Abstract
The title of the book Digital Journalism is sufficiently broad to activate various expectations. Mine were driven by a preoccupation with journalistic discourse, and even though they were defeated, I recommend the book to discourse analysts interested in deepening their knowledge of technological, economic and social contexts of online journalism. By capturing a turning point in the history of journalism, the authors specify the implications of emerging media trends (hyper-text journalism, social media), affordances of news technologies (videoblogging, Tweeting), changing identities of news workers, and a (possible) restructuring of power relations due to digitization. This review summarizes the contents of the book’s nine chapters, and discusses its merits as a textbook for students and a valuable update for scholars interested in media and journalism studies.
Chapter 1 revisits key dilemmas connected with the perennial question ‘What is journalism?’ – a cultural artifact, an occupational practice, an ethical orientation in reporting, or a set of stylistic properties in writing? It presents a relatively simplified typology of modes of journalism (mainstream vs radical, public vs commercial, objective vs advocacy, institutionalized vs amateur). The point is to validate the diversity of journalistic practices, notwithstanding a core of shared professional standards, and to present digital technologies as aids, not threats, to traditional journalism. Although the chapter problematizes the notion of journalistic objectivity, it does not relate to the work of discourse analysts who have exposed it as a textual practice.
Chapter 2 looks at how the economic and institutional constraints on journalism can be lessened (but not eliminated) in the digital environment. It reviews the issues of corporate ownership, profit-making imperatives, and advertiser and political influence to explain the current disincentive to do costly news journalism. With respect to online news services, it notes the democratizing potential of crowdsourcing and citizen journalism, but shows how independent journalism has been stymied by commodification of information and capital advantage of media corporations. Chapter 3 follows on well from this by chronicling the evolution of business models that have aimed to monetize on news gathering and distribution. It traces news outlets’ struggles in the competitive and deregulated digital environment, and identifies their diverse marketing strategies (content scraping, pay-per-click, freemium, niche marketing, branding), only to conclude that online/mobile technologies are changing news consumption patterns so rapidly that media providers need to constantly re-invent themselves to stay afloat.
Chapter 4 (‘Truth, Trust, Transparency’) re-examines two commonly held pre-conceptions: 1) that ‘professional’ journalism is characterized by credibility (polls show that only 22% of the public in the UK and 29% in the US believe that mainstream news media are accurate, p. 57), and 2) that ‘amateur’ journalism must be inferior. In fact, the authors note that the rise of media-savvy, networked and, above all, committed citizen journalists means that some news and blog services are well up to professional journalistic standards. They go on to conclude that participatory online journalism (e.g. Wikinews, Indymedia) is an indication that some elements lacking in institutional journalism need to be corrected through a deeper engagement with topics, more transparency of sources, and multi-perspectivalism. Even though the authors endorse citizen journalism, they are not blind to its limitations, suggesting that it has a strong, educated, middle-class bias and tends to be oriented towards the views of those with more purchasing power. This chapter will be of special relevance to discourse analysts interested in doing critical (as well as comparative) research of mediated communication patterns and aiming to identify their ideological or epistemic bases.
Chapter 5 documents the measures taken by the publicly subsidized BBC to pass the service value test in view of the digital revolution, the economic crisis and the deregulation of the British media system. The Corporation embraced interactive audience contributions by carefully managing them (e.g. Have Your Say forums and BBC blogs), but it has yet to allow audiences to shape its output in a significant way. Chapter 6, on local digital journalism, is also restricted to the British context. The authors focus on rapid structural changes in regional news provision, which have resulted in the emergence of (hyper)local frameworks (neighborhood nets). As local news is predicated on trust and community building, the new role of the journalist is mainly that of a content solicitor and a post-moderator.
Chapter 7 discusses news customization, through which content can be reframed and agendas modified to match consumer demand. Hence, news gravitates towards infotainment and opinion rather than serious in-depth analysis and reporting, as even the most prestigious news outlets adopt user-driven homepage customization systems. Since customization limits consumers’ exposure to news, it could ultimately lead to depoliticization and social fragmentation. The authors also draw attention to the pervasive conceptualization of news recipients as consumers rather than citizens, which should strike a chord with critical discourse analysts who have noted that public communication is being colonized by neo-liberal discourses (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999). Again, the authors show their even-handedness in assessing the phenomenon of customization: while they worry about the future of the civic society, they also note that setting up a ‘Daily Me’ for customized news delivery suggests an active reader.
Remediation – the promise to transform our experience of mediated communication offered by each new technology – is the prevailing theme of Chapter 8, which focuses on the popularity of accessing interactive news from mobile devices. To the surprise of their commercial developers, mobile technologies and social media proved effective in mobilizing citizens politically and democratizing public spheres. Yet, as the authors aptly note, with news apps, speed and mobility come at the cost of foregoing the flexibility and openness of the World Wide Web. Chapter 9 (‘Media Law and the Challenges of the Internet’) explores the regulatory and legal constraints on what is commonly perceived as a free public domain of information exchange. The authors list high-profile court cases in which commercial interests of media companies were protected by invoking intellectual property rights. The authors also illustrate how difficult it is for bloggers to be legally recognized as professional journalists. For example, besides copyright, libel and anti-terrorism infringement cases, news bloggers (and leakers) were being prosecuted on the grounds of anti-hate or ‘sedition’ legislation. Hence, the readers can infer that the regulatory boundaries of digital journalism have yet to be negotiated.
The strengths of Digital Journalism include resistance to generalizations and a nuanced line of argumentation achieved by a careful examination of advantages and disadvantages of the transition from page to screen. Ample exemplification and up-to-date references from professional journals, classic books and media monitoring reports produce an insightful overview of the media arena. The writers eschew unnecessary jargon, which, together with intriguingly titled sections, makes for accessible reading for students, even those without a background in media and journalism studies. It must be underlined though that the book centres on Anglo-American journalism, with other cultural contexts being invoked only rarely and from the perspective of ‘the other’. What I personally miss in a textbook with such a broad thematic structure is a chapter on how the digital environment has transformed the discursive dimension of journalistic practice, with an overview of textual, rhetorical, narrative, generic, argumentative and particularly interactional aspects of new media styles. But perhaps these deserve being documented in a separate book.