Abstract
In Journalism as Activism, Adrienne Russell charts what she sees as a new, digitally driven ‘space’ of journalism that comprises diverse networks of actors and information sources rather than the content products, standards and prerogatives of professionalized journalism and the institutional power of news organizations and the press. In this new space, conventional boundaries between issue advocacy and activist intervention, on one hand, and the impartiality and watchdog role of traditional journalistic practice and the press, on the other, blur as news organizations, the academy, government, commerce, activist movements and civil-society groups borrow and adapt elements of each other’s missions, ethics, tools and practices to advance their aims. Russell argues that no single, pervasive ‘media logic’ explains or governs this emergent space. Instead, both journalists and activists share a more diffuse ‘hacktivist sensibility’ that guides their priorities and practices and challenges traditional journalistic norms.
Russell illustrates these points with basic network analyses of media and activist organizations that shared content about three major protest projects/actions: Occupy Wall Street in 2011, the People’s Climate March in 2014, and The Day We Fight Back anti-surveillance protest, also in 2014. A selection of content items from ‘first and second tier’ legacy news and opinion media, newer online news sites, activist and advocacy sites and other online sources (e.g. government, academic, non-governmental organizations) for each case were categorized, first by the organizational source (outlet) for each item, and then by the activist ‘voices’ quoted in the items. A network graph was generated for each case, showing media outlets as nodes linked by shared content items. The percentage of links, by outlets and by voices, was reported for each graph.
The results suggest the prominence of what Russell calls ‘connective’ (i.e. social) media like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube alongside legacy media like The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Mother Jones, The Wall Street Journal and well-known online sites like the Huffington Post and ProPublica. Each network also includes a roster of interlinked, issue-driven activist and advocacy sites, which are far more numerous and (perhaps counter-intuitively) influential than might be expected (although this is a common pattern in network analytic studies, where the relative influence of nodes in a network is often depicted using characteristically skewed power-law, Pareto, Zipf, cumulative advantage or ‘long tail’ distributions).
Russell devotes the final three chapters to the crossover and adaptation of tools, practices and power arrangements between journalism and activism in this new landscape. The ‘Tools’ chapter provides a useful inventory of apps, search and data analysis/visualization tools that activists and journalists have adopted or developed to interact, protect themselves and their sources and document and report events. The ‘Practice’ chapter includes a discussion of changing journalistic values and norms, institutional and public interests, and quality of sources and evidence fostered by digital media systems. Four notable writer/activists (environmentalist and essayist Bill McKibben; attorney, civil liberties advocate, columnist and online publisher Glenn Greenwald; hacktivist, technology pundit and citizen journalist Tim Pool; and Juliana Rotich, blogger and founder of the open-source crowd-mapping application Ushahidi) are profiled as archetypes of this new journalistic practice. The book’s concluding chapter, ‘Power’, considers how media power has shifted from the concentrated institutional power of traditional mass media to more volatile patterns of power relations seen in present-day online media.
To some extent, Journalism as Activism can be situated within the growing literature on citizen, participatory, grass-roots or community journalism (including, more lately, data journalism and data activism). These studies show how activist groups and media adopt the ethos and practices of professional journalism to advance what are often minority or marginalized stories and perspectives. It is a domain of contemporary activism that has been deeply influenced by the ‘hacker ethic’ as well as the affordability, reach and affordances of digital media technologies, with roots in the 19th and 20th century labour, immigrant and ethnic press, and the underground anti-war and anti-racist media in the mid-20th century, among other influences. Russell goes a step further, to argue that the influence moves both ways: just as activists are adopting the practices, codes and tools of professional journalism, journalists are adopting the advocacy, political and ethical commitments, mobilization tactics, and interventionist ‘hacker’ stance of activism.
There are a few (minor) methodological problems. Only one network metric is reported for any of the three cases (in-degree centrality, measured as the percentage of all network links pointing to a given node, in this case media organizations/outlets). Yet the media outlets being examined surely have complex, reciprocal and indirect relations that could have been teased out further using additional measures like connectedness and density, multiplexity and directness of links, network structure (clusters, subgraphs), which would give readers a more nuanced view of each network’s structure. Similarly, a discussion of the long-tail or power-law characteristics that appear to be at work could provide further support for the contention that activist norms, practices and tools are diffusing into online journalism. In addition, many of the graphics are difficult to read. Only a few labels are visible on the most dense network graph (for Occupy Wall Street). In-degree centrality is visualized with ‘deconstructed pie charts’: slices of each pie float on the page, arrayed in columns without clear reference to circular wholes. On page 62, the slices are finally assembled at the bottom of a table, but the wholes are too small to label, and each pie has a substantial missing portion. (First rule of pie charts: only appropriate when the sections add up to 100% of something.)
Technicalities aside, Journalism as Activism also raises more substantive questions. Some key terms could be more fully elaborated or justified; for example, the phrase ‘connective media’ here denotes social media platforms that occupy key positions in online media networks. Russell draws an analogy with Lance Bennett’s and Alexandra Segerberg’s concept of ‘connective action’, but it would be helpful to theorize more explicitly how ‘connective’ applies concretely to media outlets and voices, versus Bennett and Segerberg’s focus on individual expression and interpersonal interaction as movement organization and mobilization mechanisms online.
Similarly, Russell stresses a shared ‘hacktivist sensibility’ that encourages journalists and activists to borrow from one another’s values, practices, tools, issue agendas and so on. It is presumably fostered by the disruptive nature of digital media tools and platforms whose hackable hardware and software make them adaptable to activist intervention. Certainly, she is right to reject a single technological or institutional ‘media logic’ as a straightforward explanation for media power. The adaptability of digital media tools, and the ‘tinkering’ they afford, are intrinsic to digital infrastructures and the engineering cultures that create them, and distinguish them from the stabilized, one-way transmission structures of electronic and mechanical mass media.
However, the infrastructure of digital media may shape and constrain users’ options more significantly than Russell supposes. Over the last decade, far more effort and investment has gone into developing closed, proprietary platforms like Facebook, Google or Twitter (and their walled-garden business models) than to developing open, non-proprietary protocols such as TCP/IP or the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), which were deliberately designed to allow anyone to build new services or platforms onto a standardized, installed base. Ironically, the very platforms Russell praises as ‘connective media’ are among the most locked-down, stabilized, IP-protected and hack-resistant elements of the digital media landscape: in a real sense, they have themselves become digital legacy media. While users may have some latitude to develop refinements that add value to an existing commercial platform, to the extent that its Application Programming Interface (APIs) and licensing agreements permit, there is little opportunity for users to modify fundamental architecture or affordances. This trend towards enclosure would seem to be a direct challenge to the hacktivist sensibility Russell describes, though one that could prompt even more creative intervention or workarounds.
It is also debatable whether renowned issue activists like McKibben and Greeenwald should be portrayed as a new species of ‘knowledge journalists’. Journalists have always developed specialized knowledge, whether as political or investigative reporters, foreign correspondents, obituary writers, beat reporters, essayists or editorialists. Russell compares these writers to prominent 20th-century public intellectuals, who helped set the agenda for public culture and whose passing from the public scene from the 1970s onwards was widely lamented in academic and publishing circles. We might also recall the ‘new journalism’ of the 1960s and after, when writers like Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Hunter Thompson and Truman Capote depicted themselves as participants, and not just observers, in the stories and social scenes they covered. The idea that writers like Tim Pool or Greenwald are merely rejecting journalistic ‘objectivity’ (always something of a straw man) in favour of a new activist subjectivity is too simple an explanation and underestimates the very complexity and hybridity of values, advocacy and reporting that Russell proposes.
We might also ask whether the blurring lines between activism and journalism and some of the tactics they share (e.g. issue advocacy, ‘unfiltered’ content, suspension of editorial gatekeeping and fact-checking in favour of immediate live feeds, the pursuit of virality and page views) may have contributed to the current atmosphere of prosecutorial political and cultural partisanship, and the erosion of trust in institutions and expertise. Similar rapid-response, adversarial tactics are deployed by reactionary groups and progressive muckrakers alike. Pressures to ‘feed the beast’ in an always-everywhere news cycle may have the positive effect of opening media discourse to more diverse, undiscovered or marginalized voices (of almost any persuasion), but the same pressures and tactics encourage the resort to false equivalence, clickbait, ‘post-truth’ and ‘alternative facts’.
Finally, Journalism as Activism does not directly address the ways that digital technologies have affected the nature of journalistic (and, for that matter, activist) work.Job insecurity, precarity, piecework and burnout are common among online journalists, especially for the boundary-crossing freelancers, community activists and grass-roots journalists Russell describes. Its intensive pace and relentless demands make onlinejournalism a prime example of what Gina Neff has called venture labour. Media practitioners and activists are expected to provide their own tools, training, tech support, transportation, financial security and health insurance; often, they personally assume the losses if a publisher doesn’t pay or a story doesn’t attract enough page views. Working conditions are not Russell’s main focus, but they surely influence the ability of activists and journalists to sustain the kinds of reporting, watchdogging and advocacy that social change requires.
Overall, however, these are points for further conversation, rather than major criticisms. Journalism as Activism provides a lively account of this transitional moment in journalism practice, including the plethora of constantly morphing technical platforms and affordances, the shifting affinities and alliances among media professionals and growing ranks of aspiring online journalists, and the increasingly destabilized power of news organizations as authoritative institutions. The book would be an outstanding addition to the reading list of any course on activist media or journalism practice.