Objects of journalism,revised: Rethinking materiality in journalism studies through emotion,culture and ‘unexpected objects’

Journalism studies and objects of journalism

Object-oriented study within journalism studies and adjacent subfields has oscillated between an obsession with technological artifacts and a disavowal of objects as distractions with minimal potential as sites of inquiry. Much of this intellectual uncertainty can be pinpointed to an uneasy relationship towards novelty. Papacharissi and Streeter’s (2012) elaboration of the ‘habitus of the new’ highlights how the structures of academic reward often result in a tendency to obsess over the newest technological artifact. Gray’s (2012) speech to the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) provided an apt summary of this concern, noting, ‘This predisposition to the wow factor in digital media studies. . .makes it hard to shift the conversation away from specific bits of technology to the social complexities that offer anything but clear, universal answers to our questions about media’s historical impact on society.’ Gray crystalises this well-trodden debate concerning the utility of object-oriented study and how to harness it without resorting to ‘toaster studies’ (i.e. uncritical studies of shiny new objects for the sake of something new to study, see Posetti, 2018). Novelty, then, might be blamed for turning the materialist approach away from analysis of culture, society, economics, and so forth, and, instead, towards a more narrow, sociotechnical analysis.

Material studies is thus unsettled scholarly terrain, perhaps because of scholarly reticence of being sullied by accusations of techno-determinism. But as Lievrouw (2014) notes, the pendulum has swung back as the language of ‘mutual-shaping’ has been popularised, with the materiality of media technologies ‘invoked and even celebrated’ (p. 24). Even with this expansion, Lievrouw (2014) argues that while studies have productively explored the ‘social/cultural side of sociotechnical duality’ of objects, this scholarship nonetheless tends to ignore or underplay the ‘concrete, embodied quality of crafting and using them’ (p. 24). Jackson et al. (2002) echo this sentiment, arguing that the prevailing social constructionist approaches to study technological objects remain ‘tilted’ – leaving underexplored the materiality of the artifacts themselves. Further, the ‘materialist turn’ seems to have abandoned the intellectual tradition of cultural materialism, which relies on neo-Marxist approaches to understanding capital and production. This is not necessarily a problematic omission, but it does mean that there is less emphasis on the history of objects as embedded in culture (White, 2013).

STS has become a popular theoretical foundation for empirical research in journalism studies, though these explorations predominantly focus on digital objects of journalism (see Lewis and Westlund, 2015) and the utility of objects in the practice of news production and news consumption (Domingo et al., 2015; Schmitz Weiss and Domingo, 2010). This may be due to the reliance on Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT), which rests on the premise that ‘groups and objects that act in the world, otherwise known as actants’ are ‘not limited, a priori, to human beings’ (Anderson and Kreiss, 2013: 368). In early versions of ANT, Latour insisted that studies of innovation could forgo analysis of the subaltern, with this ‘associational sociology’ denying ‘any a priori assumptions about the existence of social categories or aggregates’ (Halford and Savage, 2010: 937).

Anderson and De Maeyer’s (2015) special issue in Journalism provides the most recent and cohesive picture of the utility of object-oriented study for journalism thus far, although the articles on new technology do tend to forgo a critical analysis of social categories and power. Contrary to Gray’s assertion that objects can distract from social and cultural work, the special issue editors argue an object-oriented approach ‘provides a new window into the social, material and cultural context that suffuses our increasingly technologically obsessed world’ (Anderson and De Maeyer, 2015: 4). Accordingly, a material approach does not have to lead to mere ‘toaster studies’ of singular technological artifacts that are deemed sole agentic powers. Instead, they argue that object-oriented study can make good on many of the motivating forces of STS and digital media studies by ‘provid[ing] us with nuanced understandings of power that draw on the genealogy of technological artifacts, material affordances, organisational imperatives and cultural values that reside in the object itself and around its use’ (2015: 4). Yet even within this collection, which makes an important intervention in journalism studies, the articles are centered on functional interpretations of objects rather than their affective significance.

Contributors to the special issue highlight the utility and difficulty of a reorientation in journalism studies around material thinking. For instance, Boczkowski (2015), notes object-oriented study has thus far been unable to properly examine the outcomes of objects at a system-wide level that accounts for variance in the way objects are used and understood. Rodgers (2015) argues research should consider digital objects like software not as objects of journalism, ‘but instead as objects in relation to journalism’ (p. 23), thus pushing researchers to consider objects not just as products of journalistic practice or as merely objects of audience consumption.

But it is hard to ignore the focus on the ‘habitus of the new’ within journalism studies’ interpretation of materiality. For example, Ananny and Crawford’s (2015) exploration of the rise of news ‘apps’ focuses on the novel actors and objects that are created by news media in its new digital format (see elsewhere De Maeyer and Le Cam, 2015; Mari, 2018; Mor and Reich, 2018). In the special issue, Braun’s (2015) work on MSNBC.com’s online interfaces and Rodgers (2015) article on web content management systems highlight how digital objects of journalism are fruitful sites for interrogating a wealth of relational, technological, institutional and cultural questions pertaining to journalism. But this research also shows the limitations of present approaches to materiality, especially for digital objects; as the articles focus on how objects are used rather than how they are felt, experienced, or culturally-situated beyond the narrow focus of news production. The research could go further, and these articles would benefit from the productive potential of affect and emotion in objects of journalism research.

That said, the Journalism special issue offers an important intervention to stave off the ‘habitus of the new’ in objects of journalism scholarship: several contributors highlight the utility of studying physical objects of journalism. For instance, Le Cam (2015) examines photographs of newsrooms, focusing on the aesthetic and on the physical objects within the space to explore the values and role of journalistic outlets both internally and externally. Keith (2015) highlights how objects afford insight into changing newsroom cultures, showing how material artifacts like pica sticks, proportion wheels, and page dummies were not only tools but also symbols of power and historical markers. Finally, Usher’s (2015) research on The New York Times’ 24-7 global news production process invokes materiality as a way into questions of time, space and place in newsmaking. Collectively, such studies show how a more expansive object-oriented lens holds promise in studying both the sociocultural dimensions of objects of journalism and the embodied qualities of the material artifacts themselves.

Further work needs to be undertaken to fully realize the potential of materialism in regard to affect and emotion in journalism. In media studies, Peters (1999, 2015a, 2015b) aptly demonstrates how new media objects have material corollaries, suggesting our experience of digital objects draws on our affective and historical experience of their physical forms – the metaphor of the computer cloud is not much different than the way we think about and experience the clouds in the sky. Object-oriented study, grounded in cultural studies, offers new sites of study for understanding how journalism is produced via emotion, is imbued with emotion, and also elicits emotion (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2016: 2). Objects of journalism elicit questions not only about how objects inspire feelings but also about what particular feelings are prompted.

In discussing the contentious nature of emotion in the practice of journalism, Wahl-Jorgensen (2016) (drawing on Pantti, 2010) comments that emotion has tended to represent a ‘bad object for journalism practitioners and scholars, understood in terms of its deviance from ideals of the public sphere’ (p. 4). However, as scholars have moved away from seeing the public sphere as rational, affect has become an important dimension through which to understand the positive, generative potential of feeling. Indeed, Ahmed’s (2010) conceptualisation of ‘happy objects” offers a contribution to this ‘affective turn’ by theorizing positive affect and by connecting objects, feelings, and public discourse. According to Ahmed, ‘happy objects’ function as ‘a promise that directs us towards certain objects, which then circulate as social goods. Such objects accumulate positive affective value as they are passed around’ (p. 29). These objects are ‘sticky’ – they are already attributed as being good or bad, as causing happiness or unhappiness – and this stickiness is a shared orientation that gives affect a shared, social feeling.

How then, does this help us understand objects of journalism? A nostalgia for print newspapers, dedicated museums full of antique print presses, physiological responses to mobile push-notifications, and even sustained distrust of ‘news from the Internet’, all point towards an affective ‘sense-making’ of objects of journalism that is in many ways ‘sticky.’ Thus, object-oriented study allows for an exploration of affective sense-making that extends beyond use or novelty to consider ‘stickiness’ – that is, ‘what sticks, or what sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values, and objects’ (Ahmed, 2010: 29). Objects make us feel – and what they make us feel (and why) can be the starting point for cultural, historical, and empirical research.

An Intervention: ‘Structure of Feelings’ and news objects

A reorientation towards materiality and a focus on object-centered study via culture affords researchers a host of opportunities to consider the history, the affect, and the political economy of objects. To do so, we propose connecting objects of journalism to the larger framework of what Raymond Williams called ‘the structure of feelings’ or the ‘meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt’ (in Filmer, 2003: 132). We take Williams’ use of ‘feelings’ as affective, understood as a precondition to emotion or how feelings are expressed in discourse (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2013). Williams’ (2015) framework brings together the connections between form, matter, and the body that have been contested within the tradition of materialist thinking to show their interdependencies. Williams acknowledges a formal ‘structure,’ but notes that objects have material continuities that bind them together; these connections are ‘one of feeling much more than of thought’ (p. 325).

Drawing from cultural and aesthetic theory, Williams illustrates how objects have a multiplicity of meanings and provide a constellation of experiences to different people situated in distinct temporalities. The work of art has often been considered as the quintessential object by critical theorists; consider Benjamin’s (1936) discussion of ‘aura’ as a way to root a work of art in space and time (pp. 220–224). Williams (1974) argued earlier discussions were overly focused on an object’s content/message, use, and links to consumerism. Instead, ‘structures of feeling’ builds on the more intangible sense of an object as bound up in emotionality and aesthetics. Elaborating on the concept in The Long Revolution, Williams argues that the term ‘structure of feeling’ is ‘as firm and definite as ‘structure’ suggests, yet it operates in the most delicate and least tangible parts of our society’ (2001: 65). ‘Structures of feeling’ account for the multiplicity inherent to an object’s materiality – its physicality, emergent relationships, use, adaptation, influence, and beyond. Object-oriented study, therefore, illuminates the aesthetic and emotional connections inherent within and between objects that are emblematic of cultural and social phenomena that are similarly temporally bound.

Furthermore, embedded in Williams’ approach is an expansion of Marxist historical materialism that adds affect and emotion to critiques of labor, institutional structures, and hegemony. While Williams has been critiqued for his lack of empirical evidence, he offers a starting point for an analytical framework for studying objects of journalism. In Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974), Williams analyzes television as experience (‘flow’), as institution, and as form. In doing so he provides a roadmap, albeit incomplete, for interrogating the materiality of objects themselves and their social history that allows for affect and emotion to be considered as more than just a by-product of production or use. Objects are structures that inspire feelings and emotions, which if analyzed, can provide valuable insight into power and social difference. Though Williams does not specifically address the connection between structures of feelings, objects, and communication, he acknowledges that communication itself is a kind of social institution, which in turn structures social relations (Williams as quoted in Carey, 1989: 26).

Zelizer (1993, 2008) has arguably done the most to connect Williams’ intervention with journalism studies. As Zelizer (2008) has long noted, journalism is all too often considered as merely an information purveyor. A cultural approach to journalism studies, alternatively, considers ‘how practice, routine, and convention take on meaning internally for and among journalists and sees journalists as being ‘in’ a culture, viewing them not only as conveyors of information but also as mediators of meaning’ (p. 88). Building from Williams’ work, Zelizer’s (2008) intervention therefore calls for journalism studies to reimagine its own definitions of journalistic conventions. Accordingly, ‘seeing journalism as culture opens journalism’s definition to activities that go under the radar of conventional views of what journalism does’ (p. 88). A cultural perspective has thus offered journalism studies novel objects, spaces, and theoretical lenses to examine journalism. For example, from this cultural standpoint, journalism works as narrative and mythology (Bird and Dardenne, 1997; Lule, 2002); as cultural memory (Zelizer and Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2014); as creator of cultural imaginaries (Anderson, 2006; Gutsche and Hess, 2018), and increasingly, as a form of self-critique (Carlson, 2009; Creech, 2015).

Things too, play an important role for journalists and the public alike in establishing cultural and symbolic meaning about how journalism works, what it means, and the values it embodies. Foregrounding this work is an embrace of Carey’s (2002) view of the importance of ritual communication: as a dramaturgical process in which a collective experience of communication creates and constructs shared belief systems. Carey’s ritual of newspaper reading, whereby the daily news invokes a reader as part of a larger and ongoing drama in the world, is arguably as much about the ritual of having an object of journalism to pick up and to connect to as it is the experience of the content itself.

In her work on communication as embodiment, Marvin (2006) calls for Carey’s distinction between ritual communication and transmission to be taken seriously and to be further ‘fleshed out’ (p. 68). Journalism is experienced not just as information; the experience of journalism includes a daily ritual that provides comfort and continuity as well as a sensory experience of holding a newspaper, smelling its ink, and turning its pages, or perhaps, swiping on an iPad. Literary critic N. Katherine Hayes argues that a robust theoretical discourse must be able to talk about materiality and meaning together – ‘to settle for anything less than a fully embodied and material practice of literary theory and criticism is to risk impoverishing out understanding of the meaning-making practices through which we engage the world’ (in Gitelman, 2002: 12). Consequently, things – objects of journalism – are important avenues for understanding culture and thus act as a vital prism for journalism scholarship.

Hard, soft and unexpected objects of journalism

Objects of journalism are implicated in the institutional, organisational, and individual routines, rituals and relationships of journalism. They can be mundane, hidden, and rare, and do not always contribute directly to the processes and rituals of news production or consumption. To operationalise objects of journalism for more grounded, empirical research (and to move beyond a consumption/production binary), it is helpful to have categories that delineate different types of objects and their potential affective and emotive dimensions.

Building on work by Schudson (2015), we propose that objects of journalism can be classified into three broad categories; hard, soft, and unexpected objects (see Table 1). The use of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ labels to categorise journalism is well established (see Lehman-Wilzig and Seletzky, 2010; Reinemann et al., 2012; Zelizer, 2004), but has overwhelmingly been used to describe and measure news content. The application of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ labels to objects of journalism, however, entails a more concrete classification. As Schudson (2015) illuminates, ‘We conventionally distinguish between hardware and software. Both are things. But hardware lasts a long time, and it is not easily changed. Software is flexible and can be tweaked’ (p. 64).

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Table 1.

Defining and operationalizing objects of journalism.

Type of object	Definition	Example	Potential affective dimensions
‘Hard’ objects	Objects with physical instantiations that can be touched.	Printing presses, news buildings, newspapers, television screens, satellites	Nostalgia. A sense of stability cultivated by physical news spaces. A sense of security and safety associated with rituals of use
‘Soft’ objects	Incorporeal objects, often digital but can also be the collation of socially constructed/conventionally bound practice.	News interactives, Homepages, Comment Sections, News Interviews, Web Analytics, APIs	Uncertainty over journalistic labor with the increasing need for programming experience. Engagement and a sense of community facilitated through interaction (actual and perceived) with other readers. Sense of winning, losing, or gaming the system based on audience feedback
‘Unexpected’ objects	Objects defined not by physicality but by their unanticipated relationship to journalism	Paintings in newsrooms, news media merchandise, political and cultural ephemera, furniture	A sense of power and importance felt through the acquisition and consumption of expensive objects. A sense of community and belonging through wearing (or seeing being worn) branded merchandise. A claim to authority based on past experience of expertise.

While Schudson (2015) differentiates between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ things he maintains that it is not a simple categorisation of either/or. He posits ‘A Thing is no less a Thing for being a cultural convention or social practice to which, to some extent, individual human volition must bow’ (p. 64). ‘Hard things’ or ‘hard objects’ of journalism may help provide a more holistic analysis into the industrial elements of journalism, such as printing presses or television satellites to the way that buildings and locations impact news production (Author, B). A ‘soft thing’ might be thought of as a news interview; partly social as it is made of practices and conventions built up over time by journalists, but also material in its formulation as a transcript or news clip, or as content within a newspaper. Thinginess, therefore, exists both in people and objects; by categorizing things as ‘hard’ or ‘soft,’ we can consider both how they exist and how this form affects their use.

Hard and soft objects retain important affective and emotional dimensions for exploration within journalism studies. Hard objects retain meaning beyond use – creating a sense of control and order, denoting position within a newsroom or even labor security. For example, newspapers as hard objects, embody a sense of tradition cemented by the daily rituals of audiences and producers alike. Physical newsrooms similarly encapsulate a shared sense of stability for those that work in them and provide an important reminder of the significance of the news organisation for a local community. While the digitisation of journalism has rendered many hard objects of newsmaking functionally obsolete, many still exist, in newsrooms and museums, as temporal markers of nostalgia of journalism’s past.

The digitisation of journalism has unanchored it from its traditional material form to allow for new ‘soft’ manifestations (Schudson, 2015). Soft objects of journalism inspire emotions from uncertainty to contestation to hope to a sense of connection. Soft objects such as news interactives, APIs, comment sections, etc., cultivate sociality across a news organisation and among audiences, prompting affective and emotional responses. The interplay of soft and hard objects within news making, dissemination and consumption bring together different types of labor, organisational imperatives, and infrastructural configurations.

Studying the affective dimensions of soft objects does not mean a focus on the ‘habitus of the new,’ but instead prompts a reconsideration of digital journalism and emotionality as anchored by the hard, soft, and unexpected objects that tie together emotions and rituals of consumption. In particular, the fragility of contemporary journalism brings to light the importance of objects that were previously background ephemera. Unexpected objects emerge out of this unmooring; these are objects that feel ‘unexpected’ because they are not traditionally associated either with news production or news consumption or ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ objects of journalism.

‘Unexpected Objects’ of journalism

With Williams in mind, we suggest the importance of considering ‘unexpected objects’ of journalism, which are objects that are not typically considered to be part of the direct experience of producing or consuming news, but nonetheless have an affective dimension, creating the preconditions for a range of possible emotions. The central connective element of these unexpected objects is that they are affective or emotive – they are bought into the realm of journalism as they relate to the ‘structure of feelings’ of journalistic culture and how journalism is situated in a larger, sociocultural context. In part, these unexpected objects have come into focus because they offer new insights into how the turbulence of the news industry is felt. Thus, we propose ‘unexpected objects’ as a third category of objects of journalism: these are the objects that we don’t expect to be important because they are ordinary and often unconnected to news production or consumption, but unexpectedly take on new significance, often due to disruptive change.

The introduction of unexpected objects is therefore a call for journalism scholars to broaden considerations of which objects are seen as relevant within the study of journalism. These unexpected objects may be ‘hard’ physical objects or ‘soft’ objects, but what distinguishes these objects from the previous categories is their unexpected significance, their reconfiguration as background ephemera to the everyday routine to taking on new, explicit, affective significance. Unexpected objects of journalism are physical and digital objects that appear ordinary and unimportant, until they do not.

This focus on the mundane and every day is a common frame of reference in scholarship. Outside our subfield, scholarship on everyday objects, built environments, and markers of conspicuous consumption are par for the course. Recall Bourdieu’s focus in Distinction on ordinary objects: one’s choice in cigars or one’s newspaper purchase is a key to understanding one’s habitus. Similarly, Lefebvre (1991) argues that our phenomenological process is emplaced; the objects are touchstones for cultural meaning orient who we are and how we know. In media studies, Humphreys (2018) returns attention to the process of self-chronicling, once in a hard diary, but now, found in selfies and social media posts – these formerly mundane objects take on new significance because of what they can tell us about identity, self-presentation, and platform power.

Examples of ‘unexpected objects’ might include journalistic ephemera: that is, the stuff of journalism that isn’t journalism. These include hard and soft objects that recall nostalgia or showcase expertise or serve another symbolic function: press passes, ticket stubs, photos with, old campaign signs, sports memorabilia, and beyond. News organisations will often display such objects in their lobbies, centering their existence as important emotional and cultural signifiers. For instance, some newspaper lobbies have large maps on the wall or human-scale globes, often with dots designating national and international bureaus (Munson, 2017), others have mini-museums filled with cornerstones, time capsules, and old-timey photos. These objects extend past existing merely as symbols of grandeur – their curation and change over time also reveals temporal shifts and contestations within the values and motivations of the profession.

At The Los Angeles Times, a collection of Picassos went missing; they were once signs of the Chandler family’s embrace of the avant-garde, and only became relevant once more in 2018 as newspaper employees chronicled The LA Times’ move out of its downtown, block-long building, sold to save money. This is not to say these unexpected objects are never used directly in journalistic processes, but their primary attachment is affective, while their functionality is of often tangential or secondary impact. Even the ‘T’ tattoo on the back of New York Times’ former executive editor Jill Abramson is an unexpected object of journalism that speaks to the affective power of the material in relation to journalism. For Abramson, the tattoo, even after her unceremonious firing, still inspires her with a sense of pride in Times journalism, but she is stuck with a tattoo on her back of her former employer’s logo. These ‘unexpected objects’ are embedded into journalism by social and cultural practices that inscribe emotional and affective dimensions.

Company mugs, with newspaper logos and tag lines, take on new significance in a time of disruption. But few newspapers are making mugs for their employees today, and when a journalist is laid off, that coffee mug takes on new affective dimensions. Packed into a box that itself is now the measure of a career, precisely what emotion this mug conjures requires empirical research. That mug may represent loss, bitterness, frustration, and beyond – an obvious, everyday object that unexpectedly reveals emotional flashpoints in the decline of journalism. For example, Katy Read, a former New Orleans Times-Picayune journalist, shared a picture of a broken Times-Picayune mug with tagline ‘looking to the future’ circa 1987 on the ‘Friends of The Times-Picayune’ Facebook group (Figure 1). She ordered it from Etsy in May 2020 after a discussion on the page about newspaper mugs. Read commented on the broken mug, ‘. . .a little too on-the-nose, Etsy’; as the newspaper’s print edition no longer exists and the newspaper itself has been subsumed into a local rival newspaper, The New Orleans Advocate. ³

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Figure 1.

A broken Times-Picayune mug. Shared with permission.

In other cases, a ‘soft’ object like a news organisation’s website, especially for those not charged with running it, can quickly fade to the background. But when that website is upgraded, for instance, or when an old article or digital graphic can no longer run because the software code is obsolete, this website or even a url may well take on ‘unexpected’ importance. A website revamp might signal hope, for instance, or anger, depending on whether a journalist’s work was lost in the process. For the public, a new website might mean a better user experience, a favorable, easy experience surfing a site minus ad tech that might well inspire the kind of loyalty to pay for a digital subscription. Again, the richness of potential empirical research comes to the forefront.

Consider, for example, how former New York Times and Chicago Tribune multimedia specialist Andrew DeVigal has fought the ‘linkrot’ of poorly maintained newspaper sites. For his own archives, he has kept a record of screenshots on a website (Flickr) that is now itself obsolete (personal communication by email with the author, June 2, 2015). In a screenshot caption of a 1995 interactive graphic of Chicago Tribune homicide map (see Figure 2), DeVigal recalls the graphic fondly, proudly pointing to it as an early example of what would become a fairly standard interactive visualisation. He also reminisces in the caption about his old co-workers. This graphic, then, takes on unexpected affective significance for those who come across it, and over time, to DeVigal, has unexpectedly become a digital, ‘soft’ object’ tinged with nostalgia, particularly once its existence as a live link was lost.

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Figure 2.

Screenshot from Drew DeVigal’s Flickr Account of the Chicago Tribune’s Homicide Graphic 1995. Shared with permission.

Furthermore, explorations of incidental or accidental (see Tewksbury et al., 2001), ambient, and attractive exposure to news (see Hermida, 2010; Thorson, 2020), highlight the unexpected ways in which news audiences encounter journalism, underscoring the need to rethink the traditional material pathways and sites associated with journalism. Unexpected objects of journalism are thus useful for exploring news audiences – take the merchandise news organisations sell to news consumers, for example. The choice to wear a public radio t-shirt or tote bag is a declaration of one’s identity and values, a form of commodity activism more generally (Banet-Weiser, 2012), as it is the news organisation’s (e.g. The New York Times’ ‘truth’ pin, see Figure 3). These objects – t-shirts, tote bags, pins and the like – are not traditional objects of journalism, yet they are connected to journalism through an emotional attachment that makes the object a fruitful site of inquiry.

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Figure 3.

The New York Times’ Truth Button, from www.store.nytimes.com.

Unexpected objects of journalism can highlight attempts to create control or order, inspire creativity, or facilitate community. At first glance these objects feel replaceable and consequently unimportant within journalism studies yet categorizing them as unexpected objects and considering affective and emotional dimensions serves as a fruitful starting point for considering power, relationships, newsrooms culture, journalistic value and more. Put another way, these unexpected objects become objects of journalism apart from any connection to their direct or obvious utility within the production or consumption of journalism; rather, their materiality is enmeshed in relationships, rituals, assessments and cultural associations of journalism. Thus, we can see how objects of journalism, as hard, soft, and unexpected, are socially produced and bound up in cultural and affective meaning.

Affect and emotion: Toward the future of objects of journalism research

Object-oriented offers journalism studies a concrete way to examine the tumultuous history of the news media in a way that captures simultaneously its past and present forms and the conditions of its alteration. This article shows how objects of journalism can also provide insight into affect and emotion, offering a rich conduit for empirical inquiry into how people feel about journalism itself. We advocate for a cultural turn within object-oriented study, drawing particular inspiration from Williams’ ‘structures of feeling’ and Carey’s ritual communication. An expansive material lens that considers emotion and affect, in addition to use and to function, can therefore provide new insight into social structures, power and history.

Future research might consider how objects of journalism and the ‘emotional turn’ can examine questions far understudied in journalism studies, from labor relations to physiological responses in news consumption, to aesthetics and design. Cultural studies traditions of materiality have long contended with relationships between objects and the body, exploring the affective and emotional impact that changing material configurations have on physical embodiment. Resituating materialism also allows for future research to contend with connections between journalism, embodiment, and emotion. For example, Petre (2018) alludes to this in her study of Chartbeat in a digital newsroom, with a figurative heartbeat showing the viability of metrics prompting an affective response from journalists of anxiety, celebration and relief. If taken up more consistently within journalism studies, objects of journalism can help explore the emotional consequences of digitalisation across news consumption, production, content, and distribution.

The link between history, objects of journalism, and emotionality can also rebuild a cultural materialist emphasis in journalism studies, which could unmask power relations in novel ways. While scholars are turning to directly consider labor fragility (Cohen, 2015; Deuze and Witschge, 2018), objects of journalism can reveal latent affective tensions. The paycheck, heretofore routine aspect of professional journalism as payment for labor is now an ‘unexpected object’ fraught with fear, hope, disputes, and contingencies. A paycheck, then, is imbued with a ‘structure of feeling’ that is now destabilised. As journalism moves away from industrial manufacturing (especially print newspapers), considering the ‘loss’ of machinery can help reveal previously hidden labor. Thus, next steps for the affective turn in material studies of journalism could include the class, race, gender, and power dynamics that have been largely understudied in research on news innovation.

Heeding Zelizer’s (2004, 2017) call to extend journalism studies beyond the newsroom, object-oriented study can also encapsulate the activities and agents involved in newsmaking that happens outside the confines of a traditional newsroom. ‘Objects of journalism’ are far more than their utility in the newsroom. Further developing the categorisations of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ and ‘unexpected’ objects provides an analytical framework for empirical research. In sum, journalism’s thinginess extends far beyond its traditional manifestation and now encompasses a rich variety of physical and non-physical objects. Object-oriented study offers a cosmopolitan theoretical direction that, if applied holistically beyond questions of utility, enables the consideration of multiple temporalities, multilevel analysis, and a recognition of the affective and social relationships that underpin the practices, structures and meanings of journalism.