Abstract
One way to identify journalism’s problems is to focus on journalism itself. This is what we are good at. How will journalism react to the constantly evolving hybrid media environment (Chadwick, 2013) and the eroding boundaries of public communication – without losing its professional autonomy (Waisbord, 2013)? How will it sustain a cultural and social authority (Carlson, 2017) that differentiates it from other information, particularly when there seems to be a ‘gap’ between the thematic priorities of journalists and their audiences (Boczkowski and Mitchelstein, 2013) – and journalists are often seen as part of the establishment? How will new and old journalistic outlets develop plausible revenue models that can sustain quality reporting? What will be the position of journalism in the current attention economy or in the middle of the collective emerging ‘attention disorder’ (Bennett, 2016: 71–72) where battles of public opinion are won by well-targeted, simplistic, emotional messages that circulate effectively in the ‘distortion chambers’ (Sunstein, 2017) of the web?
Another way of taking stock is to look at what is happening around journalism. John Nerone (2015) offers a useful template for this with his idea of ‘tests of capacity’ (pp. 221–230). He looks for social and political issues that come to test journalism. With this de-centred strategy, his narrative picks up historical threads: the question about social classes, the legacy of slavery, global warming, and war and empire. Other recent candidates could emerge effortlessly: datafication and its issues of power and justice (e.g. Dencik et al., 2016), the global rise of populism or authoritarianism (e.g. Moffit, 2016), with its toxic post-modern uses of power and political discourse which aggressively attacks journalism – among other ‘internal enemies’ of the people. And so on.
While we live in times where many risks are high and intertwined, the latter strategy offers, I think, one challenge that rises above others. Hence, the ‘single’ biggest challenge for journalism in this sense is, of course, climate change. It is the systemic problem of our era and the coming future. It is not a ‘crisis’ (Latour, 2017) – a temporary condition of disease that can be cured or weathered out – but a material, unpredictable trajectory on which we have already embarked on. It challenges – or changes (Klein, 2015) – in time, well, everything. Thus, it turns up to genuinely fundamental questions also to journalism. Here is a good, overtly dense, but uncanny and clear quote that explains why: The stakes are massive, the risks and uncertainties severe, the economics controversial, the science besieged, the politics bitter and complicated, the psychology puzzling, the impacts devastating, the interactions with other environmental and non-environmental issues running in many directions. The social problem-solving mechanisms we currently possess were not designed, and have not evolved to cope with anything like an interlinked set of severity, scale and complexity. (Dryzek et al., 2011: 3)
Facing this kind of ‘test of capacity’ must, in the future, lead to a differentiated list of challenges and innovations for journalistic practice and organizational policy. Details of the future are not available, but it is not difficult to point to the way facing climate change – or climate politics – will cut to the core of what journalism is. Three quick examples will have to suffice here.
Sources, networks and coproduction: New professional imagination
Climate coverage demands rethinking journalism’s default position vis-à-vis other social institutions. While professionalism teaches us the virtues of autonomy and detachment, covering climate demands highlights the necessary alliances and interaction that underlie production of quality journalism. It underscores the importance of the coproduction facts and evidence that form the base of the current authority of journalism (see e.g. Lück et al., 2015). Perhaps, in order to reclaim a stake in the idea of public knowledge journalism needs more to think more about new ways of how crafting and delivering news together (Painter et al., 2017). This may demand a move beyond the rigid, modern imagination of institutional boundaries towards more relational (Carlson, 2017) or networked (Ananny, 2018) concepts. Perhaps professional reflexivity, in future, that cannot be detached from the substantial issues that the journalism deals with (see e.g. Berglez, 2011; Brüggemann and Engesser, 2014; Kunelius et al., 2017). This will be a demanding balancing act: how to recognize and value the need for an authoritative of consensus on the direction of policy, but retain the necessary ability to politicize partial and local solutions and recipes for climate change.
Location, scales, context: Transnational professionalism
As a paradigmatic example of a transnational problem, climate change puts pressure on journalism’s actual ability to act as critics of (nation) state power. While ideals of the Fourth Estate have been well ingrained into celebrations of professionalism, we know that national interest and national security (in particular) strongly discipline journalism. This is also so in climate journalism, where a ‘domestication’ logic still manages public attention and the frames. The inequality of resources for good climate journalism – strong local science, lively civic activism – is disproportionally spread, leaving journalism weak where the need for localized information and dialogue is crucial. Climate change is an uneven global problem, and has to be reported globally and locally at the same time. This poses a demand for scaling and reframing the necessary information in many ways. Climate change articulates itself in different ways in Capetown and Helsinki and Dacca and Miami Beach. While this diversity is clearly a challenge, it also points to a unique opportunity and a resource: the ability and crucial need for journalists to work in transnational networks and across national boundaries. There are new kinds of chances that transnational journalism can take advantage of: both the tensions between states and nations to access to a new diversity of voices and experiences and that between different levels of politics and admin as well as those between the states. (see e.g. Sambrook, 2018). Reporting climate change in a way that recognizes the ‘spectral’ nature of global knowledge (Hulme, 2015) is a paradigmatic test case for journalism that aims to reach beyond the misframings of methodological nationalism that has shaped the profession so far (see e.g. Roosvall and Tegelberg, 2018).
Time and rhythm: Attribution, risks, futures
Journalism is in the business of storms, floods, summits and elections, whereas climate change is about trend, trajectories, predictions and probabilities of models. Climate coverage challenges the time horizon and the rhythm that defines journalism. One concrete example of this is developing new practices of attributing extreme weather events to climate chance. This will demands new ways of validating such relations (by scientists) but also new ways of communicating (a bit like fact-checking reports, only much more complicated). 1 In addition to quick validation problems, climate journalism also needs to deal with unforeseen timescales of a political problem. Thinking and arguing on timescales that reach from the previous Ice Age to the end of this century creates dizzying challenges for social imagination. Clearly, the current ways of communicating the risks of what lies – of might lie – ahead are not enough (see Painter, 2013; Volkmer and Sharif, 2018).
Climate change is the most powerful forced opportunity modern societies face, thus it offers an unavoidable testing ground and laboratory for finding out ‘what journalism could be’ (Zelizer, 2017).
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This article was supported by the Finnish Academy project Mediatization of Governance (MeGo), SA 285734.