services. The goal here is to establish
a sizeable historical corpus of newsroom photographs, in order to obtain the most complete archive possible, as is the case with the on-going assembly of corpuses for the daily
Belgian newspaper Le Soir, the Belgian press agency Belga, the regional French newspaper Le Télégramme, and Radio-Canada, a French-speaking Canadian television and
radio broadcasting company. For example, 41 photographs dating from 1897 to 2013
thus comprise the historical series of photographs of the daily Le Soir.
This approach corresponds to two methodological needs: in order to analyze the historical vestiges of change, our corpus must be presented as a diachronic series (a historical study of the media), but it may also be composed as a number of synchronic series
(an in-depth analysis of media photography at a given point in history).
As an example of the nature of the corpus – these images will be analyzed in Part 3 of
the article – these three photographs from the Journal de Roubaix (see Figures 1 to 3), a
regional daily paper in France, allow us to develop a synchronic series. The eight images
gathered together show all the production spaces of the newspaper in 1910: the engraving, folding and binding studios, the linotype machines, the newsroom, and so on. This
series is highly valuable, as it gives us detail about the newspaper’s production and creation, just as Dewerpe’s industrial images showed us the tangible configuration of work in
Italy’s Ansalmo factory. It is the synchronic vestige of the materiality of newspaper production during that era.
A second example of the nature of the corpus refers back to the development of diachronic series. These series require the collaboration of media documentation services.
They allow as large a historical corpus as possible to be assembled which can visually
represent newsrooms. The diachronic series is the manifest illustration of the material
transformations that occurred in the workspace over the years. Thanks to these images,
both transformations and consistencies may become evident to the researcher. The next
four pictures below (Figures 4 to 7) belong to the corpus analyzing the Belgian daily
paper Le Soir, and range from the end of the 19th century to 2013. They show how the
physical workplace has changed from a small but collective office to an organized newsroom with structured sections. They also illustrate the continuous appropriation of technologies and tools by the media.
Using both diachronic and synchronic series, as well as isolated photographs, we can
not only analyze the evolution of the media, but also establish comparisons between different series. To this end, addressing continuities and changes must not only rely on
longitudinal studies (the analysis of a single media company), but also on the study of the
convergences between labor organization configurations and the physical and organizational changes occurring in newsrooms. Comparing photographs from different newsrooms, taken at the same time, offers a view on the circulation of organizational models
and their uses by media companies.
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Figure 1. Journal de Roubaix, bindery (1910), Mairie de Rouaix, site des archives municipales.
Figure 2. Journal de Roubaix, workshop (1910) Mairie de Rouaix, site des archives municipales.
Figure 3. Journal de Roubaix, linotype room (1910) Mairie de Rouaix, site des archives municipales.
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Figure 4. Le Soir 1902, Le Soir archives.
Evidently, the difficulties associated with such an analysis are numerous. It is not easy
to infer the intentions of a photographer during his or her shoot. Was the photographer
commissioned by the company to portray a specific image of the newsroom’s organization? Was the space rearranged for the photo shoot? Moreover, it is difficult to analyze
photographs without any context or explanation. Where did that door in the back lefthand side lead to? What about that stairwell on the right-hand side? Two tools can be
quite useful to address such questions. On the one hand, analyses should concentrate on
series (and not insist on any one detail); on the other, the study of photographs should
simultaneously rely on a collection of historical documents that were contemporary with
the media enterprise itself. By contrasting texts about newsrooms (which are very rare)
with journalists’ scattered descriptions of their workplaces (more frequent) and historical
media studies (somewhat random in frequency, depending on the company and research
interests), our study can become more precise and open up new possibilities for comprehending the material vestiges revealed by these visual documents.
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Gathering together this corpus inevitably involved a complete analysis of all the photographs. This cross-case approach allows us to propose new avenues for research and
also, to nuance a number of sub-problems. What can we see in newsroom photographs
that can help us to analyze the evolution of their material nature?
The visibility of journalism’s organization: What should we
see in these photographs?
The study of the whole corpus is the indispensable first step for an analysis of a photographic series. The cross-case analysis of the photographs produced several avenues for
research. Consequently, newsroom photographs allow us: (a) to examine the emergence
of the newsroom; (b) to consider the representation of itself that the media seeks to portray; (c) to contemplate the space of the newsroom, its structural and managerial organization; and finally (d) to study the objects used by journalists.
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The emergence of the newsroom in French-speaking countries
The 19th century photographs, drawings, and engravings show a highly specific organization of workplaces. It is very difficult to ascertain the date when the workplace called
a ‘newsroom’ appeared. It seems that this word (‘salle de rédaction’ in French) did not
appear in French texts during the 18th century. At that time, many newspapers were still
edited by a single individual. Those in charge of newspapers even sometimes went so far
as to erase all traces of the editorial process and production, especially when the latter
was collective (Lévrier, 2011). Collective editorial and production spaces took a very
long time to arise. Prior to these, the senior editor would work with the publisher or
printer. Sometimes, he would even correct the galley proofs onsite in the production
space (usually the printing studio); other editors would also occasionally contribute to
the corrections. When journalism became a professional occupation during the 19th century, working conditions and changes in the frequency of diffusion made collective work
necessary (Ruellan, 1993). But for a significant period of time, the newsroom still
remained ‘a dark place’ (Pinson, 2013: 26).
For example, the oldest photographs in our corpus show the workplace of the daily
paper Le Soir, located at 42 rue d’Isabelle, in Brussels. The newspaper’s owner, Emile
Rossel, is leaning against the doorframe of the case room; he seems to be checking the
proofs. This scene depicting how the newspaper gets made is thus clearly associated with
the concrete, physical space of its production. Historical texts about Le Soir discussed
the first few years following its creation. On rue d’Isabelle, a
printer rented several rooms to draft and compose a new paper. […] Le Soir’s first offices were
incredibly humble. The typographers worked in the attic and the plate-makers in the cellar […].
As for the two editors, they each had a table and a telephone. This attested to a certain attempt
at modernity, once we realize that at the time, there were only 4,674 phone lines in all of
Belgium. (Hereng, 2003: 11–12)
A photograph of Le Soir’s offices from 1902 already shows transformations in the
newspaper’s representation and practical organization (Figure 8).
This photograph is markedly different from the previous one representing Emile Rossel
leaning against the doorframe. It shows the implementation of collective editorial (and not
just layout or composition) workspaces. It is not the owner who stands out, but the editor-inchief. In the background, we can see the other editors, all working on a communal table.
This first line of investigation paves the way for an analysis, via visual representations,
of the historical structuring of newspaper production spaces. When did ‘newspaper offices’
(Pinson, 2013) become collective rooms full of ‘professionals’? How were these workspaces pragmatically organized? What kind of spatial representation can we observe?
The image of itself that the media seeks to convey
Many photographs stand out because of their static, frozen appearance. As Dewerpe
(1987: 1098) has stressed, photographs communicate ideologies and perform a sort of
doubling of the company’s strategies of presence. Factories have their name splashed on
every wall, both inside and out. On the other hand, this trend is much less visible with
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Figure 8. Le Soir, 1902, Le Soir archives.
media companies, where the company name may appear on the exterior of the building,
but is largely absent from the newsroom itself. The only obvious traces can be found
indirectly, thanks to the newspaper issues left behind on desks, or perhaps the backdrops
of television sets. Nonetheless, what we do find in photographs of newsrooms is not only
a picture of the productive tools the company seeks to emphasize (the presence of rotary
presses, innovative tools – many photographs show the first computers available in
newsrooms, for example), as a form of functional order. The other order, which stems
from the representation system inferred by the photograph, reveals the company’s stated
aesthetic (Dewerpe, 1987: 1099).
The next two photographs (from L’Auto, a specialized French newspaper, and Belga,
the Belgium Press Agency – Figures 9 and 10) illustrate such ideological expressions.
The choice of perspective, angle, luminosity, and subject (the editor-in-chief and the
reception area) belong to a functional – and especially aesthetic – order. The locations are
elegant and rather uncanny; in each different era, a certain air of modernity and control
pervades the space and informs the aesthetic.
This second approach would orient our research toward an aesthetic analysis of the
media company’s staging, examining the values that emanate from its organization
within the city and neighborhood, from its buildings and office. How do the buildings
belonging to a media company represent its role in society and its relationship with the
outside world?
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Figure 9. L’auto 1914, Free of rights.
Figure 10. At Belga, the Belgian press agency, this photograph stages the agency’s new offices.
Contemplating the space of the newsroom, its structural and managerial
organization
These photographs give us information about the size of the editorial staff (and possibly
the total number of journalists), its socio-demographic distribution (thanks to the presence of certain profiles, the staging of social genres, and generations), its hierarchical
structure (where the editor-in-chief’s desk is located, how the offices are arranged), and
its place within the entire organization (proximity to printing studios, specialized offices,
in a circle around a central desk …).
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Some of these photographs are also extremely helpful for understanding the collective
nature of the editorial staff. For example, the picture of L’Illustration Nouvelle’s staff from
1938 to 1939 (Figure 11) tells the story of a collaborative and collective endeavor, looking
much like a portrait taken during a family reunion. The photograph shows the presence of
two women (were they the editors’ wives? journalists themselves? secretaries?) and the
intermingling of different generations; its staging around the dinner table likewise suggests
the existence of social interactions that went beyond the merely professional.
Figure 11. L’Illustration Nouvelle, editorial staff, 1938–1939. Free of rights.
Figure 12. L’Illustration, Montreal 1934–1935, Free of rights.
These images are also meaningful with regard to the position of the editor/journalist/
reporter within the workspace. The practical organization of desks and offices (in the
offices of Montreal’s L’Illustration in 1934–1935 – Figure 12) shows us how the desks
were arranged in rows, one behind another, all facing a central desk. The desks themselves (they appear to be made of wood, though that would soon change), the posture of
the editors, the presence of an attendant who seems to be distributing the news, are all
helpful details for our analysis.
Visual representations such as these also allow us to infer distinctions between the
various statuses and roles in the company. The various paths of travel between offices are
visible and can sometimes even be mapped out. These paths can illustrate the social relations within the company, the breaking off of smaller collective groups, and the thematic
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divisions inherent to information production, as well as the creation of new departments
and the disappearance of others. The room for circulation between desks is also particularly important: It points to the ‘paths’ or ‘routes’ embedded in the workspace. Some
images represent the spaces allotted for sociability, where journalists would gather
around the newspaper or television set, or share a cup of coffee. This tells us about the
daily life of these employees.
These pictures also show how the places belonging to individuals become internalized territories. One’s worktable or desk could be personalized (books and personal
effects could illustrate the fact that the desk was not only a place for work – Monjaret,
2002), but it could also remain impersonal, at times perhaps exhibiting the fleeting traces
of various individuals sharing a desk.
Some types of workspaces seem to have been favored during specific eras. Meeting
rooms are visible. Some photographs let us see the spaces where employees work
together, but also how these spaces can be almost entirely controlled. This control stems
from the physical arrangement of the space: open space offices, present very early only
in some editorial environments, mean that everyone can see each other’s professional
activity and productivity. Open space arrangements also give managers and supervisors
a panoptic view of the entire staff. Various photographs show the editor-in-chief’s desk
outside of the newsroom properly speaking (journalists can access it via a little staircase
and must open a closed door). Others show the editor-in-chief sitting in a specific section
of the newsroom from where she/he can observe the entire newsroom. Finally, a number
of other images show the editor-in-chief sitting in a glass office cell, from which she/he
can see and be seen.
Despite their silent nature, photographs paradoxically tell us about the sounds present
in the newsroom. Visually, they sometimes insist on typewriters, computers, telex
machines, telephones – at times displaying the movements of various employees coming
and going on television screens, and so on. These images evoke the soundscape of the
newsroom and tell us about the evolution of noise within this environment. Evolving
from the cacophony of typewriters and printing presses in the basement, the newsroom
seems to have become increasingly silent, now simply home to the vibrations of cell
phones and the soft clicking of computer keys.
Examining the objects used by journalists
Our corpus very clearly portrays the objects used by journalists in their work and their
evolution: paper, uploading tools, scissors, computers, telex machines, the Internet,
phone booths, and smartphones. This global view of objects allows us to study the practical circumstances behind information production (paper scattered across the top of a
desk, two computers being used simultaneously …), and to evaluate the material changes
that have affected the practice of journalism, consequently requiring those employed in
its service to constantly adapt.
Analyzing these objects also paves the way for an investigation into how journalists
relate to their sources: The places where information is acquired and exchanged have
been transformed (for example, telephones used to be in booths) and the timeframe of
source gathering has also been radically altered, as we can tell from these photographs.
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Hypotheses regarding these objects are numerous. One theory leads us to consider
the importance that the company grants to the staging of its work tools. Demonstrating
a sort of technological quasi-determinism, the photographs contained in our diachronic
series all emphasize the acquisition of ‘innovative’ tools and materials (innovative for
the era, naturally). Consequently, these two photographs (one from Belga, the other
from Le Soir – Figures 13 and 14) illustrate the technical organization and thus the
strength of the company with regard to information technology. The processes of information production and branding are thus strengthened by the air of modernity that these
images evoke.
But the most interesting hypothesis with regard to journalism’s objects such as
they are represented in photography refers to the object’s role within its environment
(by sociologizing Paveau’s (2012) perspective). The journalist also acts via the object
she/he uses, the latter offering him or her a discursive framework in which to operate.
Identifying the objects in the daily life of journalists (as photographed) lets us glimpse
Figure 13. Belga archives.
Figure 14. Le Soir, Le Soir archives.
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Journalism 16(1)
the traces of concrete materialization. This materialization allows us to reconstruct a
kind of ‘dialogue’ (Bakhtin, via Todorov, 1981) between the different media eras and
among different media by era. These forms of dialogism emphasize the fact that all
practices and all objects carry within them the trace of previous uses, and of the practical and ideological configurations which caused them to emerge and thanks to which
they were appropriated. These photographs embody the relationship that the media
and journalists have developed – and continue to develop – with regard to their environment and the objects that ‘populate’ their work. Materiality as it is presented in
these images thus becomes the space of mediation paving the way for an analysis of
the changes and continuities of the processes of information production, journalists’
working conditions, and the structural organization of media companies. Once photographed, the object itself tells a story, and it can be used as the tangible mark of a
discourse of and about journalism.
Conclusion
This article is only the first phase of on-going research. It seeks to emphasize not only
the importance of visual analysis in the domain of research on journalism and journalists, but also put forward a few different possibilities for future research, based on this
photographic source material. The analysis of newsroom photographs is necessarily
multidimensional. It allows us to conduct a socio-historical study of how workplaces
are created and structured and how information is produced. It paves the way for an
analysis of the media’s modes of representation within the logic of external communication (to establish and promote its brand image through videos or pictures). It also
permits us to make inferences while analyzing the organizational and managerial
aspects of a company, and reveals the value of examining the objects used by journalists in their trade. We could think about how this visual analysis could be part of a
more general study of a spatial ethnography of labor (Chari and Gidwani, 2005) in
journalism. Trying to appropriate all these methodological issues, the next step will
focus on a corpus made up of a series of photographs from the prestige newspaper Le
Soir from the end of the 19th century up to today, and also of various successive architectural plans of the building and the newsroom that have drawn the spatial territory
of the media organization, Le Soir. These visual representations are crossed with an
analysis of discourses from the media itself and its journalists (through books about
the media, articles, or biographies of journalists). Our next phase or research will narrow, in other words.
Nevertheless, working with a corpus of photographs could also lead us to broaden
our scope. Incorporating the short films of media communication campaigns, proposing comparisons between different workplaces (for example, how has rhetoric on
industrialization and the organizational changes in the industry influenced the physical configuration of work in media companies?), analyzing fictional representations
of newsrooms (films about journalism, television series, comic books, literature,
painting …): These are all possibilities which would allow us to address the concept
of the newsroom as a potentially rich subject that has until now been overlooked by
studies on journalism.
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Le Cam
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Anne Thomaes from Le Soir and Philippe De Camps from Belga for
making available the photographs of their newsrooms.
Funding
Notes
1. In the main project, the newsroom can also be defined as every place of work production: a
desk in an hostel, a car during a journey, a train, and so on. News are often produced out of
the doors of traditional newsrooms.
2. The elaboration of our corpus will subsequently broaden research into the ‘albums’ produced
by companies to commemorate their anniversaries. These albums will permit an investigation
of the images of themselves that media companies produce over time. To this end, videos and
short company films could also become part of the corpus.
References
Achutti L (2007) ‘Photoethnographie’: dans les coulisses de la bnf. Ethnologie française 37: 111–116.
Aubert D (2001) Photographie et utopie industrielle: Pittsburgh au début du xxe siècle. Revue
française d’études américaines 3(89): 33–42.
Brennen B and Hardt H (2002) Travail de l’information, histoire et matériau photographique:
Analyse visuelle d’une salle de rédaction dans les années 30 (traduction de Gilles Bastin).
Terrains & travaux 1(3): 92–120.
Chari S and Gidwani V (2005) Introduction: Grounds for a spatial ethnography of labor.
Ethnography 6(3): 267–281.
Dewerpe A (1987) Miroirs d’usines: photographies industrielles et organisation du travail à
l’Ansaldo (1900–1920). Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 42(5): 1079–1114.
Hereng J (2003) Le Soir dans l’Histoire. Bruxelles: Editions Luc Pire.
Lannoy P (2010) L’usine, La photographie et la nation. L’entreprise automobile fordiste et la production des photographes industriels. Genèses 3(80): 114–135.
Le Cam F and Ruellan D (2014) Changements et permanences du journalisme. Paris: Ed.
L’Hamattan.
Lévrier A (2011) La ‘société’ du ‘Journal Littéraire’, ou l’avènement d’une pratique collégiale
du journalisme. In: Colloque GIS-Journalisme. Available at: http://gisjournalisme.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/levrier-gis-j-2011.pdf
Monjaret A (2002) Les bureaux ne sont pas seulement des espaces de travail. Communication et
organisation 21: 75–90.
Osmond G (2008) Reflecting materiality: Reading sport history through the lens. Rethinking
History 12(3): 339–360.
Paveau MH (2012) Ce que disent les objets. Sens, affordance, cognition. Synergies pays de la Baltique
9. Available at: http://ressources-cla.univ-fcomte.fr/gerflint/Baltique9/baltique9.html
Pinson G (2013) L’Imaginaire médiatique. Histoire et fiction du journal au XIXème siècle. Paris:
Classiques Garnier.
Rémy C (2007) Ni cliché, ni séquence: s’arrêter sur l’image. Ethnologie française 37(1): 89–95.
Rouillé A (1984) Les images photographiques du monde du travail sous le Second Empire. Actes
de la recherche en sciences sociales 54: 31–43.
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Ruellan D (1993) Le professionnalisme du flou. Identité et savoir-faire des journalistes français.
Grenoble: Presses universitaires de Grenoble.
Todorov T (1981) Mikhaïl Bakhtine. Le principe dialogique. Suivi de Ecrits du Cercle de Bakhtine.
Paris: Seuil.
Tuchman G (1978) Making news: a study in the construction of reality. Michigan: Free Press.
Véron E (1994) De l’image sémiologique aux discursivités. Le temps d’une photo. Hermès 13(14):
45–64.
White H (1988) Historiography and Historiophoty. The American Historical Review 93(5):
1193–1199.
Zaman A (2013) Newsroom as Battleground. Journalist’s description of their workspaces.
Journalism Studies 14(6): 819–834.
Author biography
Florence Le Cam is chair of Journalism at the Department of Information and Communication
Sciences at Université Libre de Bruxelles (Brussels). Her research interests are the professional
identities of journalists and the historical construction of the profession. She is the co-author of
Changements et permanences du journalisme (2014) and co-editor of the multilingual scientific
journal Sur le journalisme/About journalism/Sobre jornalismo.
545744
JOU0010.1177/1464884914545744JournalismKreiss
Afterword
Journalism
2015, Vol. 16(1) 153–156
DOI: 10.1177/1464884914545744
jou.sagepub.com
Daniel Kreiss
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA
John Dewey (1925 [1958]) described ‘objects’ as ‘things with a meaning’ (p. 166). For
Dewey, objects are at the foundation of communication and, ultimately, social life. Once
named, objects are thought about, invested and reinvested with meaning, reinterpreted,
and acted upon. Objects ‘acquire representatives, surrogates, signs and implicates, which
are infinitely more amenable to management, more permanent, and more accommodating, than events in their first estate’ (p. 167).
Analytically, the articles in this volume all variously, and in varying ways, make a
Dewey-ian ‘object’ of the material ‘objects of journalism’. Empirically, these articles
reveal the presence and consequences of material objects of journalism as they are at
work in the world. In their focus on distinctly material objects, these papers all extend a
broader ‘material’ turn in contemporary social science (see Bennett and Joyce, 2013;
Marres, 2012).
There is something gained in this narrow focus on the material object, instead of the
more expansive sense of ‘object’ sketched by Dewey, the idea of cultural objects discussed by Michael Schudson (1989), or the knowledge objects that sociologist Karin
Knorr-Cetina (1997) has placed at the foundation of an ‘object-oriented sociality’. The
narrow framing of the material ‘object’ at play here helps these authors disclose a more
expansive world of journalistic practice. These authors show how often taken-for-granted
objects such as content management systems, websites, and even desks shape the organizations, work, and products of journalism through their material and symbolic properties
and affordances. As this volume demonstrates, a focus on materiality creates a rich, new
set of objects of analysis for journalism researchers. Most broadly, this volume expands
the range of things that can be said to matter when we seek explanations for what we
observe and think about in relation to journalism.
I sketch here some concluding, summary thoughts, considering broadly the theme that
I see uniting the papers in this volume. Namely, these authors all ask how and when do
Daniel Kreiss, Assistant Professor, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA.
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Journalism 16(1)
the material objects of journalism matter, and in what ways? At this point, there are
reams of studies of materiality and organization (see Leonardi et al., 2012), but this volume’s particular contribution lies in bringing a focus on things to an institution expressly
concerned with the production and dissemination of cultural objects. Indeed, these articles’ collective concern in this volume recall Schudson’s (1989) posing of very similar
questions of ‘cultural objects’ nearly two decades ago. The parallels between ‘material’
and ‘cultural’ objects are striking. In one sense, material objects, like culture, always
matter. Material objects are always present with us. They shape the very ways we have
of being in the world, and provide the background contexts, stages, and raw materials for
social action. And yet, we know that material objects, like culture, provide both constraints and resources and do not wholly determine human actions. Extending Schudson’s
analysis of culture, it is as unsatisfying to say that material objects are simply inert, as it
is to declare that they are just flexible and malleable resources easily enlisted into different programs of action, as the unyielding presence of Latour’s (1999) speed bumps
reminds us.
In other words, the strength of the volume lies in the answers these articles provide to
the middle-range concerns that Schudson posed with respect to culture: why do material
objects seem to matter in particularly consequential ways at particular moments? What
are the conditions when material objects matter? And, following Dewey, what are the
material and symbolic associations these objects acquire, and ultimately help to shape?
What is striking is that across the articles in this volume, there is a general lack of any
shared theoretical framework. The authors draw on a number of diverse conceptual
resources, from Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT), Castell’s network theory, and
Appadurai’s global and local imaginaries, to Law’s idea of heterogeneous engineering,
White’s historiophoty, Star’s emphasis on infrastructure, and the various interpretative
approaches grouped under the rubric of ‘software studies’. The authors in this volume
join these works with a range of conceptual and empirical works by scholars such as
Anderson, Boczkowski, Czarniawska, Domingo, Hemmingway, Lewis, and Usher who
represent a ‘home grown’ and now well-established contemporary tradition of studying
materiality in journalism research.
In sum, the pieces in this volume utilize a broad set of interdisciplinary concepts as
tools for inquiry in close-to-the-ground empirical work, both field and archival. Instead
of a shared theoretical approach, these works share a common orientation towards empirical inquiry. And, finally, they share a substantive interest in journalism. As a result, these
works provide context-rich accounts of when, why, and how material objects matter in
journalistic practice that are contextual and contingent, embedded in time and space.
A few pieces illustrate the strength of this empirical approach at revealing when material objects become consequential and when we should take account of them. In his
detailed field study of the MSNBC Digital Network, Josh Braun shows that ‘sociotechnical’ systems are reliant upon both the ‘socio’ and the ‘technical’. The Newsvine
discussion tool ‘worked’ when it supported a stand-alone, citizen journalism community
with defined social norms. But, it quickly ceased to function properly with the influx of
new, un-acculturated users, who often had radically different goals and expectations for
the site, when it was acquired by MSNBC. As a result, Newsvine ceased to be a stable
infrastructural platform that supported and worked in concert with a community. It
155
Kreiss
became a contested and problematic artifact – an object of concern – that convened a
host of community members, staffers, developers, and others around it to engage in reconceptions of the platform and the role of people in it, technical modifications, and redesigns. In sum, a once unheralded and background platform rather quickly became an object
of shared concern, which revealed both the work that it routinely performed in supporting
an extant community and the limits of the sociotechnical context it could function in.
In other contexts, we can see a certain obstinate durability among journalistic objects
and their role in shaping human practice. In an exceptional study, Rodgers argues that
material objects have certain degrees of autonomy – an ability of objects to resist the
intentions of human users. Even more, Scott Rodgers shows how a particular journalism
content management system shaped human practices in particular ways according to its
design and the associations it brings to news work. As a result, Rodgers provocatively
suggests that we need to consider that material objects can carry particular values and
institutional relationships in their design that stand separate and apart from, and shape,
news organizations and journalistic practice.
Other contributors show that material objects facilitate the routine functioning of
journalistic work in ways that are both very particular and are highly consequential in
shaping the production of knowledge. In Heather Ford’s rich analysis of Wikipedia, she
shows how a set of digital objects – infoboxes, tables, and warning tags – both carry
symbolic meaning and have symbolic consequences, as well as facilitate collaboration
among Wikipedia’s varied and far-flung users. These journalistic objects shape the production of knowledge in a hybrid format that blends the genres of breaking news and
encyclopedias. The objects Ford traces work in deeply political ways. They are employed
strategically by editors to guide the representation of breaking news events, and the
objects themselves have a force in shaping the work of symbolic production, the categorization of political events, and ultimately what is visible during the debate over political
controversies.
These articles make clear that scholars seeking to explain journalistic practices and
products must take account of the work of material objects in shaping social action.
Indeed, although the articles cited above focus on objects that pervade contemporary
journalism, such as content management systems and Internet applications, other contributions in this volume look historically at the role of objects in shaping journalistic
practice. Susan Keith’s richly detailed historical account reveals that material objects are
‘tools of newsroom power’ and have both material and symbolic dimensions. Tracing the
evolution of material configurations provides clues onto the historical development of
news work (which Florence Le Cam wonderfully shows in her use of photographs to
trace the material constitution of the newsrooms of the 1800s through today). Even more,
as Keith demonstrates, the analog objects that were commonplace through much of the
20th century, such as copy desks and pica rulers, empowered particular actors over others, afforded certain forms of work, and shaped the organizational workings of the
newsroom.
Taken together, the works in this volume show that journalism was, is, and will continue to be a deeply material practice. These articles show that explaining the practices
and products of journalism means taking account of material objects. As an analytical
emphasis, the idea of materiality helps scholars disclose new aspects of journalistic
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practices and interrogate them normatively. And ultimately, the usefulness of analytical
approaches to materiality must be judged on the grounds of whether they help us ask
better questions about social life. Indeed, I think the pieces in this volume leave us with
many more questions than they answer, and this is what will make them enormously useful as the starting points for future inquiries.
References
Bennett T and Joyce P (2013) Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn.
New York: Routledge.
Cetina KK (1997) Sociality with objects: Social relations in postsocial knowledge societies.
Theory, Culture & Society 14(4): 1–30.
Dewey J (1925 [1958]) Experience and Nature. New York City: Dover.
Latour B (1999) Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Harvard University
Press.
Leonardi PM, Nardi BA and Kallinikos J (2012) Materiality and Organizing: Social Interaction in
a Technological World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Marres N (2012) Material Participation: Technology, the Environment and Everyday Publics.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Schudson M (1989) How culture works. Theory and Society 18(2): 153–180.
Author biography
Daniel Kreiss is Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Daniel’s research explores the impact of technological change on the public sphere and political practice and he is the author of Taking Our Country
Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama (2012).

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