The material turn in the study of journalism: Some hopeful and cautionary remarks from an early explorer

I would like to begin with my own intellectual journey with the hope that it will illuminate broader issues that might be relevant to this Special Issue. I started doing research on online news production 18 years ago. I was a second-year doctoral student in Science and Technology Studies (STS) at Cornell University and my favorite hometown newspaper, Diario Clarín in Argentina, had just launched its online edition. I did not have a professional journalistic background or knowledge of the mass communication literature. I was simply fascinated by what this encounter between the ‘old’ medium of print and the ‘new’ medium of the web might mean for the process of innovation in the media in particular and in other areas of productive activity in general. As a student of Trevor Pinch, focusing on technology was the obvious thing to do. I knew close to nothing about journalism, but Bruce Lewenstein in the Cornell’s Communication department was a great guide to media scholarship. Because of my ignorance, and a larger naivete about broader social science discourses, I expected to find some readily available theorizing about the material aspects of newswork. Instead, the more I read, the more I realized that technology was a vastly under-explored territory in journalism scholarship. Digitizing the News was my attempt to tackle how materiality matters in newswork, in particular to understanding the process of innovation in the emergence and early evolution of online newspapers in the United States.

This Special Issue would have been unthinkable back in 1996 when I began my journey, and even in 2003, when I turned in the final revisions of the book manuscript to my editor at The MIT Press. But in the past 10 years – which is a very brief period of time for the typical pace of the academy – things have changed considerably. There has been a proliferation of studies looking at various aspects of how materiality matters in newswork, and an incorporation of a number of conceptual approaches to do this, dominated by STS and in particular actor–network theory. Furthermore, there is not only a significant level of activity but also a lot of excitement about what this activity might mean for the study of journalism more generally. However, as it often happens with relatively rapid change, there is comparatively less sense of collective direction. I see this Special Issue as a potentially critical moment to reflect on where we have been and where to go next, and applaud the organizers for their leadership in getting us to become more programmatic.

What might the next phase of this material turn mean for the study of journalism? What are some of the theoretical and methodological challenges that might lie ahead?

Theoretically, the material turn might push journalism scholarship in a more cosmopolitan direction. This domain of inquiry is not the first one in the humanities and social sciences to experience an interest in material culture over the past decades. There are insights and lessons to be learned from engaging in conversation with scholars from these other domains. Such conversation should be approached as a two-way street, trying to incorporate ideas from other domains but also aiming to influence them. As noted above, so far the main source of intellectual stimulation for the material turn in journalism studies has been my own field of origin, STS. It has many helpful insights to offer, but also some limitations that are worth keeping in mind. STS-inflected scholarship has been excellent in shedding light on the processes through which people and things intertwine. What has come out of this orientation is a special sensibility toward complexity and relative indeterminacy in sociomaterial life, and an imaginative vocabulary for capturing this complexity and indeterminacy in specific locales. What has suffered from this orientation is an attempt to grapple with the outcomes of these processes at a system-wide level. Also lacking are causal explanations of variance in outcomes that transcend the particulars of the case or cases analyzed in a given study. Explanations of variance in outcomes tend to simplify the complexity of the processes that generate those outcomes, and yield a picture with relatively limited levels of contingency. Scholars of journalism have a lot to gain if they can keep incorporating the insights of STS but also generate an epistemic apparatus that can avoid some of these limitations, an apparatus that they can in turn offer to STS scholars as an example of the two-way street I mentioned above.

The trajectory of my own research program illustrates the power and limitations of an STS-inflected orientation toward studying the news. Materiality and process were core themes of Digitizing the News and, as mentioned above, an STS approach was central to this book. It is worth noticing, however, that despite the centrality of the ‘objects of (online) journalism’ in that book, the cross-local explanations of outcome variance relied on factors such as relationships across newsrooms, representations of the user, and the character of newsroom practices. My second book, News at Work, aimed to understand the dynamics of monitoring and imitation that generate significant lack of diversity in the news. Material matters figured in the argument to a certain extent, but I found that a focus on the objects of mimicry did not have much explanatory power to account for outcome variance regarding work practices and the resulting news products. My third book, The News Gap, assesses whether there is a divergence between the stories the media deem newsworthy and those that interest the public, and, if so, measures this divergence and accounts for the factors that increase or decrease it. My co-author, Eugenia Mitchelstein, and I did find that difference in the uptake of technological affordances is a relevant explanatory factor that accounts for some variance in size of the news gap. To get at this difference, one does not need the typical constructionist lens of STS, however. As a matter of fact, this lens would probably obscure rather than clarify in this case; instead, a more traditional sociological understanding of material practice suffices. My current book-project-in-progress, How Institutions Decay, examines the demise of print newspapers in Buenos Aires, Chicago, and Paris as a window into understanding how institutions unravel and try to renew themselves. Although the data collection and analysis are still ongoing, an initial read of some of the interview material suggests that while the historical evolution of information infrastructures have some heuristic power to account for the dynamics of institutional decay, it is in a way different from the typical STS take on them. The reason that I bring up the evolution of my own research program is to offer a cautionary note on the actual promise and potential peril of a particularly influential form of enacting the material turn in journalism studies.

Methodologically, the material turn might unsettle two major tendencies in studies of newswork: a focus on journalists and on newsrooms as the critical actors and locales, respectively. Despite the truism that ‘sources make the news’, most of the scholarship to date has concentrated on the practices of journalists – and I have contributed my fair share to this tendency in my first two books. However, if the objects of journalism acquire a greater prominence in future research than what they had in the past, we will likely see a broadening of the actors having central roles in our inquiries: programmers, technicians, data visualization experts, bloggers, and so on. This would reflect changes that have been already going on in news organizations around the world. More radically, a focus on objects might also entail adding techniques of artifact analysis to the traditional ethnographic and content analysis tools that we have normally deployed in studying journalism. In this day and age, it is not only sources but also algorithms what make the news, as witnessed by the adoption of tools such as Google Analytics, Chartbeat and in-house systems inside news organizations, and the public success of Google News and content farms such as Demand Media. Understanding the causes, dynamics, and consequences of this algorithmic trend will require broadening our methodological apparatus. The material turn has also called into question the inevitability and centrality of the newsroom as the critical locale of newsmaking. This is not to say that newsrooms have become irrelevant, but that they have to be placed within a larger and more intricate web of content creation, as Chris Anderson’s brilliant analysis of the contemporary news ecosystem in Philadelphia has clearly shown. From journalists and newsrooms to geeks, graphistes, bloggers, algorithms, and news ecosystems, if allowed to grow to its fullest potential, the material turn will bring some powerful methodological renewal to the study of news and newsmaking.