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JOS23
Theorising JournalismBeyond the Crisis
A. Bruns
1
1
Queensland University of Technology, Digital Media Research Centre, Kelvin Grove, Australia
Around the world, journalism is going through a period of exceptional turmoil and transition, often characterised as a ‘crisis’ (McNair, 2009). This term
highlights the scale of the decline of audiences and markets for traditional, pre-digital news and journalistic media platforms - the centralised, industrial‑
ly-structured, top-down‘legacy media’of the analogue era - and the associated challenge to professional roles and practices. Much has been written about
“the death of newspapers”, even the death of news itself (Charles & Stewart, 2011; McChesney & Nichols, 2010). From this viewpoint, adequately resourced,
editorially and politically independent journalism is at risk. The future of news and journalism has been framed within narratives of cultural pessimism
and anxieties about the potential degeneration of the public sphere, with correspondingly negative implications for democracy itself (Habermas, 2006).
Others point to the dramatic expansion of news and journalistic information in the globalised public sphere (McNair, 2006, 2016), and the observable fact
that there is more such content, from many more sources, available to the average, net-enabled citizen than at any time in human cultural history. While
many legacy media platforms have struggled to cope with digital transition, leading to closures such as that of the Independent’s print edition in the UK
in February 2016, there have at the same time been many additions to the supply of fact- and news-based content online. News and journalism are not
‘dying’, by any objective measure of publicly accessible information, but they are changing. While the quantity of journalistic content is expanding, so too is
its quality evolving. We see the contemporary globalised public sphere increasingly filled by a myriad emerging factual forms and formats, from the ‘citizen
journalism’ of a decade ago to the ‘user-generated content’ of more recent times, and a host of online start-ups such as Gawker, Buzzfeed, and Vice News
which often incorporate user input into more participatory journalistic and quasi-journalistic news production processes.These new sites produce forms and
styles of fact-based content -‘listicles’and other types of infotainment, for example - that challenge traditional norms and definitions of what journalism is,
and should be. While pessimistic narratives of decline often lament these trends, the authors in this panel share a perspective fromwhich journalism can be
argued to be evolving in potentially positive directions that normative critiques of digital trends often fail to acknowledge. This panel evaluates the emerg‑
ing assemblage of journalistic forms, practices, and uses, and asks how we can examine and theorize the state of journalism beyond the crisis. We aim to
develop a rich empirical understanding of the emerging forms of journalism, or factuality, and to identify innovative approaches to understanding the range
of forms of journalism currently practiced and used, moving us beyond the many dichotomies existing in the field: new/old; traditional/emerging; hard/
soft; market-oriented/public journalism. The panel moves beyond the discourse on journalism as a field in crisis, to understand the changes and challenges
in news- and fact-based culture as part of an ongoing transformation of the journalism studies field.
PN 247
Factuality and the Cult of Reality
B. McNair
1
1
Queensland University of Technology, Digital Media Research Centre, Kelvin Grove, Australia
This paper traces the emergence of fact-based content as a key form - arguably The key form - of contemporary globalized culture, driven most recently
by the arrival of digital technology and tools for networking, sharing and ‘produsing’ communication in the public domain by unprecedented numbers
of internet-accessing individuals and organisations. Contrary to the predictions of the decline of ‘quality’ journalism which accompanied the early years
of the internet, and the fracturing of the established business models of print and linear broadcast journalism producers, we can observe as of 2016 that
there is more news and journalism available to the average internet user than has ever been possible in the history of human culture - far more, indeed,
than any one individual can conceivably consume in a day, a week or a lifetime. In addition, there has been an explosion in the cultural popularity of fact-
based journalistic hybrids such as true crime documentary series (Making AMurderer, Serial), feature length documentaries for cinema and online platforms
(Netflix obviously, but also a string of commercially successful feature-length documentaries going back to Fahrenheit 9/11 [Moore, 2004] and beyond).
The rise of reality TV and ‘docu-soaps’in prime time linear TV in the late 1990s, exemplified by the success of global franchises such as Big Brother andWife
Swap (McNair and Enli, 2010), filled mainstream popular culture with tales of ‘real people’ doing ordinary, and then sometimes extraordinary things. In
these and other ways the real, as opposed to the fictional or the imagined, has eclipsed traditional narrative formats in cinema, TV and literature, producing
what I wish to call a sociologically significant ‘cult of reality’. As part of the conceptual groundwork for a large, transnational study of the evolution of fact-
based content online (or‘factuality’, to signal our concern with a range of forms broader than the conventional models of liberal journalism), this paper will
consider, a) the cult of reality in late capitalist culture which can be said to have begun in the late 1990s/early 2000s with the emergence of docu-soaps and
reality TV, and which is now reflected in the phenomenal success of digitally distributed docu-series such as Making A Murderer, Serial and other works;
b) the quantitative proliferation of fact- and news based forms online, from the recognisably ‘straight’ journalistic content of big global brands such as
the BBC and News Corporation to the ever-growing number of online start-ups which work with hybrids of various kinds. If these media forms and formats
can clearly be connected to journalism as normatively defined in the pre-digital era, in what respects can they be said to diverge from those ideals? And
depending on the answer to that question, c) what might be the implications for democratic political cultures which have hitherto relied on a traditional
concept of journalism rooted in early liberal democratic theory for a variety of public goods, such as the construction and maintenance of informed citizen‑
ries and accountable political elites?