Networks of Coproduction

Conceptualizing Coproduction

In times of increasing economic pressure on media markets worldwide, there is a growing research interest in the relationship between journalists and strategic actors that advocate for certain interests—oftentimes connected to concerns about the quality and independence of journalism (Powers 2015). As both professions pursue their respective goals and interests, the relationship cannot be free from conflict. Scholars have looked at this relationship from different angles. Some authors emphasize the antagonistic relationship (e.g., Neijens and Smit 2003; Ryan and Martinson 1988); others highlight mutual dependencies and collaboration (Larsson 2009; White and Hobsbawm 2007). The characterizations of the relationship between these two professions often result from investigations of the use of PR material in the media coverage, specifically from looking at induction and selection quota (Cameron et al. 1997; Elfenbein 1986; Lewis et al. 2008; Reich 2010) or chances of different types of PR to attract media attention (Krøvel 2012). Direct contact and personal source–reporter relationships (Sallot and Johnson 2006; Shin and Cameron 2003) as well as mutual perceptions and expectations (Jeffers 1977; Sallot et al. 1998) have also received scholarly attention. In their intereffication (IE) model, Bentele and Nothhaft (2008) offer a complex and dynamic description of the relationship between PR and journalism in industrialized societies with democratic and relatively autonomous media systems. In an attempt to avoid merely metaphorical formulations—such as “love-hate relationship” (Ryan and Martinson 1988)—the authors coin the term intereffication derived from the Latin words “inter” and “efficare,” meaning “to mutually enable.” In the IE model, two types of communicative influences are distinguished: Inductions are defined as “intended and directed communicative offers or stimuli” (Bentele and Nothhaft 2008: 36) by one of the two systems toward the other; adaptations are defined as communicative organizational adjustments, that is, “actions by which actors or organizations consciously adapt themselves to changing circumstances . . . in order to maximize their own communicative success” (Bentele and Nothhaft 2008). Inductions and adaptations occur simultaneously on both sides but do not neutralize each other—the relationship between the systems (or individual actors within these systems) might be asymmetrical depending on power and resources. Our understanding of coproduction derives from this IE model and acknowledges the idea of mutual enabling through reciprocal action (induction and adaptation) without disregarding that such power differences can be critically imbalanced to a degree that would not be normatively desirable, for example, in cases where the power of PR outpaces journalism, rather disabling or even obstructing it.

The very different approaches to conceptualizing the journalism–PR relationship in general are also reflected in the recent scholarly investigations on the relationship of journalism and NGOs. NGOs pursue a special form of PR that is usually focused on issues of the common good. This aspect marks an important difference to the common notion of the strategic communication for special interests or economic success to which the scholarly theories usually apply. However, there are enough communalities between traditional PR and the PR of NGOs with a common-good orientation to apply the concept of IE to NGOs. Like many other competitors for attention in the public sphere, NGOs face the challenge to be heard and therefore aim at professionalization and use classical PR strategies (Greenberg et al. 2011).

Despite these efforts and a quickly growing media space, however, NGOs still struggle to achieve publicity. Compared with government or business representatives, their representation in the media is rather weak (Powers 2015). Instead of challenging dominant news norms, NGOs rather adapt to them, hoping to increase their chances of publicity (Powers 2015). Our own study contributes to this growing body of research on journalism–NGO relationships by identifying the decisive factors that directly influence interactions and their outcomes. In doing so, we also provide an explanatory basis for the IE model, which in its original form cannot explain under which circumstances we can expect which type of interactions. We also expand the scope of the IE model by accounting for the complex relations between national and transnational actors as well as between actors from different national contexts on both sides.

Understanding Journalists and ENGOs

Both environmental journalists and ENGOs have been studied before, yet most studies concentrate on one group at a time (Berglez 2011; Doyle 2009; Giannoulis et al. 2011; McCluskey 2008; Princen 1994; Warkentin 2001). Few studies explicitly examine the relationship by regarding both groups and their interplay as well as the ensuing consequences at once even though the very existence of environmental reporting was closely intertwined with the environmental activism movement emerging during the 1960s: “At the same time, environmental activists began flooding the media with releases, some media began environmental investigative reporting, and public awareness was heightened by a series of ecological disasters” (Sachsman 1973 cited in Sachsman et al. 2010). By investigating both groups within one study, we also aim at clarifying how these historical relations translate today and are actualized in coproduction processes at extraordinary occasions such as the climate change conferences. Although most literature focuses on one of the actor groups, in particular, we find several hints about factors that may be relevant for coproduction and that are necessary to structure our own empirical investigation.

The group of journalists that cover the COPs is rather heterogeneous. They work for different media types (print, broadcasting, online) and outlets with varying geographical scope (e.g., national, transnational) and thematic focus (e.g., science/environment or business). This diversity leads to important differences in how journalists approach the topic. Fahy and Nisbet (2011), for example, demonstrate that science journalists have a wider spectrum of role perceptions than other journalists. In addition to the more traditional journalistic roles of reporter, conduit, watchdog, or agenda setter, science journalists’ role perceptions also include those of a curator, convener, public intellectual, or civic educator. McCluskey (2008) found that newspaper articles on environmental topics written by environmental journalists were more positive toward ENGOs than those written by business, political, or general news reporters. Giannoulis et al. (2011) find three distinct types of journalists that mainly cover environmental issues: the “scientifically led, environmentally responsible” journalist, the “environmental crusader,” and the “impartial” journalist. This indicates different role perceptions but does not give any explanations for the differences that were detected. Brüggemann and Engesser (2014) find that most journalists who write about climate change agree with the consensus on anthropogenic climate change as put forth by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and also with common proposals for solutions. They therefore constitute an “interpretive community.” Looking at factors that influence IPCC affirmation, the authors point to two statistically significant correlations. First, environmental journalists are more affirmative than political, general news, and business journalists (the latter were least affirmative). Second, journalists who are more affirmative with the IPCC consensus more often use “a triad of sources: environmentalists, scientific sources (e.g., researchers and their publications), and mass media reports” rather than only one or two of those sources (p. 20). For our own considerations, this supports the assumption that the varying journalistic orientations of political versus environmental journalists will result in different forms of coproduction. In another recent study, Engesser and Brüggemann (2015) further differentiate journalistic attitudes and opinions by investigating environmental journalists’ cognitive frames of climate change in an international comparative survey. They identify five different cognitive frames and present evidence that certain individual factors such as specialization, professional aims, and political alignment influence journalists’ frames. However, the authors cannot make any claims on the influence of these cognitive frames on the journalists’ working practice and products. Such connections between personal attitudes of journalists and their practices when working with environmental NGOs can, if they exist, further complement the causal picture we are aiming at.

Berglez (2011) focuses more on consequences of journalistic decision making resulting from a particular audience orientation for the journalistic product. As a premise, he emphasizes that reporting on climate change entails the necessity to go beyond the usual logic of reporting and “no longer frame events and places as either domestic or foreign, local or global, but interrelate them.” (p. 461). His interviews with Swedish environmental journalists reveal that this challenge is not managed well by most of his interviewees who address national audiences by emphasizing aspects relevant for their national context. Journalists retain the traditional bifurcated logic when they report transnational issues and events for national audiences and focus on the domestic ramifications. We therefore expect audience orientation to be quite influential for the work of journalists in the climate change context.

To sum up, journalists who report about environmental issues, besides sharing a common issue focus, differ substantially in their own role perception (Fahy and Nisbet 2011; Giannoulis et al. 2011), their attitudes toward the issue (Engesser and Brüggemann 2015) and different sources (McCluskey 2008), their audience orientations and reporting styles when it comes to the treatment of scientific uncertainty and critique (Brüggemann and Engesser 2014), and their national versus transnational orientation in making sense of the issue (Berglez 2011). If these diverse journalists are confronted with ENGOs at the COPs, we expect a spectrum of distinct relationships. Given that the literature does not offer support for concrete, directed hypotheses, our study aims at identifying that spectrum of relations in the first place.

The role of “ENGOs” on the global stage should be viewed against the background of political PR in modern societies where all different kinds of interest groups try to influence politics, media, and public opinion (Davis 2002). ENGOs have realized that they need to influence politics on a global scale to support structural changes and therefore support local projects on the one side and address the causes of global problems on the other (Princen 1994). To do so, ENGOs try to promote their issues, analyses, and proposals for solutions through international agenda building and international frame building (Sheafer and Gabay 2009).

By and large, ENGO activities can be divided into two main pillars: lobbying and mobilizing. Several studies on NGO communication strategies reflect this basic distinction. Princen (1994), for example, shows that NGOs create media attention to address the general public, draw attention, and promote communication (e.g., via publicity stunts, mass mailings, and local organizing)—activities aimed at mobilizing (potential) support. However, NGOs coordinate lobbying and provide scientific knowledge that back up their political claims to convince policymakers to act in their sense. Gough and Shackley (2001) summarize the strengths of climate-oriented NGOs as they pursue lobbying through advocating certain policy solutions, while at the same time, they try to reach broader support through the construction of knowledge and acts of campaigning.

Powers (2014) identified four factors that shape NGOs’ publicity strategies: the form of funding, the NGOs’ relationship with state authorities, organizational dynamics, and desired audiences and impacts. Beyond that, Powers notes that NGOs do respond to particular media logics but “are not mechanically controlled” (Powers 2014: 103) by them. This confirms Waisbord’s (2011) findings that the worlds of news making and NGOs are heterogeneous and their relationships multifarious and changing. The Latin American NGOs that he investigated did not challenge the ideology of the newsrooms from which they wanted coverage, but they pursued different strategies that ranged from personally connecting with editors and reporters who would support their causes all the way to collaborating with “news making political elites to get attention” (p. 160). NGOs adapt to the media logic and “brand” themselves, use celebrities, regionalize and personalize ready-made media packages, and try to avoid scandals (Cottle and Nolan 2007). They even practice “news cloning” by reproducing the normative conceptions of journalism such as news criteria to make messages more newsworthy (Fenton 2010). From Krøvel (2012), we get insight into which kind of information is most successfully distributed by NGOs. Investigating the impact of environmental NGOs on news media in Norway, his results of a quantitative content analysis over a period of ten years of Norwegian newspaper coverage indicate that those NGOs that rather focus on information and knowledge production are successful in getting representation in the media coverage on climate change. NGOs provide journalists with in-depth expertise on scientific background information and are therefore an important source. The study also highlights that it cannot support earlier findings that media only focus on NGO activities that are supposed to be media friendly and driven by activism. However, what we do not learn from this study is what the actual interaction looks like between NGOs and journalists and which mechanisms account for the form of NGO representation in the media.

Resulting from what we know about journalists covering environmental issues and ENGOs, we propose a heuristic conceptualization of coproduction and distinguish a number of aspects that have not been looked at systematically before (see Figure 1). Even though we present the model in total here it is worth noting that only parts of it existed prior to the analysis and that it was continuously refined as our qualitative data analysis progressed. It serves to clearly demarcate different components of coproduction and to distinguish possible explanatory factors.

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Figure 1.

Heuristic model of coproduction processes.

We assume that the journalistic beat (political vs. environmental) on one hand and the strategic orientations of ENGOs (lobbying vs. mobilizing) on the other hand structure what we call cognitive and social preconditions of coproduction. On the cognitive side, the literature mentioned above suggests that different professional orientations go along with different perceptions of one’s own professional role and the role of the respective other side, with expectations concerning the interaction and notions concerning the respective target audience. Concerning the social preconditions we assume that different professional orientations on the part of both journalists and ENGOs result in different kinds of professional networks that either side establishes and maintains. Journalists’ and PR professionals’ own strategic media use in pursuit of relevant information needed for the job will equally vary with these professional orientations.

Furthermore, we suggest that the actual manifestations of coproduction should be influenced by these cognitive and social preconditions. We propose a distinction between behavioral patterns of coproduction and the consonance of interpretations shared by journalists and PR professionals. On the behavioral level, coproduction is manifested in the frequency and intimacy of professional contacts, by instances of actual collaboration, as well as by the choice of particular presentation strategies. However, coproduction can also become manifest in shared interpretations between journalists and PR professionals concerning the relevance of the issue of climate change and the respective COP, concerning the main story or message associated with a particular COP, and the level of conflict perceived. Common interpretations can also extend to shared opinions between journalists and NGOs with respect to particular issue frames propagated by different stakeholders or to shared perceptions of what constitutes the most striking or effective images used to represent a particular COP.

In sum, the heuristic model serves two functions. First, it helps us to sort the remarks that interviewees have made into specific categories and compare them with other remarks on the same aspect of coproduction. Second and more importantly, the model guides the causal process tracing by directing our attention to possible explanatory relations between variables on the left side and those in the middle and on the right.

Method

To investigate coproduction processes between journalists and ENGOs, we conducted three comprehensive case studies at the COPs in Cancun, Mexico (November 29 to December 10, 2010), Doha, Qatar (November 26 to December 8, 2012), and Warsaw, Poland (November 11 to November 23, 2013). Access to the conferences was gained through accreditation as an official observer organization with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Our semi-standardized interviews were conducted on site the conferences with thirty-six journalists from nine countries (Germany, the United States, South Africa, Brazil, India, Britain, Mexico, Qatar, Poland) and transnational news agencies (AP, Reuters, Bloomberg), as well as with sixteen representatives from transnational NGOs (Climate Action Network, Friends of the Earth, Climate Analytics, Global Call for Climate Action, Greenpeace International, One World, Oxfam and WWF International). Some respondents were interviewed more than once over the years, resulting in a total of seventy-eight interviews. Country sampling followed two main criteria: First, we interviewed journalists from the political and economically most important democratic country in each of the five major continents (Germany for Europe, the United States for North and Brazil for South America, India for Asia, and South Africa for Africa) to gain insights into how coproduction plays out under conditions of press freedom across the globe. Second, journalists from each of the three COP host countries (Mexico, Qatar, and Poland) were interviewed to gauge possible influences produced by the access of host country journalists to information from the respective conference leadership. Finally, British journalists were added because the Guardian was consistently named as an extremely important information source for journalists by many respondents. In the ENGO camp we focused on those NGOs and NGO umbrella organizations that act globally and thus develop PR strategies tailored to influence the interpretation of the COPs across the globe.

The media outlets that we investigate serve as agenda setters and leading media even in a highly fragmented media environment. However, many of the journalists who we have interviewed also produce for the online presence of their media outlet or a personalized blog and oftentimes not all reports that are published online automatically find their way into the paper or newscast. Beyond that, we know from our interviews that even in highly competitive media environments, NGOs still take pride in placing stories in mainstream news agencies and media outlets as these promise higher levels of outreach. NGOs’ own media products or outlets try to respond to the lack of attention from traditional media (Powers 2015), but attention from traditional media is still a crucial metric of success. ¹

Interviews lasted between fifteen and forty-five minutes, and were mostly conducted in English and digitally recorded. A small number of interviews had to be conducted via telephone after the conference had ended. To obtain candid answers, most interviews were conducted under the condition of anonymity so that individual quotes from the interviews presented in this paper cannot be traced back to individual interviewees. The interviews were transcribed and then analyzed with the help of the software MaxQDA.

Distinct interview guides for both professional groups were developed deductively based on relevant literature and subsequently improved through team discussions. For the later case studies in Doha and Warsaw, both interview guides were reviewed before the conferences to make modifications where further clarification or elaboration seemed necessary. This was the case for the specification of respondents’ contact to others, which was recorded more precisely in the Doha questionnaire, as well as the consonance of frame interpretations, which was a main research focus in Warsaw (see the appendix for the list of issue frames used in the Warsaw interviews).

To identify relevant factors and underlying mechanisms that explain coproduction, we pursue a process-tracing approach following George and Bennett (2005: 206): “The process-tracing method attempts to identify the intervening causal process—the causal chain or causal mechanism—between an independent variable (or variables) and the outcome of the dependent variable.” We derived a number of factors from the literature that are likely to influence coproduction, but as there is no elaborate theory on coproduction yet, our model clearly needs to be understood as a heuristic that gives hints on what to look for while analyzing the interviews. The limited state of research especially regarding the existence of explanatory factors that underlie IE mechanisms precludes explicit hypothesis testing in this case. The interviews were analyzed by way of stepwise qualitative content analysis as developed by Mayring (2002). The interviews were first read to identify all statements that refer to aspects in the heuristic model or suggest additional elements for that model. Statements relating to the same category in the model were paraphrased to simplify them and make them more general. These paraphrased statements were then grouped across interviews to identify patterns and typical connections between the aspects in the data. Such patterns were then visualized in a complex network structure (see Figure 2). In this paper, we do not have enough space to recount the qualitative discovery process. Instead we offer network descriptions based on the final product of our analysis and enrich these with exemplary quotes from the original interviews.

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Figure 2.

Networks of coproduction.

Results

Looking at our journalistic interview sample first we find that our proposed distinction between environmental and political/news journalists is insightful when it comes to coproduction processes. Of the thirty-six journalistic interviewees, twenty-one can be classified as environmental journalists (of which five have a business focus) and fifteen are more general news reporters (twelve of these have a focus on political news, three have a business focus). Nineteen out of the twenty-one environmental journalists maintain close contacts with NGO representatives, but only six out of fifteen general news journalists report closer contact to ENGOs at the conferences. ²

Our analysis reveals four distinct networks of coproduction as presented in Figure 2. Each network is crucially defined by the media type for which journalist members of the network primarily work (transnational media, national media, international news agencies, and business media) as well as the main target audiences at which communication is directed (policymakers, general national publics, general or well-informed international publics, or business audiences).

Conclusion

The complicated and often antagonistic relationship between journalists and PR professionals faces rather unusual circumstances at the UN climate change conferences. The complexity of the issue and, even more significantly, the “camp feeling” that develops due to two weeks of confinement to one conference location are conducive to processes of coproduction. These circumstances are in many ways different from the day-to-day work of both actor groups, especially because of the denseness of the event that progresses constantly and provides occasions for interactions that go back and forth and back again until they pause at the end of the conference, only to resume at the next COP. Instances of spontaneous communication or communication by chance in moments of idling during the conferences’ daily routines occur more easily and add to a blurring of the lines in professional relationships.

We have shown that within these particular circumstances, the Intereffication model (Bentele and Nothhaft 2008) serves as a useful base to understand the communicative processes between the actor types as it strengthens our awareness of mutual influences and adjustments. However, the Intereffication model is limited in its power to explain different patterns in journalism–PR relationships. With the results of our analysis, we can elucidate production processes that shape the global image of the climate change conferences in much greater detail. The process-tracing approach that we have applied to identify causal mechanisms between the relevant factors and outcomes has revealed distinct connections between structural parameters and professional orientations of the actors and cognitive and social preconditions of coproduction as well as between such preconditions and the actual manifestations of coproduction in both behavior and interpretations (see Figure 1). Our in-depth analysis shows that coproduction works differently within subgroups of our actor sample. Thus, our general model can now be specified for these subgroups, and factors that decisively shape the coproduction relationships in each network can be identified. Very generally, we show that the journalistic beat is influential as is the type of media outlet for which journalists work. The latter is crucial for their audience orientation as well as for the understanding of their own role, which both constitute important preconditions of coproduction. Manifestations of coproduction differ accordingly—whether journalists need sophisticated background information from long-established personal relationships or occasional alerts on upcoming highlights from situational contacts.

Looking at the same process from the NGO side, the strategic orientations of the globally acting ENGOs are most consequential for the ensuing mode of coproduction. When ENGO communicators concentrate their strategy on mobilizing broad audiences and their own supporters, they will share a professional self-understanding (as a precondition of coproduction) that is focused on setting the media agenda and determining media imagery. When an ENGO decides to focus its strategy on direct lobbying with political decision makers, mass media access is less important and professional self-understanding is more geared toward expert communication and thus toward specialized journalists and delegations, sometimes directly via Twitter. It should be noted, however, that most global NGOs and NGO umbrella organizations we observed during the COPs try to follow both strategies at the same time if they judge the respective COP to be important enough. A global ENGO like Greenpeace or WWF might then bring on both campaigners to organize PR stunts and mobilize supporters as well as policy specialists who try to engage elite-oriented media and national delegations. On the behavioral level, the “manifestations” of coproduction will differ in form between the two strategies, but collaboration is common in both.

In this study, the COPs have served as a prism for coproduction patterns between ENGOs and journalists as they uniquely combine high-level negotiation, civil society mobilization, and expert communication. In all three process types, NGOs play a distinct role. They have access to negotiations, they engage in lobbying negotiators as well as in mobilizing outside supporters to attain visibility and mount pressure on negotiators, and they provide specialized information and expert assessment. The element of ritual celebration and symbolic loading, to which all parties involved—government, NGOs, the media, and broad audiences—would have to contribute, was somewhat weaker at the COPs we study here than at COP 15 in Copenhagen (and possibly at COP 21 in Paris in 2015), so this element cannot serve as a forth domain of NGO–journalist interaction in our analysis.

What, then, can we learn from our case study about journalist–NGO interactions in transnational political communication more broadly? When we try to analytically generalize our findings, we would expect to see more of the coproduction type exemplified by the news agency network 3 when we turn to inter-governmental negotiation events such as the EU and G7/G8 summits or the multiparty negotiations about Iran’s nuclear program concluded in 2015: News agency journalists will collaborate with governments and other stakeholders in making sense of the power dynamics and the policy outcome of such events, but NGOs will be sidelined as one, relatively minor, type of source among others. In contrast, the transnational network 1, in which elite-oriented media collaborate with specialized NGO experts, as well as the business media network 4, which is built on domain-specific expertise, are more likely to be found at global conferences aimed at sharing knowledge and best practice such as, for example, the global AIDS conferences. Conversely, conferences marked by strong civil society mobilization as well as summits drawing extensive civil society “counter-summiting” activities such as the World Social Forum or Rio+20 might see a strong element of the network 2 type coproduction, in which NGOs try to mobilize broad audiences through protests and symbolic actions aimed at national media, and some media virtually join the mobilization in an effort to capture their audiences’ presumed inclinations.

The main theoretical contribution of our study lies in moving beyond wholesale characterizations of the roles of “the media” and “the NGOs.” Instead we specify four coproduction patterns that we hypothesize will recur in other transnational contexts and will structure the relationship of the news media and civil society actors more broadly. In addition, our analytical model also shows the significance of specific cognitive and social preconditions such as perceptions of target audiences and journalists’ long-standing source networks in determining the level and type of coproduction between NGOs and journalists. Finally, our analysis draws attention to the influence of situational micro-contexts of media production often ignored in attempts to analyze general professional conduct. Our observations and interviews strongly suggest that unplanned personal interaction does influence what gets said and written even in contexts of strong deadline pressure.

Of course, a focused case study such as ours also entails certain limitations. First, both actor groups we have studied are certainly very important in the global communication process, but for all journalists interviewed, country delegations were highly important sources, too, although they are often less accessible than NGOs. For a complete picture of coproduction at the COPs, therefore, delegations should be brought into the picture in subsequent analyses. Furthermore, as we have seen, the agreement on anthropogenic climate change is high among environmental and climate change journalists. To further test the relevance of common interpretations as a manifestation of NGO–journalist coproduction more generally, it seems promising to study a second subject in comparison that is more controversial in its basic assumptions than climate change. The issues of poverty/hunger and terrorism/civil war seem to lend themselves to such an approach. With our present contribution, we hope to have furnished a basis for subsequent explanatory analyses of coproduction. Such analyses remain important precisely because the specific configurations of coproduction mold the content of national and transnational media debates in consequential ways and thus determine the success of strategic transnational agenda- and frame-building efforts.