rasmuskleisnielsen.net

A few notes from ‘European Journalism in the Era of Digital Information’, an event last night organized by the European Institute at Columbia University. Dominic C. Boyer (Cornell) is the speaker, Jane Kramer (The New Yorker) and Nick Lemann (Dean, Columbia School of Journalism) were the discussants.

Boyer has done field research and interviews with journalists in Europe, predominantly with the AP in Frankfurt, Germany, and speaks about the distinctive challenges facing European journalism, and the kinds of transformations happening there. He is working on a book on this, which I am really looking forward to.

Boyer started by pointing out that he does not think the changes he will speak about are unique to Europe. In so far as there is any European exceptionalism when it comes to media, it has to do with the public media versus private media balance being very different (esp. relative to for instance U.S). In Germany, for instance, this generates debates over what the role of public media should be online, where private media are lobbying for caps on how large parts of their budgets they should be allowed to spend on online media, arguing that their direct subsidies distort competition and unnecessarily crowds out commercial organizations.

He went on from here to share with us some observations from his interviews and field work on eight major issues and trends

(unless thinks are in quotation marks, I am paraphrasing, so these are my best attempts to convey what they said, I have probably missed a thousand nuances):

/ / / ONE / / /

Journalism is a profession in transition. Not necessarily in crisis, mind you, some see wonderful new opportunities too. The journalists point largely to new media driving this. But also fragmentation of national audiences and the acceleration of the news cycle with 24/7 cable news etc.

/ / / TWO / / /

Newspaper circulation continues to decline, and this is very present to the journalists. (RKN: he arguably means paid newspaper circulation; the free metro dailies have added many, many thousand new readers to the overall newspaper audience). DB also points out that in a global perspective; newspaper circulation is up, because it is increasing in many poor countries.

/ / / THREE / / /

The traditional revenue models behind journalism are in crisis, especially for print journalism, which also suffers from the perception in the investor community that they are in a more or less irreversibly long-term decline, and that investors therefore has to squeeze as much money out of it now as they can (typical strategy with so-called ‘sunset industries’). DB argues, by the way, that this latter idea is at least partially incorrect, and points to the high profit margins of many newspapers and newspaper chains (more on this below).

/ / / FOUR / / /

Journalists experience these years as a time of downsizing and de-professionalization. Many organizations experience an influx of younger writers, of part-timers, of interns, of freelancers. This in turn generates new labor-management relations, changed role for unions, and a tiered system where some people have very good benefits job security, etc, whereas most do not.

/ / / FIVE / / /

A striking experience many German journalists told him about is that they experience a fragmentation of ‘the public’ in the singular as the addressee of their work (RKN: I was surprised to hear that the journalists he studied thought like this, as Germany, like many other European countries, also has a strong historical strand of opinion and partisan journalism, which is addressed not to the public but to a certain position, but this may reflect the deep impact of the deliberate attempt to export an American model of journalism to Germany after the war). The basic transformation the journalists report is one of going from speaking to ‘the public’ to speaking to particular desirable demographics, audience segments, consumer groups, etc (RKN: again, a historical note, they may always have been doing that, but now, they are instructed to do it). This in turn casts doubt on the public interest discourse often invoked to legitimize journalism, where the profession and its institutions are purported to represent the general public interest versus parochial politicians and pernicious special interests.

/ / / SIX / / /

The journalists reported increasing difficulties arising from having to manage information in real-time. He had lots of examples of frustration with time pressures, updates of stories etc, and said that many reporters had told him it was a strange feeling when news monitors with 24/7 news started appearing everywhere in newsrooms.

/ / / SEVEN / / /

Perhaps unsurprisingly, many spoke of difficulties maintaining journalistic standards under increasing production pressures. DB pointed out that this often led journalists under stress and pressure to turn to ‘authoritative’ high-status print publications like Spiegel to see “what the real story is”, and that this in turn further fed group thinking, pack mentality and all of that.

/ / / EIGHT / / /

Finally, DB pointed out that many journalists had pointed to what they perceived as an increasing self-referentiality in media coverage, whereas foreign affairs might still be event driven, something happens, it is covered, the domestic coverage was often seen as driven by media events and their reverberations throughout the national media environment.

/ / / Some synthesizing remarks and discussion / / /

DB concluded by saying that the portrait of the state of journalism that arise from his empirical work in Germany is a long way from traditional ideals, whether academic/theoretical or journalistic, of the profession as opinion-builders, truth-finders, watch dogs and whatnot.

In his response, Nick Lemann (NL) pointed out that companies rarely break the numbers down, but that “on the rumor mill”, all the big papers in the U.S. are said to be operating at a loss. So the old meme that ‘the problem is that owners demand unreasonable profit’ is losing its relevance.

He went on to point out, speaking about the US, that the vast majority of the reportorial workforce continues to work for newspapers, and that the historical coincidence that made local newspapers local information monopolies, funded by downtown department stores, is disappearing as (a) the funding side is disintegrating due to demographic and urban changes, (b) advertising in general is hitting a rough spot right now, and also shifting towards various web services, (c) the barriers to entry for information providers are lowered for all online, (d) which has led to increased competition for many kinds of content (international and national coverage, fashion, what not), and that this perfect storm has seriously undermined news organizations’ ability and will to underwrite original reporting.

He pointed out that this development in his view has been exacerbated by the “catastrophic decision” in the 1990s “to give content away for free”. He said that the thinking then was that this way, news organizations could grow their audiences to such sizes that increased ad revenue would cover the decreased income—unfortunately, these ad dollars have not materialized.

He called basic reportorial work, predominantly done by newspaper journalists, “a rock” upon which much, much else rests, not only a lot of the opinion and commentary material generated on blogs, but also much of TV and radio. All supported by the reportorial work done by a handful of people.

And few alternatives seems to be forthcoming. The belief in citizen media and citizen journalisms’ ability to step in and fill the growing gap has eroded, especially at the state and local level where bureaus are being cut dramatically, and where there will often be no one but the local newspaper covering issues.

So what do we do? That is the final question NL asked, and he said that anyone he had a concrete idea for a new business model was welcome to try it out, but that he wanted to see stuff that worked, and that there hadn’t been much in the offering yet. He said that the news industry and journalism in the US “need to go European”, and think about funding models beyond traditional business, potentially involving forms of public subsidy, even state subsidy of reporting, regulations, and the like (RKN: tools that have, as Paul Starr has pointed out in his excellent The Creation of the Media, been integral to the development of the media in the US historically, been seems to be out of vogue at the moment).

I asked DB at the end if he would agree that his synthetic view and 8 observations mainly applied to the corner of journalism that covers high-prestige organizations with highly professionalized staff, and that institutions with (a) less prestige and different audiences, and/or (b) a less traditionally professionalized workforce, like many tabloids, local papers, ethnic papers, and most new media enterprises, would see the situation of “European Journalism in the Era of Digital Information” quite differently, and he seemed to agree.

I also asked about why he thought it was the case that the new media and citizen media discussions and practices in Europe seems to be less developed than in the US. I didn’t really catch his answer, but it had partly to do with an idea that there are other, non-media institutions playing comparable roles in European societies, basically, public meetings standing in for blogs (I’m surely misrepresenting his full answer here). I have not thought this through, but I personally think it also has a lot to do with critical mass—coming from a small country myself, I always find myself thinking, faced with a specialized new media venture ‘would this be possible with a population of 5 million?’ Some would arguably, others probably not.

EVENT DETAILS

Thursday, December 4, 2008
Seminar on Modern Europe: European Journalism in the Era of Digital Information
Speaker: Dominic C. Boyer, Cornell University

Discussants: Jane Kramer, The New Yorker

Nicholas Lemann, Columbia University
Chair: Nancy W. Collins, Columbia University
December 4, 4:00 – 5:30 pm, Burden Room, Low Library
For more information, please contact Myrisha S. Lewis, msl2155@columbia.edu

Interesting discussion on SSRC President Calhoun’s site, right here, with numerous heavy-hitters in sociology and communications studies chipping in on the question–what is the future of the newspaper? I chipped in too, my comment is awaiting moderation.

Laurels to Dave Cohn, working hard on promoting his spot.us project and encouraging other aspiring young journos to embark on their own entrepreneurial ventures.

The idea is very simple, break the processes of journalism down into its constituent elements and try to crowd source the part that seems to have the hardest time right now, which is not the content production (as in citizen media, user-generated content, what not), but the funding.

Hence, four stepts.

1. People submit tips (if they want to, or journos dig stuff up).

2. Journalists pitch stories (so we are talking professionally produced content).

3. People fund pitches (crowd sources funding).

4. Stories are reported, anyone can publish (unless some media company buys exclusive rights, but that’s fine to, it brings in money for reporting, and funding is a central problem).

You can point out a million ways in which this won’t replace or compete with ‘the newspaper’, but don’t even begin singing that song, since that isn’t the point at all. The point is to get some (not all) important reporting done.

I have another little thing I’d like to point out–the very nature of this process brings out in the open some of the steps that come before a story is published, and it seems to me it pulls the material that spot.us can do a little away from ‘breaking news’ in the purest ‘stuff you had never heard about before’ variety. Here, the tip is public, the pitch is public, the funding will accumulate over a period of time, and only then will the final work be done. That takes time and some of that time is spend in public. I actually think this is largely a good thing. If one can say so without sounding too cute, I personally think a central problem with much news journalism is that it is too focused on the newness of news, and too little with why anyone would care. Classic academic complaint, I know.

I think it is an interesting project, and wish him well.

Apropos the discussion we had Tuesday about the future of communications as a field.

Doug Anderson, Dean of Penn State University’s College of Communication, on Poynter

“This fall, we enroll 3,654 undergraduates and 79 master’s and doctoral students. Of our 3,654 undergraduates, some 1,647 are freshmen and sophomores with the remaining 2,007 enrolled as advanced sophomores or juniors or seniors in one of our five majors. Our largest major is journalism, with 717 upper-division students.

We had nearly 2,500 applications last year for this fall’s freshman class. To say that interest in mass communication remains strong would be an understatement.”

(more substance, less fluff, at http://poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=154931)

I will be the teaching assistant on a course on ‘The Changing Dynamics of Public Controversies’ that Todd Gitlin will teach this spring at Columbia. The course is Mondays, 2-4pm. The syllabus is available here. Comments and suggestions welcome.

The communications colloquium that I organize at Columbia hosted a roundtable today, with Michael Schudson (Columbia/UC San Diego), Shannon Mattern (New School), and Helga Tawil-Souri (NYU) talking about different graduate-level courses they have taught to introduce incoming MA and PhD students to the field of communications studies/media studies.

The conversation was wide-ranging and interesting, and obviously partly reflected the institutions the three of them work at. We discussed the distance between the seemingly somewhat ambiguous and indistinct conceptual and theoretical definitions of what exactly the field is supposed to be, and the considerable demand there is for education and research in this area–as reflected by the influx of new students at all levels, and the amount of money that floats to various forms of communications-related research (if not always done in communications departments).

I can’t hope to summarize everything here, but a few observations.

Michael Schudson talked about three different orientations or programs in research in communications, a ‘derived’ that sees communications as determined by something else (economy, politics, organizational logics, what have you), a ‘contextual’ orientation that doesn’t really have an a priori view of the explanatory role of processes of communications, but puts them at the center of analysis nonetheless, and a ‘strong’ program that takes communications as a central and foundational force in human existence. He pointed out that the strong program may still have many adherent in communication studies (various descendants of Marshall McLuhan springs to mind), but that it, in his view, has failed to gain wider currency in the broader intellectual world–and that that is a good thing too. He argued that communications studies doesn’t need a strong program to be viable as a field of inquiry.

Shannon Mattern pointed to the challenge of introducing very different students with various backgrounds and expectations, and often decidedly non-academic interests (in management, in production, in performance) to theories of media and communication. She highlighted how the media program at the new school has tried to move away from an emphasis on ‘key thinkers’ and pre-packaged readers, and towards a thematic approach and an emphasis on theory as practice and live ideas, concretely asking the students to grapple with theories in the fields of media and technology, media and power, plus media and aesthetics. She mentioned that the relatively large size of the media program at the New School helped the department maintain a critical mass where both students and faculty would routinely be asked to step out of their comfort zone and deal with new areas of production, practice, and theory, and mentioned the interesting idea of offering university-wide skills courses in media production akin to writing courses, and for much the same reason–everybody should be equipped to communicate effectively, and that arguably takes more than writing today.

Helga Tawil-Souri spoke about NYU’s transition from the media ecology paradigm inherited from Neil Postman, and towards an uncertain (but no doubt interesting) future. She described how the faculty and comparable programs across the U.S. had been canvassed to map out a master list of core readings that individual courses could then be build from. In contrast to a model of introducing students to the field by introducing them to the faculty at the school they attend (one that Michael mentioned Stanford has used, and that plays a role in the proseminar taught at Columbia too), she explained that at NYU, a conscious decision had been taken to bascially ban work by NYU’s own faculty from the core. The idea being that students would be introduced to their work in other courses.

In the discussion, we talked about the strengths and weaknesses of communication studies as a multi-disciplinary field that arguably imports more than it exports. Todd Gitlin remarked that the lack of export probably has more to do with the protectionism of adjacent fields, and that we therefore shouldn’t worry too much about it–what looks like a weakness to some, a conceptually and empirically heterogenous field, can in fact be precisely the strength of communications research–no one will tell you, ‘that project does not beling in communications!’, no ideas or avenues of inquiery are barred in advance (even if they are of course still always explored at the investigators own risk and cost in terms of time and effort). Julia Sonnevend provided a happy note towards the end by basically validating this idea by pointing out that precisely the fluid and open nature of the field was what had made her decide to opt for communications as the disciplinary and institutional home for her work, over more established and clearly demarcated neighboring disciplines. Cheers to that. And thanks to all for a good dicussion.

With the elections over, this phase of my field work on U.S. electoral campaigns is over. It has been exhilarating, and I am deeply grateful to candidates, campaign staffers, and volunteers for their hospitality and willingness to answer (most) of my questions. Now, I’m back to doing interviews, attending conferences, and reading and writing. Bits and pieces of my findings will make their way into papers I hope to present at MPSA and ICA in the Spring.

I will be in Turkey for the next couple of weeks. I hope to meet a couple of local journalists, intellectuals, and activists, so all contacts are much appreciated. I’ll be in Istanbul and on the Western coast mainly.

on the conference front, I’ve just returned from the International Communication Association‘s annual conference, this year held in Montreal, Canada. I presented two papers, one about the public that is still only the raw material for an argument, and one on blogs I want to submit for publication some time soon. Email me at rkn2103 [at] columbia . edu if you have any questions or would like to read one of the papers.

in addition to presenting, I saw very interesting presentations by a number of people, including a great discussion of media ethnography amongst Georgina Born, S. Elizabeth Bird, and others, a very interesting analytical paper on media output concentration in France and the U.S. by Rodney Benson, and many others.

April 29, Professor Charles ‘Chuck’ Tilly died. I was fortunate enough to be in the last class he taught, and to learn not only from his classroom presence and wonderfully orchestrated class, but also from his geniunely collaborative contentious politics workshop, his prolific writings, and the comments he generously offered on my own work. Let this post join the flurry of emails amongst former students and collaborators, all bearing testimony to all that he has done as a person and an academic to show what it can all be about. Though he is gone, I still think of this as the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Thanks, Chuck.