News Talk: Investigating the Language of Journalism. Colleen Cotter. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 294 pp.
Many studies of the cultural and sociopolitical effects of news stories tend to ignore the journalistic practices that have produced those texts, focusing on larger structures of power and domination. Both of these books rebalance the equation by highlighting instead how daily routines in newsrooms determine the selection, narrative, and presentation of news stories—routines that are increasingly shaped not only by professional practices but also by journalists’ expectations of what the public wants to read.
Reading both volumes in these hand-wringing times over the future of journalism is a refreshing reminder that journalists working at legacy media are above all professionals, not devious conspirators or pawns of other interests. It is also a wake-up call that the demands of online media might be altering those routines in ways that are pernicious for both journalism and the media’s role in public affairs.
In her book, News Talk, Cotter, a linguist at Queen Mary University of London and a former U.S. newspaper reporter, seeks to ground sociolinguistic inquiries regarding “news talk” in the actual daily routines that journalists undertake when putting together a story, and to show how those routines are linked to professional norms and to understandings of their communities. This emphasis makes her book a must-read for any scholar of the language and discourse of mass communication, especially those who have not worked extensively for a news media organization.
As flagged by the title of his book, News at Work, Pablo Boczkowski, a long-time scholar of new media who teaches at Northwestern University, also centers his study on journalists’ practices. He adds a comparative print-online analysis and then takes it further to the news readers, looking for how the producer-product-consumer interaction has created what he calls the paradox of today’s media—how in “an age of information plenty, what most consumers get is more of the same.” His groundbreaking volume is a most welcome addition to any course in journalism studies, and it will be particularly precious to students of new media.
For her part, Cotter essentially updates for the twenty-first century the sociological and anthropological work of classics like Gaye Tuchman’s 1978 Making News. She takes the norms, values, and routines that any contemporary journalism student or professional in the United States learns by heart—from objectivity to the “boilerplate” paragraph—and shows them to be essential to the formation of news discourses. A journalist would find very little new information in this book, which relies on ethnographic observation of newsroom workings, textbooks, and trade publications, though Cotter also makes explicit the easy-to-ignore links between mundane practices and pervasive societal values. For academics without direct experience, however, this text amounts to a necessary field guide to “the motivations, conventions, and rituals of a community and their output in discourse.”
Organized along a production chronology, News Talk starts with learning the craft of journalism and its best practices, then moves to determination of newsworthiness and story selection, and concludes with the actual composition of a news item for publication. Throughout, the essential contention is that texts and journalistic discourses cannot be studied without a clear comprehension of the processes and practices that create them.
Of the latter, Cotter maintains, the key determinant is news values—themselves constructed as essential to the “craft” of reporting and writing, and thus socialized into all news professionals either in journalism schools or through an apprentice model. Every cub reporter knows them: “proximity, impact, change, prominence, conflict, timeliness, usefulness, and the unusual,” or some variation. A reporter, and her editor, uses them as a checklist in choosing a story—the more checks, the better the chances that an event, a tip, an idea will actually become the news. The same values will then influence the “lede” (often the only part read), source selection, the inclusion of contextual and background information, and story placement in the newspaper and on the page. As Cotter rightly points out, although the lay public may increasingly see those choices as overtly ideological, for most journalists, it is simply a matter of what fits the canons of what’s news—even though those very criteria hide cultural meanings.
As an example, Cotter examines coverage of a California ballot proposal aimed at denying illegal immigrants certain public benefits. She observes that the very simplified, non-attributed, descriptive summary of Proposition 187 is used by reporters repetitively and nearly verbatim in multiple stories as the “boilerplate” providing necessary background over many months. Actually, though, the practice ends up giving an apparently uncontested framing of a deeply controversial issue.
One of the most interesting findings in Cotter’s book is the extent to which “the audience is a co-participant in the construction of news discourse” by being on journalists’ minds constantly when making editorial decisions. From the early story meeting, when ideas are brainstormed, to pagination, from reporter-source relationships to assumptions about prior knowledge in ongoing stories—the faceless “reader” (or viewer, one assumes) is part of the journalist’s thinking, Cotter says, an echo of coorientation theory. One feisty newspaper masthead exemplifies the inextricable link between news media and their communities: The self-description of the Mason Valley News of Yerington, Nevada, reads, “The only newspaper in the world that gives a damn about Yerington.”
Boczkowski’s book carries the same insight a step further by methodically analyzing news consumption as well as news production for their impact on news output—and its political consequences. The starting point is a provocatively simple observation: Since the advent of online journalism, most people read or hear news during their work days, not during leisure time at home or to kill time while commuting. Those changed routines of consumption put a premium on quickly scannable, easily readable news bits updated frequently enough that they can provide a short break from work demands. Given that online tools have also made it all too easy for journalists to base their choices on what the public is reading now—not only are clicks fast to count, but the competition is newly visible—how is consumption changing production and the product?
To answer those questions, Boczkowski takes Argentina’s two leading newspapers and their independently operated websites, and then interviews their print and online editors as well as their readers, and, finally, conducts a content analysis of their news stories from 1995 to 2007. The comprehensive research design masterfully exposes the links among those spheres and, if one generalizes the conclusions beyond Latin America, provides a convincing argument for why new media seem to have ushered an era of more stories about less content, especially in the realm of public-affairs news.
The central mechanism that Boczkowski analyzes is imitation and the resulting homogenization of news content. In his ethnography of work routines at Clarín.com, the country’s most popular online news site, he finds that the increased pace in the hard news section of the newsroom leaves little time for anything more than pushing out short stories—some 85% of stories are authored in less than thirty minutes. Constant online monitoring of competing media organizations is the idea-generator for most stories, which, of course, fuels imitation so pervasive that stories across the media environment are increasingly similar not only in subject matter, but also in narration and presentation. Through reader interviews, Boczkowski finds that not only are consumers aware and feel powerless before such homogeneity of content, but also that their new habit of “news at work” pushes them to avoid controversial topics that would fare badly in watercooler exchanges. For journalists, this tendency exacerbates the conflict between their professional calling to cover public affairs and the economic mandate to please readers with fluffier stuff. As a print national desk editor complains to Boczkowski, “It is very difficult for us to place [a story] … because people are not interested.”
As a consequence, News at Work’s conclusions are quite dire. A public preference for light news, transformed into journalistic routine through competition and imitation, means that news media have to chose between lose-lose options. If they abandon hard news, they lose their ability to shape the public agenda, but if they buck the trend and abandon the mass public, they also lose what makes them powerful to begin with. Boczkowski also finds dim prospects for the traditional media’s replacement by consumer-generated content, based on his analysis of the cursory and passive nature of online news consumption. His sample readers tend not to use the web in any meaningful interactive way—leading one to wonder whether this alone among the book’s findings might not be different for the U.S. context or for younger news users who have grown up interacting online.
Regardless, a systemic failure of mainstream news media would have grave consequences for the public, and both Boczkowski and Cotter provide urgent reminders of how symbiotically media and their audiences work to paint increasingly skewed pictures of the world.
GIOVANNA DELL’ORTO
University of Minnesota