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JOS29 Conceptualising JournalismElsewhere
T. Witschge1
1 University of Groningen, Media Studies and Journalism, Groningen, Netherlands
For decades, journalism as an institution has shown a resilience to change (Costera Meijer 2005). It revolved around professional organisations with a news‑
room as a central workplace incorporating a stable set of practices, codes of ethics and business models. Recently, however, journalism has entered a state
of flux. There are new distribution channels (such as Blendle), new organisations (such as Google News), new news producers (such as citizen journalists),
new working conditions (with changing working hours and work places) and new technologies (including mobile applications and transmedia storytelling
platforms). In this panel, we propose approaches that help us conceptualise the current developments in journalism in terms of organisational structures
and the people and material conditions involved in the production of journalism from a very particular vantage point: we explore theories that help us
understand the production of journalism across the board, in particular on the margins of and outside legacy news organisations, what we call ‘Journalism
Elsewhere’. Despite the rapid rise of Journalism Elsewhere, the dominant ways of theorising and studying journalism still turn a blind eye (Wahl-Jorgensen
2009). New stakeholders, platforms, practices, technologies, professionals and professional values remain under-theorised and understudied. Examining
the changes in the field of journalism from a variety of approaches that are complementary and even conflicting, this panel highlights the complexity
of the field. To this end, we present an exchange between different theoretical perspectives on journalism in the broadest sense. This exchange is aimed at
understanding the current developments in journalism in such a way that we can capture and embrace journalism’s ‘complex, flexible, and multifaceted’
(Tracy 2010: 841) nature – a research agenda that is guided by the principle of requisite variety (Ashby 1956). This principle inspires us to find ways to
address the multifaceted, multivalent nature of Journalism Elsewhere. Ultimately we aim to critically interrogate the commonalities and, in particular,
the discrepancies and tensions that arise from the various perspectives on journalism proposed in this panel: journalism as ecologies, as experience, as
networks, as emotion and as practice. References Ashby, W.R. (1956). An introduction to cybernetics. New York, J. Wiley Costera Meijer, I. (2005). Impact or
content? Ratings vs quality in public broadcasting. European Journal of Communication, 20(1), 27–53. Tracy, S. J. (2010). Qualitative quality: Eight big-tent
criteria for excellent qualitative research. Qualitative inquiry, 16(10), 837–851. Wahl-Jorgensen, K. (2009). News production, ethnography, and power: On
the challenges of newsroom-centricity. In S. E. Bird (Ed.), Journalism and Anthropology (pp. 21–35). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
PN 318 Journalism as Temporal Ecology
C.W. Anderson1
1 City University of New York, New York, USA
This paper aims to be the synthetic theoretical and methodological statement on the question of how to study newsrooms in an age of rapid technological
change and the digital dispersion of news function (Downie and Schudson 2009; Wright, Phillips, and Witschge 2011 ). It argues that, to conduct ethno‑
graphic research on news production in the 21st century, this research needs to circulate throughout both the newsroom and the larger news ecosystem that
surrounds that newsroom. Second, it needs to pursue a strategy of following the fragments of news stories and news artifacts across that larger ecosystem
as well, cataloging how shards of evidence combine and recombine in order to produce a variety of journalistic products. Finally, it argues that ethnogra‑
phers need to maintain a particular kind of historical sensibility as they pursue an understanding of journalistic technology use in real time. Maintaining this
genealogical temperament, I argue, will allow researchers to see the ways that the values and routines of journalism are both embedded in technologies
and how those artifacts change slowly over time. I illustrate this theoretical and methodological perspective with several case studies drawn from different
research projects conducted over the past decade: the study of the use of data in newsrooms (see also Coddington 2015; Lewis and Westlund 2015; Usher,
forthcoming) an analysis of a piece of political coverage repeated several times in different ways over a fifteen year period (Anderson 2013), and a study
of the use of analytics in newsrooms (Christin 2014). I conclude by drawing all these threads together and reflecting on the larger role of ethnography in
the digital age. Anderson, C.W. 2013. Rebuilding the News: Metropolitan Journalism in the Digital Age. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press Chris‑
tin, A. 2014. “When it comes to chasing clicks, journalists say one thing but feel pressure to do another,” Nieman Journalism Lab. Online at .
niemanlab.org/2014/08/when-it-comes-to-chasing-clicks-journalists-say-one-thing-but-feel-pressure-to-do-another/ Coddington, M. 2014. “Clarifying
Journalism’s Computational Turn: A typology for evaluating data journalism, computational journalism, and computer-assisted reporting.”Digital Journal‑
ism 3(3): 331–348 Downie, L. and Michael Schudson. 2009.The Reconstruction of American Journalism.Tow Center at Columbia University, online at http://
Lewis, S. and OscarWestlund. 2014.“Big Data and Journalism: Epistemology, expertise,
economics, and ethics.”Digital Journalism Usher, N. Forthcoming. Interactive Journalism: Hackers, Data and Code. Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois
Press. Wright, P., Angela Philips, and TamaraWitschge (eds). 2011. Changing Journalism. New York, NY: Routledge.
PN 319 Journalism as Experience: Why It Matters and What Differences It Makes
I. Costera Meijer1
1 VU University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands
When scholars study journalism, in particular quality journalism, they usually focus on the product, the norms and routines of the organisation or the pro‑
fessionals. Consequently, news quality is what professionals understand as news quality:“diversity, relevance, ethics, impartiality, objectivity and compre‑
hensibility” (Urban and Schweiger, 2014:821). In this tradition what counts is whether people recognize these news qualities and are able to apply them.
What remains underresearched is an important dimension of journalism’s quality: the actual experience of making and using it. In this paper I will explain
what journalism studies can gain by investigating journalism from this angle. Instead of approaching quality journalism as a particular content, genre or
taste, the paper uses John Dewey’s (1985, 1934) theorization of experience as a framework to investigate quality journalism as a particular experience,
an event unfolding in time, arousing interest and affording enjoyment. From then on the paper will move to central concepts, borrowed from entertainment