Trading zones,boundary objects,and the pursuit of news innovation

Abstract

Amid growing calls for greater collaboration between journalism and computer programming, this article examines a salient case study that reveals processes of communication, exchange, and work production at the intersection of these social and occupational worlds. We focus on a key stage of the Knight-Mozilla News Technology partnership – namely, an online ‘Learning Lab’ through which 60 individuals sought to coordinate around a shared interest in the innovation of journalism through open-source software. Drawing on the science and technology studies concepts of trading zones and boundary objects, we explore how distinct understandings about news and technology converged, diverged, and ultimately blended around three thematic ambitions: making news more process-oriented, participatory, and socially curated. This window onto boundary negotiations in journalism provides a glimpse into the future development of news and its norms and values, as programmers and their ethics assume a greater role in the journalistic field – in the very heart of some of its leading institutions.

Keywords

Boundaries computer programming digital journalism hacking innovation open source participation science and technology studies (STS)

Introduction

Communication and media professions – as occupations, organizations, and individuals – confront a similar challenge: the need to innovate and adapt in a seemingly precarious environment of rapid social, cultural, and technological change. While precarity has become the norm for media work (Deuze, 2007), perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the case of journalism, an occupation that has seen its social authority and economic rationale challenged like few others in the digital era (Anderson, 2013a; Ryfe, 2012; Usher, 2014). The news industry has been buffeted by declining advertising revenue, fragmenting audiences, and managerial missteps in transitioning from legacy to digital modes of production and distribution. Amid the pursuit of solutions in recent years, many leading voices in the journalistic field – including foundations such as the Knight Foundation, research centers such as the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, and training hubs such as the Poynter Institute – have pushed for traditional journalism to embrace computer science. The arguments put forth by these key stakeholders are that skills such as computer programming, data science, and software development – and the skilled technologists who know how to manipulate data and code in such fashion – will both improve editorial products and assist in developing business solutions (cf. Lewis and Westlund, 2015).¹ Typifying this international movement, and evident inside a host of major news organizations around the world, is the rise of news application teams: groups of ‘programmer–journalists’ who build mobile apps, online databases, and data interactives and visualizations (Howard, 2014; Parasie and Dagiral, 2013; Royal, 2012; Usher, 2016).

At the same time, journalism education has made connections with computer science a top priority. In the United States, Columbia University offers a joint degree in journalism and computer science, Northwestern University gives scholarships to programmers interested in journalism, and Stanford University has refreshed its graduate program to require training in data journalism. Elsewhere, Cardiff University in the United Kingdom offers a new graduate degree in computational journalism. Many other universities have begun moving in similar directions, as computational approaches to journalism become key organizing frameworks for future-of-news discourse and experimentation (Anderson, 2013b). Meanwhile, other aspects of this phenomenon are more grassroots and networked in nature, playing out in localized ways through the likes of Hacks/Hackers, a worldwide group dedicated to helping journalists (hacks) and technologists (programmers) coordinate and collaborate informally around a shared interest in applying technology to improve journalism (Lewis and Usher, 2014).

Amid such developments, it is critical to explore how journalism and computer science/programming intersect, given their distinct cultures, values, and modes of working (Lewis and Usher, 2013). If journalists and programmers indeed are to coordinate and collaborate for the future of news, how are they to accomplish such coordination, exchange, and production across disciplinary boundaries separating these social and occupational worlds?

This article examines one of the first, most international, and well-funded intersections of journalism and programming: the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership. This multiyear partnership, which began with US$2.5 million in 2011 and received additional funding thereafter, was created to develop open-source software innovations for news and apply them in some of the world’s leading newsrooms.² It was established with this promise:

The partnership will accelerate media innovation by solving technological challenges, developing new news products and services of the Web and embedding technologists in news organizations. Everything done through the Knight-Mozilla Innovation Challenge and by Knight-Mozilla Fellows will be open, providing knowledge, solutions and open-source products that are valuable and useful to the whole field. This partnership spurs media innovation and helps news organizations facing the same or similar challenges understand how to solve them.³

In this study, we focus on one particular stage of the partnership, called the ‘Learning Lab’, where a class of 60 individuals – chosen for their previously submitted ideas for news innovation – participated in a monthlong virtual learning environment that demanded at least 10 hours per week of involvement in July and August 2011. The incentive for these 60 people, including journalists and programmers alike, was the opportunity to become one of the five Knight-Mozilla Fellows who would spend a fully funded year in one of the program’s partner newsrooms: Al Jazeera English, Boston.com, Zeit Online, the BBC, and The Guardian. While the Knight-Mozilla program attracted people focused on a shared concern – the innovation of journalism through open-source technology – the resulting Learning Lab that we analyze here featured individuals with a wide variety of backgrounds, beliefs, and skills with respect to news and technology.

The rationale for such a case study lies in understanding the nature of professions and their boundaries. The sociological study of science, medicine, and other professional domains has shown how occupational fields (and the social actors within them) negotiate their standing vis-à-vis other fields, perpetually struggling for ‘jurisdiction’ through which to assert control over a certain knowledge base and the execution of that knowledge (Abbott, 1988). Gieryn’s (1983) study of scientists describes this patrolling of social boundaries as ‘boundary work’, and Starr’s (1982) study of medicine further demonstrates how professions manage boundaries to establish ‘cultural authority’ by demarcating certain people and practices. Altogether, boundaries are symbolic contests by which different actors compete for definitional control, allowing them to apply or remove certain labels, or otherwise establish authority over a social domain (Carlson, 2015; Carlson and Lewis, 2015). And yet boundaries need not be simply sites of contestation; research in science and technology studies (STS) has demonstrated that boundaries can be seen as means of coordination rather than merely disagreement. Crystallizing this perspective, Stark (2009) argues that in contrast to conventional wisdom that differences breed conflict and shared understandings equal cooperation, ‘it is through unshared typifications, through uncommon attributions, through divergent or misaligned understandings that problematic situations can give way to positive reconstructions’ (p. 192, emphasis original).

These conceptual concerns have great practical meaning with the boundaries of journalism in flux: notions of who is a journalist, what counts as journalism, and which types of people and practices get to claim journalistic authority have been shaken up in a moment of social, mobile, and interactive media. This case study thus offers a window onto boundary negotiations in journalism. Namely, as the boundaries of journalism expand to accommodate new actors (such as computer programmers), as well as potentially new ideas, norms, and values introduced by such boundary crossing, how might new definitions of news emerge – and what might that suggest about the future development of this occupation in transition? In particular, given the presumably divergent character of journalists and technologists brought together in this Learning Lab space, how might forms of conflict and/or coordination occur, as these groups work toward the goal of open-source innovation in journalism? To explore these questions, we examined various elements of the multilayered Learning Lab using a combination of online ethnography and qualitative analysis. Our examination focuses on (and discusses in this order) the backgrounds of participants, the lectures presented, the interactions between journalists and technologists in various chat logs, and the final project of the lab: a video pitch for proposed software that might improve news.

Literature review

As Stark (2009) argues in The Sense of Dissonance, there can be a purpose – indeed, a sense – to dissonance or to the discordance that can arise at the intersection of competing value sets. Such a view suggests that innovation arises not out of homogeneous cooperation but rather out of heterogeneous, even fractious, assemblages of individuals and ideas. Such a notion runs counter to conventional thinking in social science research that coordination is dependent on mutual understandings or implicitly shared perceptions or values (Lainer-Vos, 2013). And yet an appreciation for the generative possibilities of friction – of what may be achieved through cooperation among different groups with diverse, even competing, perspectives – is one that has long held currency in STS.

Scholars in STS have developed concepts for explaining how diverse communities – whether formal institutions or networked arrangements of individuals – come together, exchange knowledge and resources, and coordinate productively, even as they maintain their distinct social identities and cultures (e.g. Galison, 1997; Star and Griesemer, 1989). In recent years, however, such concepts and ideas have spread beyond STS to gain currency in a variety of research domains and the intersections among them (Star, 2010), including the study of institutions (Morrill, 2012), education (Mills and Huber, 2005), management (Zeiss and Groenewegen, 2009), and cultural history (Turner, 2005). This is true also in the study of media and communication, covering issues such as networked arrangements in journalism (Ananny, 2013), organizational dynamics of interactive marketing (Kellogg et al., 2006), and interpersonal communication (Barley et al., 2012). In this article, we draw on this theoretical framing to explore a particular case of two groups with different cultures – programmers and journalists – who yet were tasked with developing a cohesive partnership of creative production.

Trading zones and boundary objects

One of the strongest cases in favor of innovation through dissonance, Stark (2009) suggests, is Galison’s (1997) Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, which reveals the distinctive cultures of 20th-century physics, each with its own identities, traditions, and epistemological claims. While the differences among the different classes of physicists remained enduring, Galison illustrates how these groups interacted through a sociotechnical space he calls a ‘trading zone’ – a set of physical places and technical arrangements (such as laboratories) as well as processes of social interaction. He famously concludes that, in the trading zone, even though different groups ascribe different meanings to words like ‘mass’ and ‘energy’:

Two groups can agree on rules of exchange even if they ascribe utterly different significance to the objects being exchanged; they may even disagree on the meaning of the exchange process itself. Nonetheless, the trading partners can hammer out a local coordination despite vast global differences. (Galison, 1997: 783)

The concept of trading zone is thus particularly suited to describing the productive possibilities at the intersection of, even misunderstanding among, heterogeneous actors. In trading zones, such actors manage to work together through the development of what Galison calls contact languages. These languages begin first as a pidgin and then eventually emerge into a creole – a linguistic blending that allows both groups to converse, converge their thinking, and ultimately create productively.

A related concept from STS is Star and Griesemer’s (1989) notion of boundary objects. Star and Griesemer, along with other scholars (e.g. Barley et al., 2012; Bowker and Star, 1999; Fujimura, 1992), suggest that different groups with distinct identities, types of expertise, or occupational backgrounds can come together around particular objects to communicate and collaborate, without losing any allegiance to their own field and its particular frame of reference toward those objects. Boundary objects thus are plastic enough to facilitate a variety of meanings across knowledge boundaries – yet simultaneously ‘rigid enough to support particular meanings within them’ (Barley et al., 2012: 281; see also Star and Griesemer, 1989: 393). In examining the early years of Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California–Berkeley, Star and Griesemer described how a diverse mix of amateur naturalists, professional scientists, administrators, and others determined which artifacts should be included in the museum and how such objects should be explained. Such boundary objects, either real or imagined, have ‘different meanings in different social worlds but their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them recognizable, a means of translation’ (Star and Griesemer, 1989: 393). In the case we analyze here, news can be said to be the boundary object. It may mean certain things to programmers, who have their own occupational and ideological foundations, and something else to journalists. Nevertheless, in the case examined here, the two groups are united by their interest in the object itself, in its dissemination and use – much like an object in a museum.

Boundary objects are not always material objects (though see Levina and Vaast, 2005). Instead, news in this case may be understood as having ‘coincident boundaries’: that is, it is a relatively common object (i.e. news and information) with familiar boundaries, and yet different groups understand the internals of the object differently. In Star and Griesemer’s study, the maps of California created by amateur conservationists and the professional biologists shared the same geopolitical boundaries of the state, but the internal aspects were different – the conservationists emphasizing campsites and trails, the biologists shading in areas associated with abstract ecological ‘life zones’. Writing about this finding, Barley and colleagues (2012) noted, ‘As Star and Griesemer observed, even though these experts from different knowledge domains did not agree why California’s borders were important, all agreed that the borders were important and, as a result, were able to achieve a common focus’ (p. 283). Likewise, different parties may readily recognize the general contour and importance of news while having different mental models for what the internal workings of news (should) look like.

Toward news innovation in the digital era

In journalism studies, there are examples of diverse cultures combining and working together toward a shared purpose of improving news. However, in many of these situations, journalists have tended to ‘normalize’ new media technologies and their related sociocultural influences, applying existing norms and practices and thereby squelching the potential for fundamental change. From a technological standpoint, this normalization was evident in journalists’ incorporation of blogs (Singer, 2005), and particularly in the co-optation of citizen journalism (Usher, 2011) and user-generated content (Williams et al., 2011), usurping the potential for unconventional and nonnarrative forms of news by rendering them as sources subject to verification in the traditional news process (Wardle and Williams, 2010). This same trend was evident in the introduction of online journalists into the newsroom. While embodying different ideals of what news could be online (Singer, 2003), these digital journalists became normalized into traditional news roles and processes (cf. Belair-Gagnon, 2015).

It is true, of course, that many traditional news organizations have attempted to transform themselves to accommodate a changing media environment. A long line of literature has chronicled newsroom change during the past decade: from experiments with convergence (e.g. Dupagne and Garrison, 2006) to adaptations to the Web (e.g. Boczkowski, 2010) to relative willingness to adopt innovations (e.g. Steensen, 2009). On balance, the story line connecting these studies is one of news organizations looking internally for solutions, resisting external forces of change, and making strategic decisions that may not take into account larger social, cultural, and material evolutions in technology.

Nevertheless, there is growing evidence not only that journalism’s boundaries are becoming more fluid and contested in this moment of technology change but also that such boundary reformations are allowing a variety of new people, practices, and processes to influence the very nature of what constitutes journalism (Carlson and Lewis, 2015). Some of this boundary spanning is the inevitable result of a media environment with lower barriers to publishing and distributing information. Other aspects involve more deliberate attempts to introduce external ideas into journalism, as in the case of the Knight Foundation’s use of innovation contests to attract software developers to take up journalistic problems (Lewis, 2011). Moreover, the development of online journalism has involved novel forms of interactive storytelling that can be seen as key points of exchange among traditional journalists specialized in narrative and technologists specialized in data, graphics, and visualization (Royal, 2012; Usher, 2014, 2016). What remains unclear, however, is the extent to which such social interactions and boundary crossings are associated with changing, even in the slightest degree, the long-standing norms and ideological commitments of journalism (Lewis, 2012b; cf. Waisbord, 2013). Thus, journalism’s ideology – around matters such as public service, autonomy, objectivity, immediacy, and ethics (Deuze, 2005) – becomes a point of reference through which to examine the divergence and convergence of worldviews among participants in the Learning Lab.

Case study and methods

In 2011, Knight and Mozilla announced the formation of the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership, a collaboration between the largest philanthropic funder of journalism initiatives and the originator of the nonprofit Firefox browser.⁴ As Mozilla explained, ‘Whether you’re a writer, a developer, a designer, a statistician, an artist, or just a net saavy [sic] muckraker, we want you’.⁵ The contest’s ultimate prize, after a series of challenges that winnowed the field of aspirants, was a fully funded, yearlong fellowship for five people, each embedded in one of five partner newsrooms: the BBC, Boston.com, Al Jazeera, the Guardian, and Germany’s Zeit Online.

Year 1 began with a series of challenges in late spring 2011. These were broadcast to as many people as Mozilla and Knight could reach, designed to generate submissions from around the world, all focused on three particular problems: how to make news videos more engaging, how to reimagine comments and debate online, and how to make news more participatory and therefore ‘people powered’. A panel would judge the submissions, which were publicly available for comment and rating by anyone. Sixty people with the best ideas were invited to an online learning lab, a monthlong experience in summer 2011 that demanded 3 days of the week, plus homework. Through this learning lab, programmers would learn about journalism and journalists about programming. At the conclusion of the lab, each participant pitched a final project – a software application for improving news – and then the group was judged again. The remaining 20 finalists were given a trip to Berlin, where there would be ‘more hacking and less yakking’, as Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, was fond of saying. And from this hackfest, alongside representatives from the news organizations on hand to meet their new colleague, five winners were selected for the inaugural year. It is important to note that in this project, the word hacker was often interchanged with the word programmer. In this case, ‘hacker’ referred not to a thief or mischief-maker but rather to a builder of tools designed to help others solve problems through technology (Coleman, 2012; Usher, 2016).

The Learning Lab was organized around a series of 11 lectures, but it also featured a wider set of activities, discussions, and projects. Most lectures included a video stream and PowerPoint presentation from the lecturer, and each lecture also featured a running chat log filled with questions and commentary from participants, giving journalists and programmers the chance to ask each other (and the lecturer) questions in real time. Participants engaged in their own informal conversations, both in the lecture chat logs and via Internet Relay Chat (IRC), a protocol for real-time chat that is popular among programmers. They often arranged online meet-ups via the video Hangout feature on Google+. Additionally, participants were required to maintain an active presence on the Learning Lab site.⁶ They were given regular feedback from the facilitators on their weekly assignments (typically, blog posts) and on the quality of their commenting. They also were encouraged to work with each other to help craft the lab’s final project, the video pitches for a news software product. The information that we examined in this analysis were the Learning Lab lectures, the weekly blog posts (which participants were required to post as well as make comments on others’ posts), the final-project videos, and various forms of discussion – the online ‘backchannel’ chat log that accompanied the lectures, tweets, IRC chats, and two Google Hangout sessions. In terms of demographic composition, Lab participants were mostly from the United States and Western Europe, with a handful representing other parts of the Americas and Asia. The group was evenly divided among journalists and programmers, with slightly more men than women.

One might expect to find a divergence of attitudes and approaches from such an international crowd. However, there is reason to believe that cross-cultural or cross-national differences do not necessarily lead to significantly different perceptions about journalism and/or programming. As one example, the grassroots network Hacks/Hackers, which has some 75 city-based chapters around the world, has been shown to have great consistency in its efforts and understandings in a wide variety of geographical settings (Lewis and Usher, 2014). Similarly, the popular Data Journalism Handbook sources best practices for data, programming, and journalism from a globally diverse set of contributors and cases (Gray et al., 2012). Ultimately, while programmers and journalists may have distinct perceptions about news, respective cultural differences do not appear to be as salient as one might assume.

Our methods draw on online approaches to ethnography (Hine, 2009; Kozinetz, 2009). Online ethnographers spend their time immersing themselves in participant observation of the digital representations of people’s thoughts, ideas, and actions. At the outset, participants were informed that we wished to observe the entirety of their public communication online, to which there were no objections. Moreover, all digital activities were public and ‘on the record’. Our analysis focused on the social interactions that shaped how understandings about journalism, technology, and innovation were developed through the course of the lab. Of particular interest was the final-project material: a total of 49 videos, each roughly 2 minutes in length, submitted by participants. We relied on Glaser and Strauss’ (1967) grounded theory approach for assessing patterns that emerged from the data. We first looked for codes, then concepts, and then organized these into common themes that began to answer our overarching question: How do journalists and programmers coordinate around a shared interest in news and its digital innovation? We then organized these themes according to the various temporal stages in the lab and with reference to our theoretical grounding. For all data, we kept an off-line file repository whereby we could code this data looking for organizing themes – for example, how journalists saw programmers and how programmers saw journalists. We paid careful attention to direct conversation between programmers and journalists about these matters. The analysis proceeds subsequently.

Data and analysis

Different backgrounds, common purpose

The lab brought together in a virtual, networked space two distinct occupational groups. These journalists and programmers were connected from globally disparate places (mostly the United States and Europe but also Colombia, Mexico, Canada, the Philippines, India, and Ukraine). Within each of these groups, there was still considerable diversity in background. Some programmers had worked in Web development for news organizations, while others were interested in news and information more generally, having never stepped foot in a newsroom. Most journalists were Web savvy; some had worked for major media companies, others for small foundations, and some were freelancers.

The Learning Lab began with a single assignment: Introduce Yourself. In videos, song, and prose, journalists and programmers shared their distinct backgrounds as well as their common interest: news innovation. From the beginning, the lab was designed to help a globally and occupationally diverse set of individuals come to identify themselves through a combination of place for exchange (trading zone) and artifact for collaboration (boundary object). The intention was to enable different groups not only to coordinate with each other but also to see one another as part of a unified ambition for news innovation.

The biographical profile of Washington, DC-based Maura Youngman seemed to speak for many of the journalists involved with the Learning Lab:

Passionate about getting untold stories told. Enjoying crashing the journalism revolution party. Intrigued by interactive storytelling methods, passionate about new models in international journalism. Happy to be here. More hack than hacker, experienced in original content creation (video, audio, photography) and project management.

She was a journalist, to be sure, and identified as such. This was her skill set, but she was committed to the ‘journalism revolution party’, hoping that her presence would, indeed, contribute to news innovation.

Some introduced themselves as programmers with little experience in journalism but strong backgrounds in fields such as information architecture or user design or deep experience working within a particular computer-programming community. Many were involved in small start-ups. They nonetheless indicated a passion for changing news in their biographical introductions. Kabir Soorya, a New Yorker, explained his interest this way:

I believe in building expressive technology that lets us create as fluidly as we think.… Why am I [excited] about digital journalism? Because it means writing JavaScript that helps safeguard human rights, vanquish tyrants, and keep democracies free! The web is a community where an idea [can] become a global movement in moments, and digital journalism promises to harness that power to build a better world.

In juxtaposing these biographies, we see how two distinct occupational backgrounds approach news. The journalist sees news in the digital age as a site of original content creation, as a place for interactive storytelling, a means to get untold stories told. Programmers have a similarly idealistic approach (a mechanism to ‘vanquish tyrants’) but imagine such feats being accomplished through JavaScript, not stories.

Within this group, some people, but very few, did have backgrounds that enabled them to be both programmer and journalist – or ‘agents’, in the terminology of Galison (1997), who can straddle two social worlds and their respective languages. One member of the group, college student Katie Zhu, introduced herself this way:

I’m Katie (alias: @kzhu91), a rising junior at Northwestern University majoring in journalism and computer science.… As my combination of majors may suggest, I’m very passionate about the intersection of media and technology (with particular interests in human–computer interaction, data visualization, and interaction design).

On her own, she could use sophisticated coding technologies to tell journalistic stories. But few in the lab had this ‘bilingual’ background.

This virtual space – the setting of the lab, along with its curriculum, homework assignments, and expectations for serious engagement from participants – enabled these people to meet and exchange ideas both formally and informally. Throughout the monthlong lab, the group proved to be a dynamic cohesion of individuals coming together to learn more about what seemed to be missing from their toolkit – either about the challenges facing newsrooms or the potential of hacking the open Web. This online trading zone enabled people to share across their disciplines, centered on a common object (news) for a common purpose (news innovation).

The lectures

The Learning Lab, while not material in nature nor as dramatic as Galison’s (1997) depiction of labs that helped physicists and engineers develop particle detectors, nevertheless provided an orienting goal of news innovation that allowed for a trading zone to emerge – a space not only for social connection but also for productive work in a collaborative fashion (Turner, 2005). Within this framework, the lab lectures were crucial to offering journalists and programmers the opportunity to engage each other around an explicit task of the day. The 11 lectures covered different material from different speakers, but they worked in tandem to point Lab participants toward their ultimate project: a final software pitch for an open-source news innovation.

Thus, the lectures were deliberately set up to facilitate cultural crossover, as each group learned about the perspectives of the other. For example, the lab included a lecture by Aza Raskin, the inventor of tabbed browsing, but it also included a lecture from Jeff Jarvis, the future-of-news prognosticator. The lab included lectures from key developers of programming languages such as jQuery (a popular form of JavaScript) and HTML5. But this was balanced by lectures from journalists working in newsrooms seen as innovative within the industry, such as The New York Times. Notably, the choices made by Mozilla and Knight about who would conduct the lectures reveals certain normative assumptions about how journalism and hacking ‘ought’ to be done, but more interesting than these lectures was what was said about them by participants as they reflected on their role perceptions.

The chat logs kept during the lectures provided a sense of the distinct perspectives each group brought to the topics as they were being discussed. The common theme was news (and the need to innovate it), but each group talked about this boundary object with different sentiments, based on their backgrounds. For example, in the very first lecture, Raskin taught the participants how to build a software prototype of the kind they would submit for their final project. The following conversation ensued in the Q & A during the lecture, illuminating the different perspectives of journalist and programmer on prototyping.

Corbin Smith [journalist]: Aza – this makes a LOT of sense, but a huge barrier for me is if I have a complex idea similar to this, but lack the hacker skills to build a prototype, I will struggle to communicate the idea to someone who does have such skills.

Laurian Gridinoc [programmer]: Corbin – you can ‘fake’ it with images, and video, I guess Aza will explain this too.

Rhiannon Coppin [programmer]: Wireframes/drawings and scripts help communicate the idea if you can’t code it yourself.

Smith approached the challenge of building a prototype from his background – as a journalist – and, from his perspective, he wasn’t quite sure how to make such a thing happen. The programmers had occupational knowledge to share about how to make these prototypes, and they could approach the final project as another software pitch, only this time for news innovation.

In this case, Smith identifies a problem that a journalist could not communicate in what he perceived would be the required common language of the programmer. But, by the end of the lab, as we note below, it was impossible to tell a journalist’s prototype from a programmer’s prototype, and this was not because journalists learned to code. Instead, the trading zone facilitated the creation of a language through which journalists and programmers could engage one another and talk about their shared interest in a common boundary object (news) and a common cause (news innovation).

However, other moments in the lectures illustrated how the trading zone reinforced particular differences – how each group possessed different understandings of what news meant and why. In a lecture on the use of interactive graphics in the newsroom, Shazna Nessa of the Associated Press spoke about a team that had both journalism and programming skills. The journalists and programmers in the lab had very different questions about such an arrangement. The discussion emerged in the Q & A during this Learning Lab lecture:

Saleem Khan [journalist]: How do you coax, cajole, encourage, enamor traditionalists to approach their work in a more interactive fashion, research and report their stories in a way that lends itself to digital?

Tathagata Dasgupta [programmer]: Q: What changes in mind-set does programmer need to make for working in a newsroom?

Here, journalists try to imagine themselves in a more technical space, while programmers try to learn to work in a more journalistic space. This suggests that the lab indeed was functioning as a trading zone: Despite differences in their backgrounds and mind-sets, these individuals could imagine shared possibilities; at the same time, each was firmly interested in what someone with his or her background could add to the process, unwilling to fully relinquish their professional identity.

The casual chats

Beyond the lectures, the group had to submit weekly blog posts leading up to a final project that would potentially position them for a trip to Germany, to participate in a fall 2011 hackfest that would determine the five fellows to be embedded in newsrooms. These blog posts were a site of feedback from the facilitators to participants (offered privately) and also a place for participants to offer comments. But the public exchanges among participants – which took place in IRC channels, informal Google+ hangouts, and on the blogs kept by various participants – helped shed light on the relationship between journalists and programmers.

After a confusing exchange with a programmer during a lecture chat log, Corbin Smith described the challenges between journalists and programmers in a post on the blog he was required to keep for the project. He pointed to their different backgrounds and suggested that they seemed to speak different languages.⁷ He then offered the following observation:

The first barrier to effective communication between these two groups is an inherent lack of a common lexicon. Initially, programmers cannot simply have a discussion with a journalist in the same way that they would normally discuss ideas with other programmers. The same goes for journalists communicating their ideas to programmers. In the beginning of your hack/hacker relationship, explain and elaborate as much as possible. Programmers: don’t assume a hack knows what an API* define is or does. Hacks: say something like ‘media captured in the field, as opposed to in studio’.

Smith’s blog post reinforces a number of theoretical points. While emphasizing the distinct backgrounds of journalists and programmers, he also uses his forum on the Learning Lab, this networked space, to communicate between two groups that are about the same boundary object – news – but speak about it in different terms. Additionally, the lab’s function as a trading zone begins to emerge: In this very post, Smith offers pointers for developing a contact language about news that can be used by both journalists and programmers.

As the lab wound down and participants prepared to submit their final video projects, facilitators began encouraging more frequent conversation among participants. These ‘pitch sessions’ allowed participants to converse in a giant video chat room, each with connection to the others’ webcam video stream, making face-to-face feedback possible. These pitch sessions helped participants refine their final-project ideas and helped them determine how to make their ideas both technically possible and journalistically sound. These group sessions underscored just how involved participants were in the Learning Lab: Each person came prepared with a pitch, and others had been keeping tabs on the development of the respective projects, either through regular comments or careful reading of blog posts. When it came time to present a pitch, both programmers and journalists would chime in readily.

One programmer, Nick Doiron, expressed an idea for making journalistic interviews more interesting: Why not allow online readers to ask questions of a source being interviewed by a journalist, in real time? A journalist in the video chat room explained that she was unclear how this would ultimately become part of the news process – that it didn’t quite seem feasible. ‘I’m just wondering from the journalism point of view how to do it’. The programmer offered that he imagined social media and tagging being layered over the presentation. He noted that, ‘As a programmer, when you talk about data, you talk about what the format is’. The two pounded out an idea where someone working with a journalist would take data from a live screen and offer it to journalists in the field so they would know in advance what questions they might ask. While the two agreed in principle, each had a different perspective on the common boundary object of news.

In these exchanges, we see how a contact language begins to form. Through the site of a mutually shared object, journalists and programmers work through their different perceptions to find a common goal to achieve in relation to that object. In this case, that goal is news innovation: the reimagination of news, both its technological character and its normative function in society. In developing this contact language, journalists and programmers attempt to capitalize on the diversity of their disciplinary differences while not sacrificing or undermining their own occupational expertise.

The videos: An artifact for a new contact language

This development of a contact language through which to articulate a shared vision for news and innovation was most exemplified in the culmination of the Learning Lab: the final-project video pitches. These 49 videos were narrated by a single lab participant, or sometimes coproduced by a group of participants; they outlined, illustrated, and advocated for a piece of software or related service that would improve the news.⁸ In these videos, it was difficult to distinguish the journalists from the programmers: all the journalists had built prototypes or wireframes, and all the programmers spoke knowledgeably about news. We do not claim that revolution occurred in a month, but we found that journalists and programmers began talking about news in the same way after spending this intensive period together. In this way, the contact language that had developed through the course of the lab had become what Galison’s (1997) framework would suggest is a creole.

In analyzing the videos, we found that this creole focused on news innovation as imagined through three interrelated themes: process, participation, and social curation. These terms are emergent, derived from the videos themselves.

Many of these lab participants were frustrated by the restrictions of traditional journalism and took the original three contest genres (Unlocking Video, Beyond Comment Threads, and People-Powered News) in a direction that would target what these participants saw as failings with the traditional news system. These were process-oriented concerns, emphasizing the shortcomings of news work, flow, and format as presently executed. Additionally, other participants attended to the larger theme of participation and the role that citizens should play, normatively speaking, in a rebooted news system; these videos, aimed at increasing user participation outside the traditional contexts of newsrooms, outlined a veritable ethic of participation (cf. Lewis, 2012b) whereby the quality of news is correlated with the range of voices contributing to it. Finally, other Learning Lab participants expressed concern about the fate of news in what they considered to be a complicated information ecosystem. They argued for software that would make news less overwhelming, easier to understand, and more user-friendly through social curation: that is, algorithms and adaptations designed to leverage social networks and friend recommendations to streamline and recontextualize the news experience. The following paragraphs discuss examples of these three themes.

Process

A number of videos expressed frustration with the dominant paradigm of news construction, arguing, for instance, that ‘stories are imprisoned within the format of the article’, as Jordan Wirfs-Brock, a ‘journalist who enjoys playing with data’, did in her pitch for The Infinite Story. Another example of participants trying to address problems with traditional journalism was Corrigo, a project developed by two journalists; it sought to allow everyday users to identify and annotate errors made in news reports, involving them as fact-checkers – and opening up the process of news to revision. This frustration of journalism as a fixed product, with little capacity for change, ran through many video pitches. Participants were particularly exasperated by the limitations of video. James Greenaway, a programmer, pitched the idea of Open News Player, which would make online news video interactive and collaborative. His mission was to ‘liberate’ news content from the ‘one-way closed format’ of broadcast video by making it ‘like any webpage’ in its capacity for user engagement and input. Other projects likewise noted a shared recognition that journalism has structural problems of top-down rigidity and hard-to-manipulate content, and the remedy is a revised news process that more fluidly and continuously allows users to critique, advise, edit, and add upon the work of journalists.

Participation

Participants universally felt that journalism should imbue a shared sense of community, wherein people are invited to participate in helping to create, filter, edit, share, and comment on the news. Many pointed to the potential for citizens as news gatherers. In a humorous video illustrating how community members could alert journalists to people dressed as bananas, Trina Chiasson, a programmer, pitched the idea of Curious – a Web application for allowing users to report happenings to journalists and simultaneously become the sources for journalists as events unfold. Journalist Rhiannon Coppin’s Proof would encourage ordinary people to no longer be ‘passive actor[s]’, providing a means for both journalists and citizens to ‘dispatch your urgent request for videos through a network request of registered videos’ (with the potential incentive of payment). In these pitches, there is an assumption that participation in the news process goes beyond commenting on or helping to correct news stories. In this view, anyone can be a journalist – outside an institutional framework and with little or no formal training – and the key to journalism’s future lies in empowering these users to collaborate with each other on news.

Social curation

Digital news consumers, many participants argued, face an unyielding torrent of information and need help – especially from their friends online – to navigate the landscape and distinguish signal from noise. Travis Kriplean, a programmer, proposed an idea called GrowUP, which would provide Wikipedia-like summaries of user comments about news summaries to make it easier for people to parse news content. Similarly, Laurian Gridnioc, a programmer, proposed Plesper as a platform to give users the chance to arrange articles based on their importance to the user. Such projects sought to go beyond creating better information systems to involve other people as key components in organizing information. Journalists, too, had similar ideas. As one participant noted, this kind of work will ‘make our news more relevant, because it makes our news more personal’.

Reflecting on these themes of process, participation, and social curation in their totality, we find that they are neither mutually exclusive nor entirely overlapping. And yet, there is enough commonality to suggest an emerging normative framework about what the innovation of news should look like in the digital media era. In this sense, news operated as a boundary object – a site through which people from different backgrounds could engage in collective discourse and problem-solving. In each specific vision for news articulated in these final-project videos, we see something slightly different, even subtle variations in the negotiation of news. Nevertheless, the underlying principle remains the same: news, as a boundary object, affords enough linguistic translation to enable coordinated perceptions and practices to congeal. Through the trading zone of the Learning Lab, a particular worldview about news and its digital reinvention could be shared by journalists and programmers alike, despite their differences in background and training. This unification represents a contact language through which news innovation is organized and articulated.

Concluding discussion

Against the backdrop of growing calls for collaboration between the journalism and technology fields by many within the industry, this article sought to examine a salient case of this phenomenon, in hopes of revealing what kind of processes of communication, exchange, and work production may be implicated at this intersection of social and occupational worlds. The Knight-Mozilla partnership and its Learning Lab are but one example in a widening expanse of this journalism–technology interchange. And yet because of the uniquely public nature of the lab’s activities and its explicit emphasis on bringing together journalists and programmers around a common object (news) and a common goal (the innovation of news), a close study of this virtual environment allowed us to examine, in a detailed way, the discourse and actions generated in a purposeful combining of journalist and programmer worldviews. Such a perspective, we argue, provides a glimpse into the future development of journalism and its norms and values, as programmers and their ethics assume a greater role in the journalistic field – in the very heart of some of journalism’s leading institutions.

This was a purposeful community, and, as such, outright conflict was likely minimized, and the motivation to have positive and encouraging interactions likely enhanced by the specter of winning the contest to spend a year in one of the world’s leading newsrooms. Nevertheless, even in an intentional community, points of likely misunderstanding emerge as journalism’s boundaries widen to incorporate programmers into the core of editorial workflow. Journalists and programmers have different backgrounds – this much is obvious – but built into these different backgrounds are divergent understandings of ideal ways of doing journalism.

Programmers come from a world of hacking, building, openness, and transparency (Anderson, 2013b; Lewis and Usher, 2013; Parasie and Dagiral, 2013; Usher, 2016), and they understand journalism not as journalists but as intelligent consumers of information. As programmers coming to work within journalism, they accept the normative assumption that news is critically important to a vital public sphere (Usher, 2016). This interest in news and a belief in the fundamental ideology of news (Waisbord, 2013) is an essential starting point for understanding journalism as it is now in order to rethink its boundaries and encourage it to be something better in the digital age (Lewis, 2012b). And yet the conversations and questions that arose in the lab, from comments on the lectures to discussions across the blogs, suggest that programmers are not linked with traditional professional assumptions about how journalists do their work. This could be a potential point of crisis in the relationship between journalist and programmer – yet, as we find here, it does not have to be.

The traditional journalists featured here do indeed have a predisposition to be interested in what technologists have to say – after all, they are participating in a Knight-Mozilla initiative intended to bring programming into news. This does not mean, however, that they are willing to leave journalism as they know it through professional socialization. Rather, what we find them doing here is using this background to explain to programmers the various boundaries of journalism, such as how open journalism can be to participatory engagement while maintaining its professional authority.

In the early stages of the lab, we saw how journalists approached news as storytelling, while programmers approached news as something that might be manipulated through their computer-programming abilities. Nonetheless, programmers and journalists were united in their goal to develop innovative, technologically driven solutions for news. Similarly, they were willing participants in this unique opportunity to engage with each other and learn from one another’s distinct occupational backgrounds and mind-sets. As such, this lab is an example of a trading zone in the digital age: an intentional space coordinated by a common purpose, organized through networked collaboration. The careful programming and sense of common purpose enabled a contact language to form around news innovation whereby journalists and programmers could speak to one another about a shared vision for improving news.

However, we should consider whether their projects, which coalesce around what might be called a creole of process, participation, and social curation, are indeed practical steps toward news innovation. Each of these frameworks provides important ways for rethinking the public as part of the news production and distribution process – a sign of news innovation that moves beyond traditional, producer-centric ways of thinking. In essence, process, participation, and social curation propose a break from the norm, which is significant itself. As journalism scholars and professionals begin to reimagine news and its future, we need to reflect on how journalism works both in traditional and nontraditional contexts. At the same time, these software pitches no doubt were whimsical, even fanciful, solutions to journalism’s problems. Yet perhaps within them are suggestions that could power radically transformative ideas for news. Ultimately, the impact of such proposals depends on how big-idea projects, incubated in spaces like the Learning Lab, become translated in the norms and practices of news work.

The larger finding here that journalists and programmers, if given the right conditions, will collaborate and innovate is important for how it builds upon, yet deviates from, the established norm in journalism studies. The last decade of research on journalists’ responses to new technologies and new actors in the news process has been nearly unanimous in concluding that journalists react defensively in the face of such boundary intrusions on their professional turf – in effect, asking with exasperation, ‘Who are these guys?’ (Singer, 2003). This study, while approaching a rather unique context for the journalism–technology convergence, would appear to tell a different story. Unlike the narrative of ‘normalization’ (Singer, 2005) that has defined much of journalists’ relationship with emerging digital tools and alternative actors, the Learning Lab points to a more optimistic outcome: Given the right circumstances – for example, self-selected motivation, a common purpose, interactive forms of learning and dialogue – perhaps journalists and technology specialists can begin to collaborate to address vexing challenges for journalism in a changing media environment. The lab reveals an opening for such coordination to occur on a scale unseen in traditional news institutions.

Footnotes

Notes

References

Abbott

(1988) The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ananny

(2013) Press-Public collaboration as infrastructure: Tracing news organizations and programming publics in application programming interfaces. American Behavioral Scientist 57(5): 623–642.

Anderson

(2013a) Rebuilding the News: Metropolitan Journalism in the Digital Age. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Anderson

(2013b) Towards a sociology of computational and algorithmic journalism. New Media & Society 15(7): 1005–1021.

Barley

Leonardi

Bailey

(2012) Engineering objects for collaboration: Strategies of ambiguity and clarity at knowledge boundaries. Human Communication Research 38(3): 280–308.

Belair-Gagnon

(2015) Social Media at BBC News: The Re-making of Crisis Reporting. London: Routledge.

Boczkowski

(2010) News at Work: Imitation in an Age of Information Abundance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bowker

Star

(1999) Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Carlson

(2015) Introduction: The many boundaries of journalism. In: Carlson

Lewis

(eds) Boundaries of Journalism: Professionalism, Practices and Participation. New York: Routledge, pp. 1–18.

10.

Carlson

Lewis

(eds) (2015) Boundaries of Journalism: Professionalism, Practices and Participation. New York: Routledge.

11.

Coleman

(2012) Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

12.

Deuze

(2005) What is journalism? Professional identity and ideology of journalists reconsidered. Journalism 6(4): 442–464.

13.

Deuze

(2007) Media Work. London: Polity Press.

14.

Dupagne

Garrison

(2006) The meaning and influence of convergence: A qualitative case study of newsroom work at the Tampa News Center. Journalism Studies 7(2): 237–255.

15.

Fujimura

(1992) Crafting science: Standardized packages, boundary objects and ‘translation’. In: Pickering

(ed) Science as Practice and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 168–214.

16.

Galison

(1997) Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

17.

Gieryn

(1983) Boundary-Work and the demarcation of science from non-science: Strains and interests in professional ideologies of scientists. American Sociological Review 48(6): 781–795.

18.

Glaser

Strauss

(1967) The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company.

19.

Gray

Chambers

Bounegru

(2012) The Data Journalism Handbook. Sebastopol: O’Reilly Media.

20.

Hine

(ed) (2009) Virtual Methods: Issues in Social Research on the Internet. London: Berg.

21.

Howard

(2014) The Art and Science of Data-driven Journalism. New York: Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia University.

22.

Kellogg

Orlikowski

Yates

(2006) Life in the trading zone: Structuring coordination across boundaries in postbureaucratic organizations. Organization Science 17(1): 22–44.

23.

Kozinetz

(2009) Netnography: Doing Ethnographic Research Online. Los Angeles: Sage.

24.

Lainer-Vos

(2013) Boundary objects, zones of indeterminacy, and the formation of Irish and Jewish transnational socio-financial networks. Organization Studies 34(4): 515–532.

25.

Levina

Vaast

(2005) The emergence of boundary spanning competence in practice: Implications for implementation and use of information systems. MIS Quarterly 29(2): 335–363.

26.

Lewis

(2011) Journalism innovation and participation: An analysis of the Knight news challenge. International Journal of Communication 5: 26. Available at: http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/1140 (accessed 1 January 2016).

27.

Lewis

(2012a) From journalism to information: The transformation of the Knight Foundation and news innovation. Mass Communication and Society 15(3): 309–334.

28.

Lewis

(2012b) The tension between professional control and open participation: Journalism and its boundaries. Information, Communication & Society 15(6): 836–866.

29.

Lewis

Usher

(2013) Open source and journalism: Toward new frameworks for imagining news innovation. Media, Culture & Society 35(5): 602–619.

30.

Lewis

Usher

(2014) Code, collaboration, and the future of journalism: A case study of the Hacks/Hackers global network. Digital Journalism 2(3): 383–393.

31.

Lewis

Westlund

(2015) Big data and journalism: Epistemology, expertise, economics, and ethics. Digital Journalism 3(3): 447–466.

32.

Mills

Huber

(2005) Anthropology and the educational ‘trading zone’: Disciplinarity, pedagogy and professionalism. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 4(1): 9–32.

33.

Morrill

(2012) From bridges to trading zones in organizational culture and institutional research. Journal of Management Inquiry 21(1): 109–113.

34.

Parasie

Dagiral

(2013) Data-driven journalism and the public good: ‘computer-assisted-reporters’ and ‘programmer-journalists’ in Chicago. New Media & Society 15(6): 853–871.

35.

Royal

(2012) The journalist as programmer: A case study of the New York Times interactive news technology department. #ISOJ: The Official Research Journal of the International Symposium for Online Journalism 2(1): 5–24.

36.

Ryfe

(2012) Can Journalism Survive? An Inside Look at American Newsrooms. Malden: Polity Press.

37.

Singer

(2003) Who are these guys? The online challenge to the notion of journalistic professionalism. Journalism 4(2): 139–163.

38.

Singer

(2005) The political j-blogger: ‘normalizing’ a new media form to fit old norms and practices. Journalism 6(2): 173–198.

39.

Star

(2010) This is not a boundary object: Reflections on the origin of a concept. Science, Technology & Human Values 35(5): 601–617.

40.

Star

Griesemer

(1989) Institutional ecology, ‘translations’ and boundary objects: Amateurs and professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39. Social Studies of Science 19(3): 387–420.

41.

Starr

(1982) The social transformation of American medicine. New York: Basic Books.

42.

Stark

(2009) The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

43.

Steensen

(2009) What’s stopping them? Towards a grounded theory of innovation in online journalism. Journalism Studies, 10(6): 821–836.

44.

Turner

(2005) Where the counterculture met the new economy: The well and the origins of the virtual economy. Technology and Culture 46: 485–512.

45.

Usher

(2011) Professional journalists – hands off! citizen journalism as civic responsibility. In: McChesney

Pickard

(eds) Will The Last Reporter Please Turn Out the Lights?: The Collapse of Journalism and What Can Be Done to Fix It. New York: The New Press, pp. 264–276.

46.

Usher

(2014) Making News at The New York Times. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

47.

Usher

(2016) Interactives Journalism: Hackers, Data, and Code. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

48.

Waisbord

(2013) Reinventing Professionalism: Journalism and News in Global Perspective. Cambridge: Polity.

49.

Wardle

Williams

(2010) Beyond user-generated content: A production study examining the ways in which UGC is used at the BBC. Media, Culture & Society 32(5): 781–799.

50.

Williams

Wardle

Wahl-Jorgensen

(2011) ‘Have they got news for us?’ Audience revolution or business as usual at the BBC? Journalism Practice 5(1): 85–99.

51.

Zeiss

Groenewegen

(2009) Engaging boundary objects in OMS and STS? Exploring the subtleties of layered engagement. Organization 16(1): 81–100.