Journalism?

Who? What? Where? When? Why? How?

According to Harcup (2009),

[Journalism] is a form of communication based on asking, and answering, the questions Who? What? Where? When? Why? How?

I think we can find a better definition, but let’s use this for now to find it.

What is journalism?

To get some flexibility on the available terms, I define news as products of journalism and media as a system that produces and delivers news among other things. I’ll might need to redefine these terms later, but this will do for now. If this is okay, let’s get started.

As told by Downie Jr. and Schudson in “The reconstruction of American Journalism”, the way news is reported today does not spring from an unbroken tradition. They tell that American journalism changed as the American society changed. The most important changes were in economics, demographics and politics.

Economical changes happened in the country due to the growth of large retailers in major cities. Demographic changes were caused by the shifts of the population from farms to cities and then to suburbs, because of changes in work structures such as mechanization of farming and centralization of factories, and values. Political changes in news(papers) were due to the fact that in the early days of the press political parties controlled the papers and later lost power over them.

Early American newspapers were typically four-page weeklies made by one or just few people. They tend to publish more foreign than local news, aggregating stories found in London papers received in the mail. During the three hundred years of organized press, these changes were at times dramatic and rapid.

Perhaps due to the historical link between democracy and journalism, many perceive journalism as synonymous with democracy (see for example de Tocqueville 1840, Dewey 1927, Lippmann 1922).

So, Journalism is the same thing as democracy? Easy! But then again, Zizi Papacharissi (2011) quotes Schudson (2008) who points out that most philosophical works on democracy tend to leave journalism out of the picture. Further, she writes that journalism is based on democratic values, but can thrive with or without democracy (for example in dictatorships).

This quarrel is easily solved. While de Tocqueville, Dewey and Lippmann talk about democracy, Papacharissi and Schudson talk about democratic society, which is of course a completely different thing. We’ll come back to this realization later.

Journalism is connected to democracy, but does not equal democratic society. So again, what is it, then? McQuail (2000, ref Harcup 2009) claims that it’s simply

Paid writing (and the audiovisual equivalent) for public media with reference to actual and ongoing events of public relevance

This answer is unsatisfactory on many levels. First, it does not include people who get other than monetary payback from doing acts that could be otherwise defined as journalistic. Second, the answer does not satisfy our question: it does not dictate what is the purpose of journalism.

To answer this question more thoroughly, we need to answer at least the questions “who is doing journalism” and “why is there journalism”. Maybe by answering that question, we can come back to this one to find a more satisfying answer.

Who is doing journalism?

It just so happens that this question is very topical these days. There has been discussions about the journalistic status of both Glen Greenwald, who by the most standards I can think of is obviously a journalist, and his partner David Miranda, who is probably not a journalist, but that is not the point.

Clearly, anyone can state that a journalist is a person who is doing journalism, but I’d like to avoid that because there is already a sense of circular reasoning in this series.

Instead, let’s take a look at the book Losing the news about which I wrote about earlier (Jones 2012). One of the main arguments in this “old school” book is that newspapers produce only a small segment of all media but by far most of the accountability news content. This accountability news is what the purpose of journalism (which I’ll address in a later post) is all about. He writes:

While people think they get their news from television of the Web, when it comes to this kind of news, it is almost always newspapers that have done the actual reporting.

I find his argument tempting but I’d like to see some real data on the topic. Even Jones admits that

News organizations are trying, rationally, to save their business, but that is not the same thing as saving the news.

According to this quote (and intuitively), there seems to be journalistic functions that are more fundamental than the organizations currently fulfilling most of the functions.

I previously wrote the unsatisfactory statement by McQuail that a journalist is someone who gets paid for writing for public media, which I defined as a system that delivers and produces news (i.e. journalists are part of the media). For the sake of the argument, let’s assume that if you work within a news organization, you get paid for it. Sadly, this is a bold statement nowadays.

Anyway, we meet a dead end again. Is a journalist someone who gets paid for doing journalism? Or someone who produces news (products of journalism), paid or not? While the latter makes sense, it’s nothing more than the circular reference I tried to avoid.

Perhaps changing the focus from the actors to the actual happening of journalism we can find better answers.

Where does journalism happen?

Previously, I tried to understand journalism identifying the people that are responsible of producing it. As that path did not take us much further, I’ll try to find another way by focus on where journalism takes place (and where it doesn’t).

If journalism is paid writing as defined by McQuail, then clearly journalism creates products and happens in companies. Chomsky and Herman begin their massively influential book “Manufacturing consent” by writing

Perhaps this is an obvious point, but the democratic postulate is that the media are independent and committed to discovering and reporting the truth, and that they do not merely reflect the world as powerful groups wish it to be perceived.

This statement reflects something that I intuitively grasp as journalism. However, as Jay Rosen states

’Journalism’ does not equal ’media’ does not equal ’press’.

Rosen says that there are professionals, amateurs and pro-amateurs all doing journalism. I’m really fond of the argument he makes to define journalist in a way that makes sense in the fragmented media environment we live in.

He claims that journalism happens where events happen.

According to Rosen, the origin of journalistic authority starts with a particular claim: I’m there, you’re not, let me tell you about it.

Rosen gives some examples of the variations of the claim:

I interviewed this person, you didn’t. I went down to the property records, you haven’t, I’ll tell you what I saw. Either they were there, or talked to someone, or did work you haven’t done.

The informing practice what the people do where events happen is journalism. There is an important difference between these acts and the media system that the practice runs on. Sometimes events happen near (or information of them is delivered via) people employed by television channels, newspapers or other media channels. Sometimes this is not the case. Still, journalism has happened.

What follows from this are the core values of all journalism. Do I trust the person near the event? Am I able to access transparently to her methods of acquiring information? What are her precursory attitudes toward the event in question and am I made aware of them?

When does journalism happen?

In the previous blog post I used Jay Rosen’s argument on the origin of journalistic authority to define what a journalist is. The claim he makes is that journalism happens where events happen.

This would indicate that the answer to the question “when does (the act of) journalism happen?” is a trivial one: it happens when the event happens and right after it, during the time it takes to inform the public about the event. This is not the case.

First, we must define the “event” in the broadest sense. If a person sees and reports a car crash on Twitter, and a public conversation about road safety follows, who is the journalist and when? I’d say there are two events, the actual event (car crash) and the media event (reporting of the car crash). There has been acts of journalism only when both events happen. The latter (media) event then impacts on higher level media events, which are formed from the reported events (such as public conversation on road safety, reported and summarized back to the public by journalists in media events).

I have reached the point in my argument where I need to discuss about characteristics of general systems. According to Checkland (1981) and others, systems have four characteristics in general. These characteristics are hierarchy (I mentioned “higher level” in the previous paragraph), emergence (the behavior of higher level media events cannot be understood by looking at the actual events), communication (systems operate by information transformation) and control (the behavior of the system depends on the received information).

Checkland also says that all systems belong to one of the four categories, which are natural systems (a rock), designed physical systems (a hammer), designed abstract systems (act of building) and human activity systems (construction company). Approaching the terms mentioned in this blog post series with these tools, we can see that “media system” can refer to three different system types! As designed physical system it’s the physical broadcast channels (radio waves and cables and cameras). As designed abstract system it’s the concept of information transformation in the society (other definitions apply). As human activity system it’s the system where people work together to, for example, spread information about an event and its outcomes.

Using this distinction, I define journalism system as a human activity system where people experience an event (journalists) report other people (public) about the event.

It goes without saying that many reported events are media events. In a way, all events are, but it’s useful to make this distinction for the sake of my argument. Further, I’m unsure should I use the term audience or public in the definition. I sticked with ‘public’ because it consists the idea that there are journalists (as defined) within the human activity system.

Still with me?

The definition might be a bit confusing but I consider it useful. It helps to understand at least when events are urgent and when their timeliness can be decided by the emerging human activity system.

Another interesting aspect of these journalism systems is their behavior over time. I don’t know about much research on how long it takes to, say, a media event on a newspaper’s website to end. What are the features of the human activity system that impact on the behavior regarding the media event over time?

Why is there journalism?

The “Why” question is always tricky, because it has an element of power attached to it. To coin an example while remembering the different meanings of media system discussed in the previous post, Chomsky and Herman write in Manufacturing consent that

The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society.

There are many less-pessimistic but similar arguments made. Media system, and most importantly journalism, is the glue that keeps the society together. Another angle to this point of view emphasizes sense-making. For example Wikipedia derives its definition of journalism from Harcup (2009), who writes that

Journalism informs society about itself and makes public that which would otherwise be private.

A fancier one with a similar theme is this one from Hartley:

“Journalism is the primary sense-making practice of modernity – -”

It’s debatable what kind of information would benefit the “sticking together” of a society. An idealist approach would be to claim that an informed public is what makes the society work (e.g. Dewey) while a more pessimistic statement would be the one addressed by the Chomsky&Herman and earlier Lippmann that the media is to silence the dissent for the powerful or for stability, depending on who you ask.

Interestingly, the pessimist side does not typically talk about journalism. They talk about media, meaning the human activity systems that operate through information sharing to archive their goals.

Here it helps that we separated the concepts of journalism and democratic society in an earlier blog post. The argument on the purpose/outcomes of media is not relevant to us. If we live in a secret dictatorship, I’ll let it be for now! If journalism is the act of reporting of a witnessed event or media event, it’s a system that by definition allows a more democratic society to exist. In system terms, it creates a causal loop that enhances the democratic features in societies.

Sounds too good to be true? You are right. The claim is true only if A) the journalists (as defined) who are perceived to be truthful really are truthful and B) enough events are “iron core journalism” as defined by Jones.

How much is enough? Let’s look at that question next.

How to do journalism?

“Journalism comes in many forms,” Fenton (2010) writes, “from the entertainment-driven and celebrity-laden to he more serious and politically focused”.

Jones paraphrases an approach by Robert M. Entman, claiming:

For traditional news organizations, the number one organizational value and mission is to be a democratic watchdog. Profit comes second.

I’m against prioritizing one value over another, but I do think the flip side of the coin of the quote above is true: tabloid journalism is the one that puts profit as its top priority.

This is an understandable outcome. As I mentioned earlier, a journalism system operates around an actual event or a media event. While many media events are important (and inevitable) outcomes of actual events, most media events don’t have anything to do with the iron core of journalism or even any actual event. Further, for profit-seeking media operations media events are a cheap way of creating an event: it’s solely up to the organization to make one up. Trying to find a relevant event in the real world is time consuming and difficult.

In the previous post I asked how much information on the events is needed? First question is, of course, “needed for what?” In democratic societies voters need to make informed choices, but there are evidence in crowd curated problem solving studies that demonstrate that in some questions the “bad opinions” cancel each others out. A classic example is that a group of people is often much better at estimating the number of beans in a large bowl than any one of the participants themselves. Nevertheless, in this example there is an information loop: the participants see the bowl. Creating this information loop, in the context of the society, would be the minimum job for the journalist.

The question on how to do journalism becomes much tougher nut to crack if we acknowledge that social problems, governmental budgets and such are not bowls of beans but much more complex systems and many questions don’t have a right answer as they are more about the competition of value systems and personal desires.

Public sphere requires compelling and contradictory arguments regarding events. Making and delivering these arguments is in the responsibility of a journalist. It’s highly problematic that different values and arguments don’t often meet in the minds of individual voters before the election day in modern democratic societies. This is due to the fact that people prefer to hear points that support their previous stand. But is it the role of the journalist to persuade?

Lippmann proposed in the 1920s a set of committees that would be given access to all necessary information and that would then operate instead of the uninterested public as a watchdog. A recent case regarding the FISA court in the USA is actually quite a strong argument against this approach.

The questions such as “How much information population needs to support democracy?” or “How informed must a nation be to be considered knowledgeable about its own best interests?” become a bit easier to leave unanswered, when we realize that these questions are journalism systems themselves – journalism systems in which you and I are participating right now. It’s good to make an effort to answer them, but in the end they are long time participants in the supercomplex network of interacting journalism systems where old topics fade away and new ones are born all the time. It is up to each journalist to decide how to do journalism.

So, what is journalism, really?

Journalism is very closely connected to democracy (but not to democratic society). This is because journalistic authority is received from being where the event happens: anyone reporting on an actual or a media event is a journalist.

Many reported actual and media events create further media events, enabling the public discussion (public sphere). This public discussion is exactly the way that democracy operates, with the added feature in democratic societies to vote on certain matters. In societies that are not democratic, acts of journalism can create change through riots or other forms of pressure.

Thus, journalism is a way of making a country more democratic (as in “sharing the power to make decisions”). This, however, is only true in the special case where journalists are to be trusted or they are transparent and when acts of journalism include enough accountability reporting i.e. reporting of events that where hidden from the public but should not have been.

Depending on how a person perceives the purpose and benefit of the society – a discussion which is itself a journalistic system – the goal of the journalist is either to create a media event that links some relevant participants to an event or to propose, deliver and think of arguments regarding events past and to be.

Image by Thomas Hawk