The Changing Faces of Journalism: Tabloidization, Technology and Truthiness. Zelizer, Barbie (ed.) (2009). New York: Routledge. pp. 174.
New New Media. Levinson, Paul (2009). Boston: Allyn & Bacon Penguin Academics. pp. 226.
Arguing for a General Framework for Mass Media Scholarship. Potter, W. James (2009). Los Angeles: SAGE. pp. 394.
An impressive group of scholars weighs in on changing journalistic norms, and Barbie Zelizer does so understanding the challenge: “The very presence of change in academic inquiry has long been seen as a necessary but often risky aspect of the landscape of knowledge acquisition” (p. 1). Drawing upon sociology of knowledge, Zelizer sees “slow and gradual incorporation of change into academic thought” (p. 2). To the extent that we are in the business of creating new knowledge, change threatens to undo our treasured life’s work. Thus, Zelizer sees that “degrees of dissonance exist because journalism scholars have not sufficiently navigated pathways between journalism we imagine and journalism we have” (p. 3). The reminder is that journalistic realities may be diverse, even if we have greater consensus on ideals. The organizational structure of The Changing Faces of Journalism: Tabloidization, Technology and Truthiness divides essays along the three dimensions of tabloidization, technology, and truthiness—all popular concepts with limited theoretical development.
Herbert Gans, for example, writes that tabloidization seems to be defined by “alleged deterioration of… content… [and] is meant to be pejorative and is used to blame all the usual suspects for what is viewed as a decline in the news media” (p. 17). The sociologist sees evidence of stratification and popularization: “Although the news media cannot chase away real and imagined demons, and there are limits to what they can do and whom they can reach, they can try harder to get the news out to the people who may unknowingly need it most” (p. 27).
The so-called “tabloidization” of news, Elizabeth Bird finds, is a “distraction” from real “forces” of change: less depth, less independence, and fewer resources. “Journalism is losing the confident sense of authority,” as “increasingly the profession seems to be panicking in an era when anyone can set up a virtual shop and claim to be a journalist” (p. 49). She angles away from the idea that journalists should be at sea with nonprofessionals: “One strategy might be a positive embrace of significant, ethnographic stories that invite readers into an experience that is simply not replicable in the point-and-click word of the internet” (p. 49).
Enter technology. For journalists, Mark Deuze frames an important chapter about “Agency Beyond Imitation and Change” (p. 82). He articulates an economy, sociology, and culture of newswork. While it is easy to see the journalist as an individual, it seems idealistic to conclude that, “the cultural use of journalism’s occupational ideology can be a tool for individual journalists to strategically resist, modify, or even counteract technology-driven innovation or imposed change in news operations” (p. 93). To the contrary, technology may enable aggressive journalists to own their own media and make content decisions based upon journalistic rather than purely profit-oriented values. Presumably, such a model might retreat from truthiness and return us to the search for truth. Michael Schudson boils this down to facts:
We cannot escape trying to make sense of our world. But we are forbidden from trying to do so without making a conscientious appeal to the facts. As imperfectly as we are able to know them. As mute as they sometimes are. It is the least bad system of knowing that we have. (p. 113)
Yet, facts are subject to the online realities. As Peter Dahlgren understands, “amateurs” now have “professional tools”—“there is massive civic information sharing going on in cyberspace that increasingly tends to bypass the classical modes of journalism production and dissemination” (p. 152). It is fair to conclude that the change he sees has not yet significantly altered journalism and mass communication instruction because educators, like professional journalists, are caught between the journalism world that was even a decade ago and a future not yet well established.
Those of us who developed new media programs a few years ago may have been out front on the current diffusion cycle, but the speed of change has now produced an awkward and ongoing redefinition of terms and topics.
Fordham University Professor Paul Levinson understands that newer tools, such as Twitter, “draw upon fundamentals of human communication that have been with us for millennia” (p. xiii). Born of the realization that the first wave of “new media” curricula— such as html instruction and e-mail effects—had become “old,” Levinson and his colleagues followed student interest in social networking:
Students look at YouTube videos and send and receive twitters or tweets on iPhones and Blackberrys while teachers are lecturing. But few of these new new media are discussed in classrooms or at any length or detail in textbooks nor in many other kinds of books, either. “New New Media” seeks to remedy that understandable omission. (p. 1)
Levinson’s July 2009 assertion came at an unfortunate moment—right when many faculty across the country were re-tooling following the intense media coverage of the Iranian uprising and impact of tweets. It is also the case that faculty members frequently supplement course readings with current Web content. Rapid adoption of online and mobile media guarantees that books published will be limited by the constraint of a static snapshot in a dynamic environment.
As a book title, New New Media seems redundant because it fails to recognize that the existing term of “new media” is flexible and forward-looking. Levinson’s distinction, which he draws from previous uses of “new new” in political essays, groups the various topics:
- Print, Audio, Audio-Visual, Photographic
- News
- Social Media
- General vs. Specific Systems
- Politics and Entertainment
- New New Media Government Control
- Microblogging and Blogging
- Hardware vs. Software (pp. 5-7)
Levinson sources his book mostly through “articles on the Web” arguing that even books published a year earlier “are out of date” (p. 8). Following an introduction, the book’s thirteen chapters focus on blogging, YouTube (thus ignoring other video sites), Wikipedia, Digg, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Second Life, Podcasting, The Dark Side of New New Media, New New Media and the Election of 2008, and Hardware. In this sense, Levinson violates his own “taxonomy” by organizing the book mostly along specific Web sites. The reader will have already seen many discussions from previous online accounts. In the end, Levinson is left to conclude: “The essence of new new media is choice” (p. 191). The absence of computer-mediated communication (cmc) and other media theory means that his book, like the others he dismisses, has a very limited shelf life.
How does one place the new world of applied journalism and new media within a more general mass communication or even communication framework? Potter’s Arguing for a General Framework for Mass Media Scholarship tackles this by confronting the “large” and “fragmented” field of mass media and proposing development of “perspective” based upon a “common platform” for knowledge (p. xiv). He sees media scholars as trapped within “a large number of distinct neighborhoods” (p. xv). Thus, the book seeks “to energize mass media scholars to think… more globally about the entire phenomenon of mass media” (p. xvi).
Potter is explicit in how he used a five-step process to analyze relevant literature, group ideas, evaluate ideas, inductively seek patterns, and synthesize. His comprehensive listing of theories will be particularly valuable to students and researchers. It is a giant leap forward from the “milestones” approach, and it reaches beyond mass communication to integrate some theories commonly found in speech communication books.
The book is organized into six parts: Introduction, Explaining the Media Organization Facet, Explaining the Media Audiences Facet, Explaining the Media Messages Facet, Explaining the Media Effects Facet, and Conclusion. The media organization chapters seemed least connected to, in Potter’s frame, the “neighborhood” that is media management and economic scholarship. Further, Shoemaker and Reese’s excellent work on media content was relegated to a section within the Employment Strategies chapter, “Shaping the News Formula” and the sub-sub-heading “Inside Industry Influences.” Here, the reader finds fifteen bullets that pass over important factors, such as journalist background, role conceptions, events, power, routines, profit orientation, news sources, and advertiser influence (pp. 91-92). These are variables that might help us to resolve what is happening in the world of new journalism and new media, but the research comes from years before the dramatic shift.
Potter seems much more comfortable in the arenas of information-processing, decision-making algorithms, audience motives, meaning construction, critiquing message scholarship (chapter 15), and effects. His final chapter (Integration of Explanations) begins to bring together what are termed “unique ideas” (mass media, economic foundation, audience exposure states, narrative line, and continuous effects) with “rim ideas” (audience attraction/conditioning, meaning, and dynamic manifestations of media effects) (p. 316).
Here, then, is a road map for the development of scholarship toward a global perspective. It is a message targeted at researchers and doctoral students, and it will stimulate lively seminar discussion. However, it does not adequately speak to those wishing to bridge theory and practice, or those faced with decisions about the future of journalism, media, and technology. Ideally, some future initiative will integrate the neighborhoods by promoting conversation between those doing the reporting, developing new media, and synthesizing theory and research.
JEREMY HARRIS LIPSCHULTZ
University of Nebraska at Omaha