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ELECTRONIC COMPONENTS AND HUMAN INTERVENTIONS: DISTRIBUTING TELEVISION NEWS ONLINE A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Joshua Albert Braun August 2011 © 2011 Joshua Albert Braun ELECTRONIC COMPONENTS AND HUMAN INTERVENTIONS: DISTRIBUTING TELEVISION NEWS ONLINE Joshua Albert Braun, Ph.D. Cornell University 2011 This manuscript examines distribution of television news products online, and includes case studies from observation and interviewing at the sister companies, MSNBC.com and MSNBC TV. In particular, I focus heavily on the cases of The Rachel Maddow Show, a news program that created a unique and highly popular Web presence; a team of Web producers at MSNBC.com responsible for handling television content; and Newsvine, a subsidiary of MSNBC.com that has built much of the infrastructure on which MSNBC television sites are based. I argue the forging of distribution paths is best understood through the frameworks provided by the sociology of socio-technical systems, and using the cases at hand, illustrate the implications of this perspective for sociological perspectives more commonly used to study media organizations. I use John Law’s framework of heterogeneous engineering, in tandem with insights from other sociologists of systems, as a springboard to examine the manner in which MSNBC.com has assembled diverse resources into a working, but highly dynamic, system of online distribution for television. I argue large contemporary media organizations are best understood, not as single, monolithic system builders, but as assemblages of myriad heterogeneous engineers pursuing related, but provincial objectives. In particular, I explore what MSNBC looks like if we examine it, not from a top-down, hierarchical point of view, but as a collection of resources enrolled in various ways in distinct systems assembled by Newsvine and The Rachel Maddow Show. I demonstrate that what a system looks like and who counts as a system builder are relative notions that depend on the vantage point of the observer, and argue as a result that organizational boundaries are in many ways problematic as analytical categories. Rather, organizational boundaries are actor categories—resources that do work on behalf of particular system builders, and the agents responsible for distribution often span them. I examine what it means to think about distribution systems in this way and explore some common strategies for circulating information in such an environment. I conclude by exploring the implications of this extended examination of distribution for our understanding of the contemporary media landscape. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Joshua Braun holds a masters degree in communication from Cornell University and another in bioethics from the University of Pennsylvania, as well as a bachelors degree in “science in the media” from UC Santa Barbara’s individual studies program. He is a former graduate fellow of the National Academy of Sciences. He currently focuses on online distribution of television and news, and has also published in the fields of medical ethics and risk communication. In non-academic capacities, he has worked as a science journalist for NPR, Scientific American Online, and Seed Magazine, where he covered diverse topics ranging from nuclear security to deep-sea oceanography to prison reform. He began his professional career in journalism in 2005 as a production intern for ABC News’ Nightline. iii This thesis is dedicated to my family, who supported—in every sense—my desire to figure out how things worked whenever I was intrigued by them, and especially to my wonderful wife, Sarah, without whom none of this would have been possible. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to acknowledge my family whose unwavering love and support allowed me to pursue my Ph.D., and especially my wife whose encouragement and understanding throughout graduate school has made all of this possible. My undergraduate mentors, Lisa Parks, Omer Blaes, Regina Fletcher, Janet Walker, and David Kohl at UC Santa Barbara, as well as my first thesis advisor, Charles Bosk at the University of Pennsylvania, all deserve a great measure of credit as well for teaching me both the possibility and the value of studying things that appear nowhere on the standard curriculum. And of course, I wish to thank my advisor Tarleton Gillespie, and my committee, Stephen Hilgartner, Bruce Lewenstein, and Dan Cosley, for their incredible generosity, their invaluable knowledge and guidance, and their untiring advocacy on my behalf throughout the graduate process. Tarleton, in particular, has been an unfailingly excellent mentor, patron, and friend throughout my time at Cornell. My own students, in my time here, have also given me enormous moral support and food for thought over the years, for which I am immensely thankful. I am also grateful to Nick Couldry and Fred Turner for their input on the early concept for this manuscript. Lastly, I wish to note that the research in this dissertation was made possible by a research grant from Cornell’s graduate school. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch iii Dedication iv Acknowledgements v List of Figures viii Epigraph 1 Chapter One // Introduction 2 Online Television News Distribution 6 Newsvine 8 The Rachel Maddow Show / MSNBC.com New York 9 Field Study 11 Structure of the Dissertation 14 Chapter Two // Forging Distribution Paths 19 The Conversation Economy 24 Toward a Theoretical Framework for Digital Distribution 29 Celebrating the Kludge 31 Threading Needles 35 Technologies as Heterogeneous Artifacts 39 The Example of Time Delay 42 Heterogeneous Distribution at MSNBC TV and MSNBC.com 43 Flipping Video 44 Pressures on the System 48 Placing Online Video 57 Pressures Surrounding the Video Player 62 Cross-Platform Distribution 78 Pressures on Cross-Platform Distribution 81 Video Syndication and Embedding 93 Online Video Syndication 93 Pressures on Video Syndication 96 Embeddable Video 103 Chains of Custody: Engineering for the Conversation Economy 107 Other Uses of the Embedded Player 120 Chapter Three // Breaking Apart the Monolith 127 Breaking Apart the Monolith 129 Provincialism and the Sociology of Technology 133 Some Additional Tools for Thinking With 141 Preliminaries 147 Newsvine 148 Engineering Newsvine 152 The Solution Stack: All the free stuff, but we didn’t want to skimp 152 The Initial User Base: Friends of mine, friends of theirs 155 The Public User Base: An aspirational philosophy of user behavior 157 vi The Business Model 179 Newsvine Becomes an MSNBC.com Property 182 MSNBC.com as Heterogeneous Engineer 191 A Post-Acquisition Newsvine 195 The Solution Stack: The Only Unix Guy at MSNBC 196 The User Base: That’s not really acceptable behavior on Newsvine 200 Inventing our Future: Building systems for MSNBC.com 211 I Thought This Was About Television 216 The Rachel Maddow Show 219 Engineering TRMS 220 Preliminaries 220 “Everything Has to Wait” 224 Marshaling Resources 232 A Full-Time Web Producer 232 Using Outside Services 238 Faking Blogware: Everything that my client wants, they’re going to get. 242 Hand-in-Glove: The Maddow Blog is Born 245 TRMS’ Web Presence 257 A Possible Cable Site 261 Final Thoughts 267 Chapter Four // Mass Reach Without Mass Media 274 Systems of Knowledge 275 On Epistemic Cultures 277 Some Important Caveats 280 Boundary Objects and Trading Zones 281 Boundary Objects 283 Trading Zones 284 Distribution Trends at MSNBC.com 286 Proliferating Brands 287 Changing Platforms 295 Newsvine’s M3 Platform 296 SkyPad 302 Generality in the Service of Specificity 305 Mass Reach Without Mass Media 306 The Comment Problem 307 Newsvine Groups 2.0 314 Friends of Thine and Friends of Theirs 319 Emergent Qualities of Distribution Systems 322 Closing Thoughts 326 Chapter Five // Conclusion 330 References 336 Appendix A // Common Terms and Acronyms 374 Appendix B // Notes on Methods 376 vii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 2.1 // Video Transcoding 45 Figure 2.2 // Show Front 59 Figure 2.3 // Standalone Video Player 60 Figure 2.4 // The MSNBC.com Cover 66 Figure 2.5 // The Bing Video news page 95 Figure 2.6 // Doonesbury from February 27, 2011 99 Figure 2.7 // The ‘clip & share’ Interface 105 Figure 2.8 // The ‘share your own subclip’ Interface 105 Figure 3.1 // Isometric Pressure Illustration 146 Figure 3.2 // Vineacity Illustration 170 Figure 3.3 // The Newsvine Homepage 185 Figure 3.4 // M2 Customizable Profile Page 186 Figure 3.5 // Newsvine Module Directory 187 Figure 3.6 // The Rachel Maddow Show Microsite 229 Figure 3.7 // The Maddow Blog 256 Figure 4.1 // Blog Designs 301 viii “For most of us most of the time a television set is a single and coherent object which we take as essentially unproblematic. However, when it breaks down, it rapidly turns into a network of electronic components and human interventions.” —John Law, 1992 1 chapter one // introduction Sitting on my desk right now is a volume with the imposing title, News: A Reader, edited by venerable journalism studies scholar Howard Tumber, which upon its publication in 1999 represented the state of the art in journalism studies. It is divided into the field’s major topics of study, “Definitions of News,” “Production of News,” “Economics of News,” “Sources of News,” and “Objectivity and Ideology of News.” Schudson’s 2003 book, The Sociology of News carves up the terrain similarly, though it also includes a sizable section on audience effects. Generally absent from such compendia and the literature they represent is any discussion of news distribution practices. Not, anyway, the sort of practices we think of when we think of the canonical ethnographies written over the years on newsroom practices, where we learn the names —or at least the pseudonyms—of reporters, copy chiefs, and managing editors, and watch as the impact of their decisions on media products is traced out in living color.