C.W. Anderson: If the president is against basic democratic ideals, the press should be his enemy
In this interview, the scholar talks about the culture of the click, ethnography, the crisis in journalism, Academia and the similarities between Brazilian and American politics.
If you are a journalism researcher in Brazil you will certainly remember this name. Professor C.W. Anderson is very well known in the country for the Post Industrial Journalism Report, written with Emily Bell and Clay Shirky in 2012 at Columbia University. But besides that remarkable work, Anderson has done a lot of other research, including the most recent one: the book “Apostles of Certainty: Data Journalism and the Politics of Doubt”, in which he analyses how the idea of what data journalism is has changed over time. “I discovered that certain aspects of data journalism are more like they were a hundred years ago that might they were 50 years ago”.
In this interview, we talked about a lot of subjects as the culture of the click in the newsrooms, ethnography (Anderson describes himself as an ethnographer that studies the news), the crisis in journalism, Academia and — of course — about the similarities between Brazilian and American politics, specially regarding to the challenges of current press coverage. For him, journalism should take the side of certain ideals and “to the degree that we have a leadership that violates those ideals, then we are your enemy”.
C.W. Anderson is an American citizen now living in the UK as he is a professor at the University of Leeds. Our kind conversation took place this February in his office, during a very cold afternoon of the European winter.
Could you speak briefly about your career?
I never worked as a journalist in the way that people could find journalism at the time. So I was never a professional journalist, but I did work for many years as sort of a early citizen journalist, ironically in the early 2000s. I was involved in blogging and some versions of podcasting and doing that type of media production.
About what kind of subjects?
Largely about politics. You know, after 9/11 and George W. Bush was around, it was a very political time. So I felt like I wanted to contribute somehow to trying to think about what was happening in America. I did that until 2003 and then I went to back to graduate school because I was interested in what was happening, in the ways that journalism was changing. I was interested in what it meant that so many people could participate in the media now and how that was changing what journalism was. At that point I went to Columbia University to work with Professor James Carey, he was the scholar who I originally wanted to work with. Professor Carey is famous for his idea of the ritual view of communication and communication as culture. Unfortunately he passed away while I was studying. So I ended up working with Todd Gitlin and Michael Schudson. I’m certainly very grateful and very lucky to work with both of them. I did my early research on the Philadelphia news ecosystem, how journalism was changing in Philadelphia because of the Internet. And then I got my first job at the City University of New York as an assistant professor, worked there for eight years until coming to the UK to have a full professorship at the School of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds.
Your PhD dissertation is remarkable because almost 10 years ago you observed what you called as the culture of the click. Since then publishers are relying a lot on audience metrics, especially the quantitative ones. Do you think they should better evaluate their editorial decisions as we now know that many of those metrics are fake or are not so reliable?
It’s interesting because one of the things that I’ve learned in classes at Columbia was that journalists don’t care about their audience.
This was sort of the intellectual wisdom in sociology classes at Columbia Media and Communication classes. Journalists were a professional community that did not care about its audience and so the minute I got into the newsroom I literally see people with spreadsheets in their hands running across the newsroom waving them in the air saying ‘Can you believe this story?’. It just really surprised me what was happening and how what I learned was wrong.
So the question now I guess is: has it gone too far? Are journalists too dependent on clicks or too dependent on metrics that they make too many of their decisions because of these things? I think it’s important that journalists know what their audience wants and what their audience needs in order to be informed. Any journalist who would claim that they don’t need to know what their audience wants to read is deluding themselves. But I do think that journalism as a professional category needs to make decisions for itself about what it thinks is important. That is what makes a professional community. It’s a group of people who have a certain amount of expertise and then can decide for themselves what the important thing is. So journalism as a professional community is highly threatened. And that is a problem because it’s important for journalists to be professionals. So I don’t think clicks and metrics alone are terrible for journalism. But I do think that insofar as they contribute to a larger deprofessionalization of this very important occupation, they can be part of a bad trend. The short answer would be journalists need to know what their audience thinks but they should not become slaves what their audience thinks and they need to continue thinking for themselves about what their audience needs.
Do you think still nowadays we live in this culture of the click or now most of the newsrooms have already learned that it doesn’t explain everything?
I think you have a real gap between the elite news organizations and everyone else. I have a Ph.D. student who worked at News Corp for a while, you know Rupert Murdoch’s in Australia. And to hear her tell it they were utterly governed by clicks, completely governed by news metrics. But if you talk to some people at The New York Times or The Guardian they will sell you ‘well no, we aren’t like that at all, we use metrics as one of many other things and we certainly aren’t living in this culture of the click’. But many of the more local and more commercial news organizations are absolutely even now much more governed by reader metrics. I think News Corp and the average of British tabloid. I would be very surprised if they did not still have largely click baits view. Although that’s different at elite. At elite news organizations, which tends to be that kind of news organizations that academics study, is not as much. But also the other thing I will say is: journalists at these elite news organizations are trained to say the right things about metrics if you ask them. They’re trained to say very smart things. So you can interview someone and they can explain to you at length about ‘oh well, we’re not governed by these things’. But I don’t think we have had enough ethnography of how this all works — apart from your own work, Caitlin Petre’s work, a few other people who have really done ethnographies at this stuff. And I think when you actually watch what journalists do it may be different than what they say.
You describe yourself as an ethnographer who studies the news. Do you think the investigation of an ethnographer can understand the journalism in which specific aspects?
I think that the goal of ethnography is to understand how journalists understand their lives and their jobs, understand what is happening to them. So I would make a difference between understanding what is happening to journalists and understanding what journalists think is happening to journalists.
For an ethnographer the key thing is to always get what the person thinks is happening to them, what they think the Internet is doing, what they think technology is doing, what they think metrics are doing. It is in some ways for an ethnographer as important, if not more important, than what those things are actually doing in reality.
So to me ethnography is to some degree always going to be concerned with what we might call the hermeneutical aspects of research which is understanding how people make sense of the world. It’s not necessarily understanding the world but it is understanding how people make sense of the world. Because ethnography allows you to spend a lot of time with people and allows you to watch what they do, not simply listen to what they say, it provides a unique access to the culture of a particular place. That’s the main value added that ethnography brings to research.
In this sense, in “Remaking the News” you propose the genealogical ethnography. The idea is try to fill a gap in journalism research that use the ethnography as a method?
Yes, the idea was that I, as somebody who studies things, spaces, places and professions that have changed very quickly, I thought of my ethnography ten years later, was it still relevant, was it still valid… And then I thought what if we combined ethnography and history — not history as in 100 years ago, but history as in ten years ago. Because the way newsrooms were in 2009 is very different than the way they are in 2019. Very rapid changes. The idea was what if we combined a historical perspective with an ethnographic perspective? So we can watch how the path of the newsroom or the path of the journalism profession changes as it passes through time.
It is a huge challenge, how to put it in history… How to do that? During the interviews, the observation or you have to do research in advance?
I think it’s all those things. Certainly in the interviews, and also you should though primarily do as much historical research as you can before you arrive. So one of the things that I did in the dissertation in “Rebuilding the News”, I spent a lot of time on archive.org, it’s a collection of historical websites. I could see how web sites looked in 2005 and can go back. I spent a lot of time investigating it before I got there, so I could at least start to get a sense of how have these things changed over time. Some of it was just trying to learn as much about how journalism in Philadelphia had changed over time. Maybe there were any academic books on it or kind of oral histories or anything like that. And then based on that I was always interested in interviews to try to get people to talk about how their lives had changed over time.
And in the chapter you also say that even in the history of ethnography research we have a gap…
Yes, and the gap is temporal. The thing about the digital technology is that what happened five years ago is history. We need to be very conscious of that and always remember that our present disorientation needs to be leavened to some degree by looking at the historical time period.
That’s what you do in your new book [Apostles of Certainty]?
That is exactly what I try to do. In the new book I really wanted to go all out on history. Data journalism is a thing that everyone is talking about, is a really hot topic. The book ends with an ethnographic chapter but everything before that is historical in the sense of I was trying to understand: did something like data journalism exist one hundred years ago? And if so, what was it like? How is it different than now? Was it the same as now? In order to teach us about how the idea of what data journalism is has changed over time or how the culture of data journalism has changed over time.
And what did you discover?
I discovered that data journalism now in 2019 is more like it was in 1899 than in 1970.
So in some ways certain aspects of data journalism are more like they were a hundred years ago that might they were 50 years ago. Because our understanding of data has changed and our understanding of what we mean by data has changed. The idea of big data has led to a lot of changes as well. So that was one of the main things that I learned which is that in some ways we’re kind of going back to the past a little bit to understand the present.
In 2012 you launched with Emily Bell and Clay Shirky the Post Industrial Journalism Report, that is a very well know work in Brazil. Could you briefly tell how it was developed between you three?
Sure. Michael Schudson and Leonard Downie wrote a report called ‘The Reconstruction of American Journalism’ that came out in 2009 which was about everything that’s going wrong in the American journalism industry at that time. And after that Emily Bell was named director of the Tow Center at Columbia University and I think she wanted to start with a big project and thought to some degree that that report was a lot about what was happening now but not a lot about what might be happening in the future. And not necessarily very practical about what the news industry should do. So I think she wanted to write a new report that was much more about how can we maybe try to make things better and what will things be like in the future. But she also wanted to write it with other people, so she asked myself and Clay Shirky to write it with her. I was very interested in that great opportunity. It was largely interview based on, a bit of content analysis of different both news organizations and white papers. We also had a day roundtable focus group to brought the different members of the news industry to Columbia and had four or five person conversations with different people at the same time. But it was more of a white paper than academic, I would say. We wrote it for academics but also for news workers and news managers.
Nowadays do you still agree with this concept of post industrial journalism?
The short answer is yes, I do. The idea when we wrote the report was that post industrial journalism is a very unsettled, chaotic state of affairs, unlike industrial journalism which was relatively stable, the ways to do it were relatively set. And I do think that the change we’re going to see now is that post industrial journalism will eventually be just like old journalism, which is that it will stabilize.
We won’t be in a state of chaos forever. Eventually new structures, new routines, new professional codes, new organizational practices will solidify. I don’t think there’s anything inherent to the Internet, that means that we’re going to be living in a state of chaos forever.
That said though if you ask me one year ago what I thought the new model would be I probably would have told you BuzzFeed or Vice. And they just have had tremendous difficulties. So maybe it will be chaos for longer than I thought because it did seemed to me two or three years ago that we were starting to see some stability.
And what about the membership model, like The Correspondent…
Jay Rosen certainly done a tremendous job in bringing that project along and turning that into a really viable way to do journalism. It is interesting because they haven’t actually produced any journalism yet. And Jay said this, he said ‘we are the most successful membership based journalism website that has never actually produced an article’. They have had a lot of success so far, but I do think that eventually they have to do the journalism and, you know, doing journalism is tricky. And to some degree it’s easier to want to support something when you don’t know what it’s going to do. The tricky for The Correspondent will be their ability to keep those subscribers. So hopefully they will, we’ll see. So my answer as to whether they are a model I think it’s too soon to tell.
Besides that, America is a different market than Netherlands…
Yes, absolutely. It’s a bigger market. The trouble in America though is that journalism traditionally in the U.S. has been very local, historically because America is so big, and this has to do with the federal nature of America as well — that somebody’s decisions are made locally in the United States. Because of that, journalism has been local and there’s no business model for local in the U.S., I mean there just doesn’t seem to be one. So the question in the U.S. is what’s going to happen to that local journalism? Is national journalism just Trump all the time plus sort of the latest political scandal that blows up and becomes news for 48 hours?
So right now the business model of news in the U.S. seems to be Trump plus rolling political scandals. And is that sustainable or will everyone just lose their minds? A lot of the content has similar rhythms, which is one stupid thing that Trump said today, what is Bob Mueller doing… You’ve got the governor in Virginia who did these racist things and then I guarantee you in a month there’ll be some other politician who also has done something.
That doesn’t mean that’s not important. But you do have to wonder how long we can keep up before people have a nervous breakdown.
In Brazil we are facing right the same thing now with our new president. Bolsonaro also posts on Twitter all the time and he doesn’t like to talk to the press. What can Brazil learn with American journalism regarding to this issue?
I think it’s very hard for the press in the U.S. to know what to do when it becomes the target of a particular type of political attack. So Trump has made the American press his enemy. I suspect the new Brazilian president will do the same or has already done the same. The question is how do you respond. And this is something that Jay Rosen has also talked about a lot. Question is how do you respond, do you respond by saying ‘no we’re not the enemy, we are just objective journalists doing our job’, which I think is the wrong choice. Or do you say to the degree that you as the president are against basic liberal democratic ideals we are your enemy. So that’s a different way of saying we’re going to take sides. That’s a different way of saying that the press is going to support Democrats or support Liberals or support the Worker’s Party.
What you can say as the press is ‘we’re in favor of truth. We’re in favor of kindness. We’re in favor of reasonable conversation, the ability to disagree. We are against racism. We’re against dictatorships’. To me that’s different than saying that we’re in favor of particular political party. That’s what is saying is that we’re on the side of certain ideals and to the degree that we have a leadership that violates those ideals, then we are your enemy. And I think that is something that the Brazilian press can learn from the U.S. press.
I have seen you and other researchers discussing on Twitter about the academic career, about the number of papers in journals that the universities require and how is it possible to build a healthy and at the same time a productive career. Do you think we should publish less?
That’s a great question. What I would say to an early career researcher is this:
In the end the most important thing is you have a big question. A big question that is going to take you a few decades to answer. And always know how the big question is carried out in different types of research. So if you have a big question then it becomes less important whether you write a lot or a little or sometimes you blog, you tweet or you write books or academic papers because it’s all geared towards answering the big question.
What happens is that a lot of the time scholars don’t always have a big question. They’re not trained to have a big question. They’re trained to have smaller questions. And so when you have smaller questions then all you can do is publish. The way that you show that you are valuable and show that you’re worthy is by publishing a lot. If you have a big question you will publish the right amount to be successful, no matter how much you publish. If you have a big question and you’re always trying to answer it in different ways, different formats and different methods, you will always publish exactly the right amount. You won’t have to worry about are you meeting your quota? In the end it’s all about the question, a big one that will take you a long time to figure out. I’ve had a big question since I started.
And what is your big question?
My big question is how do we know what we know in order to operate as democratic citizens? And what different types of professions tell us what we know and how do they tell us what we know in different ways? So that’s my big question. How do we know what we know which is not to say is there a reality or does reality exist, but it is to say how do different types of institutions and different people who need to operate in a liberal democratic way, how do they interact. And journalism is one of those institutions, is one of the main points. But so is Academia, and so your neighbors are too. Your social networks as well. So I think that journalism is really important but also one of the things about my own research is that journalism has never been the only one. And I also think that this is a problem for journalism researchers. I think that sometimes journalism researchers care too much about journalism.
Talking about journalism teaching: what do you think are the big challenges in teaching journalism nowadays?
There’s an intellectual answer and there’s a professional answer to that. The intellectual answer is how do you balance your own professional judgment about what you think audiences need to know versus the need to respond to what they want to know. And how do you, as a worker, teach students to navigate that world where they’re going to be inundated with information about what their audience wants. And the professional thing is what do we owe our students when we teach them about a profession that is in very serious trouble? I mean what level of honesty do we owe them.
If your students are like my students many of them come in very idealistic, very passionate and very young and they have this vision of what they want to do and why they want to study journalism. And it’s always a tricky question as to how you keep that, how you inculcate that passion in them, but also not delude them into thinking this is going to be an easy life or it’s going to be an easy way for them to earn a living. So what do we owe our students who are coming to us who are interested in a career that’s very hard.
And it’s difficult because they arrive in the university knowing how to deal with all the gadgets, but how you explain that journalism is not just about that, it’s about talk to people and ask hard questions…
Isn’t it amazing how many students that want to do journalism don’t like talking to people? Doesn’t it just blow your mind? Every year that shocks me. I think the key to be a journalist is you have to like people. And that is one of the things that that’s interesting and makes ethnography and journalism the same. In the end many academics don’t like people as well. Academia is a good career if you don’t like people because you can go to library and work alone. But if you want to do ethnographic research you have to be different, as a journalist should be.
Read here the Portuguese version of this interview.
