Abstract
As Rena Bivens points out early into Digital Currents, television journalism has been often, oddly, and rather awkwardly absent from many scholarly discussions of the various transformations marking news in the era of digital media. And while the book seeks to address this gap, it is not limited to an account of ‘digital journalism’. Rather, despite its title, the larger thrust of the volume is an ethnographic account of the routines of contemporary television journalists, whose work now includes – but is by no means limited to – digital technologies and online interactions with the public. In this sense, the book provides a welcome update to the formative ethnographies of television news penned in past decades and a nice break from the monomaniacal focus on digital artifacts found in many contemporary studies.
Like other journalism researchers of recent years, Bivens convincingly argues that classic sociological accounts of news work focused on professional socialization and institutional structures largely to the exclusion of the agency of individual journalists. The volume’s main contribution comes in its attempt to reclaim accounts of journalistic autonomy, and explore how such autonomy may have increased (or decreased) as the routines of television news have changed to accommodate new media technologies.
She finds the agency possessed by individual journalists varies significantly at different points in the production process, and that the incorporation of new technologies has increased this autonomy at some points more than others. For example, during news gathering, journalists can now leverage Internet research and social media to locate greater information and unconventional sources. Meanwhile at other points, such as live on-air reporting, the incorporation of new technologies has in many ways constrained, if not decreased, the autonomy of journalists.
While individual readers will vary in how useful they find the specifics of Bivens’ ‘Technology-Autonomy-Constraint’ model – the vehicle she introduces for discussing these changes – its core point that autonomy varies at different stages of news work is of great importance to the field. It shows us that like blind men surrounding an elephant, studies focused tightly around distinct points in the production process, such as story selection or information gathering, are likely to come away with diverging accounts of the autonomy afforded news workers as well as how the technologies employed in these distinct phases relate to journalistic agency. Bivens makes a compelling case for the importance of context in studies of contemporary news work.
Another major argument of the book concerns the news value of ‘immediacy’, which, as other scholars have underscored, has simultaneously heightened in importance and evolved in its meaning with the rise of the 24-hour news cycle and Internet publishing. Bivens illuminates the impact of this progression on television news, powerfully arguing for its detrimental effect on journalism as organizations have become obsessed with live on-location reports. Stories abound in the book of correspondents traveling for hours to be on location, only to be trapped in front of the camera performing a seemingly endless succession of live on-air banter with different anchors, ultimately forced to parrot wire reports instead of engaging in shoe leather reporting in the locale they have parachuted into.
Such examples illustrate, too, how news organizations have been quick to adopt digital technologies for live broadcasting, which preserve their traditional status and gatekeeping role, even as they have taken a more reticent and piecemeal approach to social media and other digital tools that potentially threaten this position of privilege.
The book’s many cases are drawn from both the United Kingdom and Canada, which allows for useful comparative analysis as well as generalization. At the same time, readers should be aware that these generalizations will at times fail to capture elements of the US context, where the routines of many programs – on cable in particular – are based more closely on talk radio than traditional evening newscasts in their format, staff structure, and routines.
There are places, too, where the narrative might have benefited from additional historical perspective. For example, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the debut of satellite interview technology created an earlier craze on the part of television organizations with regard to live on-location reporting, which might have been mined productively for historical and thematic similarities. At the same time, some of the programs born of this earlier obsession, such as ABC News’ Nightline, became brands synonymous with analysis and context of the sort Bivens argues the current fetishization of live reporting is robbing us of. Getting to the bottom of such a contrast seems like it could have been a productive exercise.
The book’s prose is reminiscent of many classic ethnographies, given over in large part to precise and methodical descriptions of the work routines of television journalists. Thick description is simultaneously a strength and a potential weakness of the book. The length of the chapters, many of which span 40–70 pages, will make them difficult to assign in some courses. At the same time, the rich detail the book offers will provide good grounding concerning the ins and outs of contemporary TV news to scholars steeped in discussions of newspapers and their digital descendants.