The Gazelle Rises Again!

Now that I’m getting comfortably into the dissertation-focused phase of my education, I want to keep up regular blogging. My focus will shift mostly to working out thoughts in this semi-public space about my research project and about the course I’m teaching now – New Telecommunication Media. Most of this will probably be stuff that would be just as at home tucked away in my own journals or private computer files. But why not cast that bottle into the digital sea?

This morning I’ve been trying to think through various categories schemes to capture theories how journalism changes. By this, I mean factors that influence significant changes in basic expectations for and forms of news. Most of the case studies I’m thinking through come from two areas: 1) inquiries into the development of the ideal of objective journalism 2) the usually less historically rigorous, accounts of “tabloidization” as an increasingly prominent feature of the most popular forms of news in the last couple decades (or so). Here are some of the major types of explanations I can think of now:

 Cultural shifts
o On one hand, there are explanations that focus on journalism as responding to new social tastes, anxieties, desires, concerns, stratifications, or the development of popular expressive forms that have grown independently of mainstream journalism.
o On the other hand, there are a few accounts of shifts in the “culture of production.” From this angle the press changes reflect changes in the sentiments, aspirations, widespread beliefs, or work routines of news producers. Some examples of this might include two of Schudson’s explanations for the rise of objectivity after the penny press; one being his focus on the desire among journalists to establish themselves as legitimate professionals, the other being the way he describes a loss of faith in naive realism after WWI as a phenomenon particular to the class to which journalists belong.
 Changes in the structures of political life and institutions. Richard Kaplan’s Politics and the Press best exemplifies this kind of explanation that sees journalism reshaping to siphon legitimacy from political leaders as the sources of that legitimacy shift.
 Technological changes. The most well known theory here is probably the idea that telegraph led to the rise of objective reporting.
 International influences. This type of explanation is less prominent in histories of U.S. journalism, at least from what I can tell.
 Economic changes. New market conditions might be reflected in changes in news form, such as the well-supported claim that the professionalization of journalism and codification of objectivity in the 1920s was a way for owners to legitimize what were being widely monopolized local newspaper markets. I’m leaving this as too broad a category right now, for clearly there are differences between economic changes like the monopolization of the local press and reconfigured audience segmentation strategies.
 Individual innovators. While the “great man” mode of historical explanation is mostly rejected by social and cultural historians, there is no reason to deny that particular people in influential positions acted as agents precipitating changes that might not have happened without them.
 Innovative professional practices. As the aesthetic principles and practices changed for certain professional groups only partially situated within journalism, such as camera operators or graphic designers, these changes manifest themselves within journalism. Barnhurst and Nerone discuss the influence of graphic designers on late 20th century newspapers. Outside of news, John Caldwell’s Cultures of Production explores how the changing aesthetic philosophies of all sorts of video-related professions affected television.
 Transformations of “the industrial popular.” This is a concept I used in trying to explain innovations in cable news. It refers to ways in which communities of producers think about what their audiences want and what kinds of fare are potentially popular.

Where do I go from here? I will certainly continue to brainstorm ideas such as the ones above (and add them to this list), but I also need to think about various ways of conceiving of the interrelations among different kinds of factors. For instance, one notion of “overdetermination” (which is perhaps an overhyped concept) is that an event has multiple sufficient conditions. Another way more common way people use that term to mean that multiple factors have played a role in causing an event. Yet how those multiple factors relate to each other can be an important question. One factor might be considered “primary” even in a non-reductionist accounts. For instance, the claim could be made that a cultural shift initiated the need for a change in news form, making the cultural shift the primary factor. However, that doesn’t many the other factors need to be reduced to inert billiard balls. Let’s say a there is a cultural shift as a population is losing interest in the dry tone favored by professional journalists. There may indeed be contingent and creative ways in which journalists react to that change. Journalists or other news producers than still have some agency even while their actions are in response to something else that’s occurring outside their professional control.