Curated journalism: A field theory approach to journalistic production by environmental non-governmental organizations

Abstract

Studies of environmental communication have primarily focused on environmental journalism produced in commercial newsrooms. Yet environmental non-governmental organizations have been producing journalism in their publications for more than a century. This study takes a field theory approach to situate this production within the journalistic and non-governmental organization fields. It finds that environmental journalists who write for non-governmental organizations generally follow norms and practices of traditional commercial journalism and that the non-governmental organization field may be borrowing cultural capital from the more powerful journalistic field.

Keywords

Environment field theory in-depth interviews journalism non-governmental organizations

Globally, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have become newsmakers – not just in that they create events for professional journalists to report upon but that they are increasingly producing news themselves (Powers, 2016). An emerging literature on NGOs as newsmakers has tied such journalistic production to the economic crisis of journalism since the early 2000s, showing how NGOs have gone beyond attempting to influence newswork by professional journalists and started creating it themselves (e.g. Powers, 2016; Russell, 2013; Shaker and Falzone, 2015). Journalistic production by NGOs, however, is not a new phenomenon. Environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) such as the Nature Conservancy, the National Audubon Society, and the Sierra Club have published environmental journalism in their own magazines for decades. While the efforts by ENGOs to influence the news agenda have received attention from scholars (e.g., McCluskey and Kim, 2012), ENGOs as producers of environmental journalism themselves have been overlooked.

Examining how ENGOs use journalism to reach their goals and the relationship between journalistic norms and practices and the advocacy orientation of the organizations would illuminate both journalistic and NGOs’ communication practice. Connecting the scholarship on environmental journalism, alternative journalism, the emergent literature on NGOs as newsmakers, and field theory, which provides a relational understanding of actors interacting within a set of mutually agreed-upon logics (Bourdieu, 1998), this study examines the role conceptions of journalists who write for ENGOs and provides an explanatory account of this site of interaction between the journalistic and NGO fields.

Environmental journalism scholarship: A focus on traditional news

Scholarship on environmental communication has focused on journalism produced in commercial newsrooms (Hansen, 2011). Scholars of environmental journalism have examined the many ways that journalists interact with environmental issues, including role conceptions of environmental journalists (Giannoulis et al., 2010; Tandoc and Takahashi, 2014) and depictions of environmental issues in the news (Boykoff and Boykoff, 2007).

Meanwhile, ENGOs have been producing environmental journalism for more than a century through publications like the National Audubon Society’s Audubon, which was initially published in the late 1880s. The Sierra Club published the Sierra Club Bulletin from 1893, renaming it Sierra Magazine in the 1970s. Numerous other major ENGOs, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Nature Conservancy, and the National Wildlife Federation, have had long-running publications reaching combined millions of readers. As journalism, ENGO publications violate general assumptions that American journalism is commercial and independent (Benson, 2010), not attached to an NGO. For example, freelance journalists who earn a majority of their income by writing for ENGOs cannot be full members of the Society of Environmental Journalists, a clear indicator of institutional boundary-drawing (SEJ, 2010). While editors of ENGO publications often claim editorial independence from the parent organization, the relationship between the publications and the ENGOs has remained unexamined by both social movement and journalism scholars (Ostertag, 2006).

ENGOs as ‘alternative’ newsmakers

The relationship between journalism and social movement actors such as NGOs has been characterized as one where NGOs must conform to ‘media logic’ in order to get flattering coverage ever since Gitlin’s (1980) landmark study of student activists in the news (e.g. McLeod, 2007; Waisbord, 2013). By nature, many advocacy groups challenge social norms. Reform-oriented activists receive more negative coverage than activists supporting the status quo (Boyle et al., 2004). It is no surprise, then, that alternative voices from social movements seeking to change American society formed their own presses. These publications ranged from the influential, such as The Liberator, which called for abolition decades before it was mainstream thought, to the inconsequential, with pamphlets, bulletins, and zines lost to history. Scholars examining social movement presses call these publications alternative, dissident, and radical (Atton, 2002; Downing, 2001; Streitmatter, 2001). For the purposes of this study, we will refer to this category of journalistic production as ‘alternative’.

The term ‘alternative journalism’ suggests a binary with mainstream journalism, which in America is considered independent and free market–based (Benson, 2010) as well as professionalized (Waisbord, 2013). Alternative journalism, which is heavily associated with social movements, is non-commercial; it seeks to give voice to marginalized groups or ideas; it rejects conventions of newsgathering such as the reliance on elite sources and routinized practices like the inverted pyramid, and it rebuffs objectivity in favor of value-infused reporting (Atton and Hamilton, 2008). It draws on the labor of ‘accidental journalists who, out of a sense of social justice, volunteered to do whatever was needed for a particular cause and ended up as journalists’ (Ostertag, 2006: 10). Since ENGOs are social movement actors existing in the civil society sphere, the literature on alternative journalism suggests that ENGO publications would also follow alternative tenants of journalistic norms and practices compared to commercial journalism.

However, another way to understand NGOs as journalistic entities is to consider the role of professionalism in their endeavors. A core element of social movement–oriented alternative journalism is its inclusion of amateurs as producers of information (Atton and Hamilton, 2008). Yet NGOs are professionalized elements of social movements. An emerging literature on the intersections of NGOs and journalism goes beyond the agenda-building studies of the past and suggests that the boundary between professional journalistic work and the production of NGOs has become permeable. For example, in the wake of the economic crisis faced by journalism in the early 2000s, international journalists were increasingly subsidized by NGO funding (Conrad, 2015; Powers, 2016; Shaker and Falzone, 2015). These partnerships may be creating a new journalistic genre, NGO reportage (Grayson, 2014), and could rebalance the power differential between NGOs and journalists (Camaj, 2016; Lück et al., 2016).

Scholars have only just begun to grapple with the implications of such NGO–journalist partnerships and NGOs as news producers. Russell (2013: 917) argued that that NGO media ‘reproduce their own views and at other times create open spaces of discourse about climate change’ that were overlooked by legacy media. In China, transnational NGOs provide opportunities not possible for state-controlled media (Reese, 2015). Cottle and Nolan (2007) argue that the blurred boundaries between NGOs and journalism harm the integrity of the NGOs. Powers (2017) suggests that NGOs as newsmakers fulfill roles related to journalism in a democracy, while Scott et al. (2017) demonstrate that journalism can flourish in the non-profit, donor-supported model. This study contributes to this emergent area of inquiry by examining one point of interaction between the journalistic and NGO realms.

Bourdieu and the journalistic field

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory (Bourdieu, 1998, 1989) provides a framework that moves beyond binary thinking by offering a relational and spatial approach to understanding social action (Barman, 2016). While field theory has not received much attention from scholars of alternative journalism, Atton and Hamilton (2008) suggest that a Bourdieusian approach may provide conceptual precision that the terms ‘alternative’ and ‘mainstream’ lack. A field is a meso-level unit of inter-organizational analysis that can ask questions about how professional, organizational, and ideological forces interact to position individuals and organizations within a metaphor of a spatial plane (Benson and Neveu, 2005). Social behavior can be understood by examining actors’ location relative to each other within the field (Barman, 2016). Bourdieu calls this the doxa or common understanding of the ‘unspoken, unquestioned, taken-for-granted understanding of the news game and the basic beliefs guiding journalistic practice’ (Willig, 2013: 374). For media sociologists, it shifts the object of study from the individual or the organization to the professional field.

An important insight of field theory is that it conceptualizes each field – journalistic, political, artistic, etc. – as semi-autonomous with its own internal logics and laws and also exerting influence on each other (Bourdieu, 2005). Benson (1999) suggests imagining the journalistic field operating within the larger field of cultural production, floating parallel to other fields such as the scientific and literary fields, and at last within a larger field of power. The journalistic field itself is increasingly powerful as it mediates the legitimate vision of the social world (Bourdieu, 2005).

Within the field, the metaphorical plane is organized along two poles that represent economic and cultural capital. In the journalistic field, mass-oriented television is located closer to the economic pole, while a prestigious literary magazine is located closer to the cultural pole (Benson and Neveu, 2005). Cultural capital includes social capital, or our relative power in relationships with others, as well as symbolic capital, which is related to prestige and reputation (Greenspan, 2014). Bourdieu captured the broad influences of life experience, including behaviors and capital accumulation, within the theoretical construct of habitus, which suggests that individual behavior is shaped by our experiences with social structures (Compton and Benedetti, 2010).

Applications of Bourdieu’s chief concepts of the field, doxa, capital, and habitus have been illuminating in journalism studies. The professional norms and routines of journalists clearly map upon the semi-autonomous internal logics of the field. Journalists’ ‘gut feelings’ about news are informed by their understanding of the rules of the journalistic field (Schultz, 2007). Journalistic habitus has been applied as ‘a specific way of playing the [journalistic] game’, that is, navigating the mutually agreed-upon rules of the field, which can be interpreted as professional norms and practices (Willig, 2013: 374). In addition, relative levels of capital can explain why some media actors are more effective than others (Klinenberg, 2005). Field theory has been used to explain cross-national differences in media culture (Benson, 2010) and to demonstrate the stability of the journalistic field despite the influx of political bloggers (Vos et al., 2012).

The NGO field

The NGO field has often been described as ‘the third sector’ to denote it as fundamentally distinct from the business and governmental sectors (Powell and Steinberg, 2006: 3). There are many types of organizations within the NGO field. What these organizations have in common is an ownership structure that prevents profit (Hansmann, 1980). The ENGOs under consideration here are advocacy NGOs in that they ‘make public interest claims either promoting or resisting social change that, if implemented, would conflict with the social, cultural, political, or economic interests or values of other constituencies or norms’ (Andrews and Edwards, 2004: 481).

Field theory has only recently been introduced into NGO studies. The concept of cultural capital has been used in examinations of NGOs’ success beyond civic engagement (Schneider, 2007) and to explain the relative efficacy of NGOs (Greenspan, 2014). The concept of doxa has received little specific attention. However, following Andrews and Edwards (2004) above, it can be assumed that a shared logic of NGOs is that they seek social change. NGOs also have an orientation toward professionalism and specificity in their campaigns as compared to amateur grassroots activists (Bennett, 2004; Waisbord, 2013). They are likely to use relatively non-disruptive tactics in their campaigns (Ramanath, 2009). The NGOs included in this study, the National Audubon Society, the Sierra Club, and the Nature Conservancy, share common characteristics: They are among the wealthiest and largest American environmental NGOs in terms of staff and budget; they are headquartered in major US cities; and they are old, founded decades to over a century ago. These characteristics suggest they would follow the above doxa of cooperation and professionalism rather than the more radical logics and tactics of younger, more nimble, grassroots organizations.

The current study

Most research to date has focused on a field as a self-contained world (Fligstein and McAdam, 2015). The site of interaction between the journalistic field and the NGO field has the potential to be illuminating in our understanding of both fields. Drawing on the literature on alternative journalism and NGOs as newsmakers, and informed by field theory, we ask the following research questions:

RQ1. What is the professional habitus of journalists who write for ENGOs? In other words, what are their professional characteristics?

RQ2. Do journalists who write for ENGOs follow the doxa of the journalistic field or of the NGO field? In other words, do they describe a process in line with the literature on alternative journalism or do they follow more traditional professional journalistic processes?

RQ3. Do ENGO publications have cultural capital? In other words, how do journalists who write for ENGOs perceive the status of these publications?

Method

Three of the top American ENGOs publish long-running magazines: the National Audubon Society’s Audubon (circulation: about 400,000), the Sierra Club’s Sierra (500,000), and the Nature Conservancy’s Nature (600,000). Forty-six journalists who had written feature-length articles in these magazines from 2014 to 2017 were identified. Journalists were selected to be included in the study on a rolling basis: that is, an initial group of five was contacted and interviews completed, and then additional journalists were invited to participate. The purpose of this method was to evaluate the semi-structured interview protocol and adjust as needed. This also allowed the authors to examine the interviews as they were conducted; upon hearing repetition of themes, qualitative scholars can know they have completed a sufficient number of interviews from which to draw conclusions (Fusch and Ness, 2015). A total of 30 journalists were contacted, and 16 participated. They were interviewed by phone for up to 60 minutes in April–June 2017. The authors interviewed approximately the same number of journalists from each publication (although in some cases participants had written for more than one).

Journalists were asked about their professional backgrounds, perceptions about environmental journalism, and experience with writing for ENGOs and commercial outlets. They were also asked to describe the reporting process for a selected feature-length article they had written for one of the three ENGO magazines. The purpose of this line of questioning was to encourage participants to talk about performance and not just role conception, as there can be a gap between how journalists describe their work and how they do it (Mellado and Van Dalen, 2014). The interview protocol was informed by Bourdieu’s chief concepts of the field, doxa, habitus, and capital, although interviews were semi-structured in order to allow the researchers to follow up on interesting comments by participants. While not wholly guided by grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss, 1967) because the categories were predetermined by using Bourdieu’s concepts, the authors were careful not to attempt to fit data into a category unless it was a true fit, and they allowed a grounded theory approach to create subcategories within each of the Bourdieusian concepts or even to present entirely new categories. Thus, an inductive method complemented the predominately deductive approach of data analysis. Both authors examined the data, providing a cogency check through the triangulation of the authors’ observations that reduces possible bias from a single observer (Olesen et al., 1994).

Findings

Informing the public and pursuing personal interests

RQ1 asked about the professional habitus, or characteristics, of the journalists who write for ENGOs. To understand this, participants were asked about their background and professional experience. Participants ranged in age from 27 to 74 years. All but one identified as liberal. Less than half reported formal journalism education. Of that subset, most said they studied journalism at the graduate level.

While the majority of participants did identify as journalists or reporters, a handful preferred the broader term ‘writer’. About half said they used the term ‘environmental’ to describe themselves. The rest preferred to be identified as generalist journalists and writers. The majority worked as magazine editors, bloggers, and book authors, while less than half identified as full-time freelancers. Many were members of professional organizations, with the Society for Environmental Journalism most frequently mentioned. Slightly less than half had formal journalism educations, with older participants less likely to have journalism degrees. Most started their careers in journalism or writing before coming to an environmental focus, while a few had science backgrounds before becoming writers.

All but one of the interviewees said that more than half of their freelance writing was on environmental topics. Some said that as much as 90–95 percent of their writing was environmental. However, ENGO publications made up a small proportion of outlets in which these journalists published their work. Only a few said they published over half their freelance work in ENGO publications. Most participants had published articles in national outlets such as the New York Times, Smithsonian, and National Geographic, as well as regional magazines and other outlets.

When asked why they became journalists, many made the traditional argument that journalism educates citizens in a democracy: ‘I think that journalism plays a foundational role in education of the public, not that I’m didactic, but it also is really important to our democracy and holding people accountable’ (J6). Others saw their work as a way to connect with an audience and to help them understand certain topics: ‘I’ve always loved writing. I also want it to be a means to engage with the world, both by my own learning, going out into the world and reporting, and in producing something that’s useful for people’ (J10).

A desire to explain and communicate environmental issues to the public emerged in participants’ comments. One journalist’s decision to pursue environmental reporting was based on ‘a desire to make a difference and to help people understand what’s happening out there’ (J11). Others had similar responses:

When I was first starting to think about being a journalist back when I was in high school, over a decade ago, at that time climate change wasn’t being so widely discussed. That to me, that sort of morphed into this huge spectrum, most of the reporting I do now is tied into climate change in one way or another. You also have things like wild habitat protection, environmental justice issues, but yes, anything that sort of affects our global conduct on environments around us. (J1)

I really like environmental journalism because when I think of what the common theme of my work is, it’s putting human faces on complex issues. Most environmental issues that I write about have human faces. So this is a chance to weave narratives that are grounded in some important issue which is most of what I do. (J4)

Following traditional journalistic norms – mostly

RQ2 asked whether the journalists for ENGO publications follow the doxa, or unspoken rules, of traditional journalism. To investigate this question, researchers asked participants to select a typical article they had written for an ENGO publication. Researchers then asked two sets of questions about this article. The first set asked them to describe the process of story selection, reporting, and writing that article. The second set of questions asked them to evaluate the article based on four professional journalistic norms: accuracy, balance, transparency, and objectivity.

First, participants were asked about the story selection process. The majority said that the ENGO publication approached them about writing a story. Many spoke about relationships with the editors at these ENGO publications: ‘I have a friend who works there, one of the editors .… She invited me to consider doing the piece and told me about. And it sounded right up my alley’ (J15). Still, others said it can be difficult to pitch to ENGOs as a freelancer without prior knowledge of what they are looking for:

They said I’m welcome to pitch at any point, but it’s pretty hard because they do want a good [The Nature Conservancy] hook for almost everything so that you kind of need to be inside to know what’s happening in any given program. (J10)

These experiences did not appear to vary by publication.

However, when asked about the information gathering process, which almost always meant going into the field, responses differed somewhat based on the ENGO with which journalists worked. On a spectrum of reporting independence, Audubon emerged as the most hands-off publication. Those who worked with other ENGOs often said they needed to include sources from within the organization: ‘If it’s a TNC project, they want to make sure their guys are quoted’ (J8). These journalists described what one participant called a ‘curated’ reporting process (J12) in which the ENGO made the bulk of the travel arrangements and had other people affiliated with the ENGO act as guides for the journalist, pointing out potential sources and taking them places to visit: ‘I’m not used to having people from different departments and a blogger, somebody from administration. There was really a whole bunch of people there’ (J15). Some said the process limited their independence, while others saw it as opening otherwise impossible opportunities, such as reporting in-depth stories from a remote location, a prohibitively expensive endeavor without NGO support.

While some of the ENGOs may have had a heavier hand in selecting the story topic and ‘curating’ sources for writers, once the reporting process was underway, most participants described an independent process, regardless of the publication they were writing for: ‘I basically had total license to choose the things I thought worked best, the themes I thought were illustrative, to quote the people who I thought were best. There was basically no interference on that end’ (J12). Some noted, however, an implicit understanding with ENGOs that the story will be written a certain way:

I was given total freedom to quote whoever I wanted to, who was sort of curated or provided for me. But I think that it was implicitly understood that I would not be empathetically quoting the CEO of the mining company. We didn’t have the conversation but I think it was pretty clear. (J12)

But in the end the story that [the ENGO] wanted me to tell wasn’t going to get too deeply into what was going to upset the balance of things with the project because they really had worked very, very hard to get this all up and running. (J15)

In addition to the actual process, journalists were asked how the story could be judged based on traditional journalistic norms of accuracy, balance, transparency, and objectivity. Participants reported a strong dedication to accuracy. Some described the fact checking process at ENGOs as more thorough than at some commercial publications:

I would say that none of the NGO stories I’ve published, I’ve had a doubt as to their accuracy. The is one nice thing about working for some of these advocacy groups, they are obsessed, as all outlets should be, but aren’t always …. They’re really almost more preoccupied with accuracy than a lot of more traditional journalistic outlets. (J12)

In regard to balance, the answers were less consistent. Several of the journalists did not believe these stories needed to be balanced:

Balance is not the ultimate goal, because I’m trying to make a statement, but based on the research that I did, I’m trying to present new information. (J3)

I think there are stories that require balance and issues that are technically and morally complex. I honestly don’t think this was one of those issues. I actually think this was a pretty black-and-white case. So I feel okay with the lack of balance. (J12)

Many pointed to the concept of false equivalency, in which two sides are given equal consideration even though they are not equally supported by evidence, as an argument against balance in their stories:

I do think that this concept of balance is a little bit tricky especially when we’re talking about climate change. Because this whole notion of having to quote people who are climate change deniers when the vast majority of scientists agree that it is happening. (J5)

Some argued that since these stories appear in ENGO publications, which have clear goals and viewpoints, they are more transparent:

You are reading it in the pages of an obvious advocacy group. The group’s position is quite clearly stated. I don’t think it would be possible to read this story and not that it was being written by someone who was being paid by a group with a very definite stake in the issue. (J12)

Similar to their discussion of the balance norm, some of the participants rejected the idea that these stories needed to be objective. For some, it was a result of the kind of writing they were doing (environmental), and for others, the idea of objectivity in journalism was antiquated:

I don’t think [objectivity is] a goal. I think fairness to the research, being true to the research is definitely a goal. (J3)

I fundamentally think objectivity is a fallacy. There are no objective articles because we are always selecting facts. We are always selecting who we quote and how we quote them. I do not aim for objectivity. I aim for fairness. (J4)

I think the debate over whether you can truly be objective is pretty much over. I don’t think that can ever happen. We all have our own worldview. (J11)

The participants were asked whether they considered themselves environmental advocates. While only some said yes, even those who said yes said such advocacy would not have an impact on their reporting. This reflected adherence to the idea of neutrality, if not a total acceptance of the norm of objectivity. Some also believed that the publication format, magazine, had an impact. They argued that magazine writing is more interpretive than traditional newspaper writing:

Magazines have more of a take, the writer’s view is shaping how the story is being presented. (J16)

I think that there’s a different sense of objectivity when you are a newspaper reporter vs. when you are a magazine writer. As a magazine writer who’s also doing web stories now, magazine editors do not want pure objectivity. They want my perspective. (J5)

Status through two lenses: Journalistic and advocacy

To evaluate RQ3, which asked about the cultural capital of ENGO publications, journalists were asked to evaluate the status of the publications within the field of journalism. In addition, journalists were asked to evaluate the status of these magazines, and the journalism within them, to the ENGOs themselves. First, journalists reported what publications they would like to publish in. Participants agreed on the most desirable outlets: national general interest publications with strong records of independent journalism, such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, GQ, National Public Radio, and National Geographic. Nearly all outlets mentioned had won National Magazine Awards. This indicated that the participants shared a common idea of what journalistic quality meant.

Participants reported three indicators of status in the field: audience, reputation, and opportunities provided by ENGOs. First, the audience of a publication indicated its quality, with a general interest or wide audience seen as most desirable. Publications that are available on newsstands were high-status. Since Audubon is a newsstand publication, it was desirable to publish in, presumably because it offers a wide audience to the journalist: ‘They’re out there, not any less than The Atlantic or Wired’ (J1). A significant online presence also indicated status. However, a narrower audience made a publication less desirable. While Audubon was known for its broad appeal, journalists indicated that readers of other ENGO publications were likely limited to members of the organization. A membership magazine had less status relative to a newsstand publication.

Second, participants addressed other journalists’ perceptions about the reputations of ENGO publications. Many indicated wariness about accepting an assignment due to the perception that ENGO work would harm their journalistic reputations. ‘There are some writers who say if you’re writing anything for the Nature Conservancy, then that’s not journalism, then as a result you’re maybe not a journalist,’ said one participant (J1). Some writers would not accept assignments from ENGOs because ‘it somehow compromises them to write for an NGO publication because they are concerned about the viewpoint of the parent organization’ (J5). Ultimately, these publications were seen as ‘kind of journalism and kind of not’ (J8), making it harder for journalists who choose to publish in them to justify their choice to the field at large:

But because they are ultimately a house organ, they’re a little hard to define, they’re advocacy journalism, they’re not quite the ideal. They’re not the New York Times, they’re not the New Yorker, they’re not even Orion, which has its independence even if they’re going to pay you almost nothing to do the story. (J10)

Several participants indicated that they would never accept an assignment where their independence would be compromised and that they had pulled stories in such situations. Yet they also indicated that the ENGOs approached them for assignments because they had a reputation for writing stories in a manner already amenable to the publications. Participants were also asked whether they would recommend to a young journalist that he or she publish in ENGO magazines. Here, results were mixed; many participants said yes without hesitation, while others urged a young journalist to carefully consider the publication and safeguard their reputations by publishing in a variety of outlets, including traditional news, so that editors would not look askance at their resumes.

In addition, most participants said that ENGOs provided valuable reporting opportunities that are rare with commercial publications. First, ENGOs often have travel budgets to send journalists into the field, from the steppes of East Asia to the South American rainforest. Second, the publications were praised for offering appropriate word counts to tell complex stories. Third, ENGO publications pay well. And finally, as reported above, the publications followed strict fact checking processes, an increasing rarity even among top commercial publications. As one journalist put it, this rigorous process was a ‘weird honor’ because it meant he was writing for a publication that ‘still operated like a legacy magazine’ (J7).

The journalists indicated that these publications are attractive to work for because they have some cultural capital within the journalistic field, particularly the oldest publication in the group, Audubon. However, they also noted that writing for ENGOs was still lower-status in some ways than traditional, commercial journalism outlets because they are published by advocacy organizations. An additional question related to cultural capital, then, is what capital/status the publications provide to the ENGOs themselves. Here, participants acknowledged a donor/membership service aspect to the magazines. Yet they also insisted that the publications want ‘real’ journalism or at least a close amalgamation of it. ‘They want it to be a magazine story. They don’t want it to be public relations material’, said J1. Others added:

I think that for many NGOs having a magazine that produces journalism as opposed to just a PR shop gives them more communications cred …. Publishing real journalism gives them more credibility, gives them more of a sense of independence and therefore allows them to communicate environmental messages in a way that is more believable. (J4)

They try and get these things out there by putting out press releases, and organizing campaigns and trying to make things go viral. It doesn’t have the same legitimacy as if it’s published as journalism. (J7)

I think partly [it’s] just for credibility, if it’s clearly PR and it’s coming as news release directly from the organization then that has a certain connotation, and if you have an outside journalist coming in there’s certainly, whether real or just a feeling of it, that people may trust more. They think, ‘This really is a good thing that they’re doing. This is a real journalist. They went there, they saw it.’ (J15)

Participants frequently used the terms ‘legitimacy’ and ‘credibility’ to describe why ENGOs use journalism. Such goals for the ENGOs were discussed directly in contrast to public relations, which was seen as lacking credibility. In other words, the journalists believed that ENGOs were relying on the legitimacy lent by a ‘real journalist’ writing the story.

Discussion

Journalists who published feature articles in ENGO magazines shared many professional characteristics with journalists in general. The participants were slightly less likely to have journalism degrees and slightly more likely to be politically liberal than the typical journalist, but neither finding is very far from industry trends (Mitchell, 2003; Willnat and Weaver, 2014). More notably, the journalists shared traditional normative ideas about the role of journalism in democracy. They also expressed adherence to the traditional norms of accuracy and transparency. They sought independence, even when their reporting experiences were ‘curated’ by ENGOs; just as the organizations themselves appeared to want the work to resemble ‘true’ journalism, the journalists themselves wanted their process to resemble a typical reporting process. Some said they would pull stories that had been handled too aggressively by the ENGOs. Clearly, maintaining a standard of journalistic excellence was important to the participants, and independence was a central element of excellence. For most, writing for ENGOs made up a small part of their portfolios. They were staffers at media organizations, book authors, editors, and freelancers. This pragmatic approach to journalistic production required these journalists to be competent and flexible; they had to safeguard their reputations in order to continue getting top-of-the-line reporting opportunities. Some ENGO publications had a stronger hand in ‘curating’ the reporting process. This suggests that organizational factors differentiate these experiences. Aside from sometimes stronger guidance, however, participants reported similar experiences regardless of which of the three ENGOs they worked for in terms of the reporting process. The concept of ‘curated’ journalism recalls Grayson’s (2014) ‘NGO reportage’, where NGOs facilitate access to communities for independent journalists. The distinction between the two concepts is that the curated reporting serves the NGO more directly through its publication in NGO magazines, while NGO reportage presents a less direct benefit to the NGOs as the final product is published independently.

The reporting experience the journalists described had only some resemblance to typical expressions of ‘alternative’ journalism – that it is, as noted earlier, non-commercial, giving voice to marginalized groups, rejecting conventions of newsgathering, and rebuffing objectivity as a goal (Atton and Hamilton, 2008). The ENGOs themselves are non-commercial, but their publications only sometimes are, as some sell ads and appear on newsstands, while others are shipped only to members and are ad-free; in addition, the journalists were paid professionals rather than being ‘accidental journalists’ (Ostertag, 2006: 10). The journalists did not reject conventions of newsgathering but instead stressed an adherence to most typical newsgathering norms and practices. However, they did question the norms of balance and objectivity. Their critiques of these norms reflected a nuanced understanding of the difference between normative goals of traditional reporting, particularly strictly news reporting, and the more interpretive approach typical of magazine reporting. Notably, while the journalists questioned objectivity as a goal, none said that their reporting was explicitly value-infused. If they saw themselves as advocates, they kept that out of their reporting. Most said they would write a story for an ENGO the same way they would approach any other commercial outlet.

These findings indicate that the doxa and habitus on display by journalists writing for ENGOs have more in common with traditional commercial journalism than not. In a field theory approach, this would indicate that this form of production is closely related to traditional commercial journalism and that ENGO publications would be closely clustered to commercial outlets in the spatial metaphor of the field. In other words, this production has little in common with what scholars typically think of as social movement presses or alternative journalism despite its genesis with advocacy ENGOs. Thus, field theory provides both a descriptive and explanatory perspective: first, by locating journalistic production by ENGOs within the field and, second, by explaining this production through the lens of its spatial proximity to commercial journalism as a whole.

Even with the discovery that ENGO journalism has much in common with traditional commercial journalism, participants reported that other journalists and editors would likely view reporting for an ENGO publication as alternative journalism as defined in the literature because its very association with an ENGO made the work a rejection of the professional norms of the field. To repeat one participant’s comment, ‘There are some writers who say if you’re writing anything for the Nature Conservancy, then that’s not journalism, then as a result you’re maybe not a journalist.’ By engaging in this boundary work (Carlson, 2016), traditionalist journalists indicate that those who write for ENGOs are outside the mainstream, they are not objective, and they are not true professionals – reflecting thinking promoted in the alternative journalism scholarship, with its emphasis on value-laden work by non-journalists. In the eyes of these traditionalists, ENGO journalism would lack cultural capital in the journalistic field. Yet the findings show participants stressing their devotion to independent reporting and fact-finding while acknowledging that the ENGOs stacked the deck by recruiting writers and making assignments that aligned with the organization’s goals. Both the ENGO and the journalists wanted a product that resembled true journalism as much as possible. This indicates that this journalistic production has perhaps more capital in the NGO field than in the journalistic field – that it is borrowing capital from the more powerful journalistic field. A ‘real journalist’ added value to an ENGO publication that mere advocacy or public relations could not. Thus, this production is an exemplification of a meeting point between the journalistic and NGO fields. As Fligstein and McAdam (2015) note, most scholarship using field theory conceptualizes each field as an independent world, but Bourdieu (2005) emphasizes not just relationship within fields but across and between them. Here, we see how one field informs the other, as the other attempts to borrow capital from the first.

In addition, the study contributes to the growing scholarship on NGOs as newsmakers (Powers, 2016, 2017) by examining a long-overlooked site of journalistic production by environmental NGOs. This production was not prompted by the economic crisis of journalism in the early 2000s, to which other studies have attributed the growing prominence of NGOs in the news field (Conrad, 2015; Grayson, 2014). Rather, these publications have existed for decades, and in some cases, for over a century, and so this study deepens the scholarship on the NGOs-as-newsmakers phenomenon. This study shows that the professionalized nature of NGOs, and their increasingly professionalized relationships with journalists (Waisbord, 2013), is also reflected in their journalistic choices in ENGO publications: they generally follow standard precepts of commercial journalism. Most notably, ENGO journalists are comfortable challenging the norm of objectivity, but they do so couched in a nuanced understanding of the impossibility of true impartiality in reporting while still stressing their adherence to factuality and fairness. Because this production appeared in ENGO publications, it represents less a blurring of the boundaries between NGOs and journalism as examined by Russell (2013) and Lück et al. (2016) in their studies of journalistic co-production at UN climate summits, but rather the borrowing of tactics, and therefore cultural capital, by actors in the NGO field from actors in the journalistic field.

Conclusion

This study examined journalistic publication by ENGOs, as NGOs are considered to be increasingly important purveyors of journalistic information (Powers, 2016). The environmental press, produced largely by formal ENGOs, has reached millions of readers for more than a century. This cultural production is worthy of serious examination, but it has been overlooked in favor of other presses that focus on issues like women’s, LGBTQ, and racial minority rights or fringe political movements like socialism and communism (Ostertag, 2006). As environmental issues become more salient in the age of climate change and as the formal environmental news beat continues to shrink, the ENGO press may become increasingly important. For example, Greenpeace launched a climate change newsdesk in 2012 that frequently breaks news on environmental issues (Turvill, 2015). This development comes as traditional journalism continues to grapple with an influx of overtly partisan news organizations (Fischer and Vavra, 2017). Ultimately, advocacy-oriented news production may become normal as the traditional neutral approaches struggle to maintain a foothold in the market. Whether these organizations will continue to borrow from the capital inherent in traditional news production will be an open question.

Limitations and further research

As with any social scientific endeavor, this study has limitations. First, it only examined major American ENGOs, while the NGO field itself contains many diverse organizations with different approaches to communication (Powers, 2017). The number of participants was relatively small, a limitation common to interview-based studies. Second, while field theory is useful in discussing relationships between organizations in cultural production, it is limited in developing understanding about consumers of information and also in parsing how distinct fields really are from one another, as it is possible that organizations may act alternatively as economic, political, journalistic, or other forces (Couldry, 2007). In addition, the study provides a contemporary snapshot of journalistic practice by these ENGOs; an historic perspective might tell a more nuanced story.

The study also points to directions for further research. Now that the study has proposed a framework for examining the habitus and doxa of environmental freelance journalists associated with ENGOs, one next step would be a large-scale survey or interview project that could gather data from a wider array of journalists and provide more generalizable information. In addition, future research could consider the differences among ENGO publications regarding adherence to journalistic norms and practices beyond the three major American NGOs examined here. There is also an inherent problem with directly asking journalists about norms that they may be reluctant to admit to violating. Attempts were made to work around this problem by asking the journalists to describe actual practice and to define the norms themselves. Another potential avenue for further research would be content analysis of articles in ENGO publications. This would allow scholars to examine whether articles followed traditional journalistic norms, although this method has its own intrinsic limitations.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author biographies

Suzannah Evans Comfort is an Assistant Professor in the Media School at Indiana University. Her research examines environmental communication by journalists and professional environmental activists. Her work has been published in Science Communication, Environmental Communication, and Journalism.

Justin Blankenship is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Auburn University. His research examines journalism from a technological and economic perspective, journalism education, and the role of media in politics. His work has been published in Journalism Practice and Journalism and Mass Communication Educator.

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