Into the Newsroom: Exploring the Digital Production of Regional
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INTO THE NEWSROOM Into the Newsroom explores how journalists and the digital technologies with which they are entangled construct television news at the micro level of prac- tice. It challenges orthodox readings of television news production to explore fundamental questions concerning the ways in which we understand how jour- nalists and technologies combine with one another in unpredictable ways in order to create news. Hemmingway investigates the processes of regional BBC news production, by adapting ANT to an ethnographic study of a specific newsroom to reveal how news work is constructed by this contingent and complex interplay of digital media technologies and human actors. The book provides a rigorous investigation of the everyday rituals that are performed in the television newsroom, and offers a unique suggestion that news is both a highly haphazard and yet technologically complicated process of delib- erate construction involving the interweaving of reflexive professional journalists as well as developing, unpredictable technologies. Arguing specifically for a recognition and an exploration of technological agency, the book takes the reader on an exciting journey into the digital newsroom, using exclusive observation and interviews from those journalists working on the BBC’s recent pilot project of local television news as part of its empirical evidence. This book is an essential introduction both for those seeking to understand news processes at the level of everyday routines and practices, and for those students and scholars who are eager to adopt new and challenging ways to theorise news as practice. Emma Hemmingway is a Senior Lecturer in Journalism at the Centre for Broadcasting and Journalism at Nottingham Trent University. She previously worked for the BBC over a period of 12 years within a variety of roles, which included TV reporter, producer and also news editor. INTO THE NEWSROOM Exploring the digital production of regional television news Emma Hemmingway First published 2008 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” # 2008 Emma Hemmingway Foreword # 2008 Robert Huffaker All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-94067-9 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 978-0-415-40467-9 (hbk) ISBN 978-0-415-40468-6 (pbk) ISBN 978-0-203-94067-9 (ebk) CONTENTS Foreword by Robert Huffaker vi Preface viii Acknowledgements xi 1 Introduction 1 2 Actor Network Theory 11 3 Entering the network: the media hub and its status as a black box 39 4 Video journalism (1): how a technological innovation enters the news network 70 5 Video journalism (2): the translation of the news network and the reconfiguration of news 92 6 Extending the network: the BBC’s local television project 115 7 The satellite truck and live reporting 142 8 Human actors, intentionality and Actor Network Theory 175 Conclusion 205 Glossary 218 Notes 228 Bibliography 233 Index 240 v FOREWORD Robert Huffaker In the 1960s before reporting for CBS and Dallas’s KRLD, I had covered small- town TV news with a black-and-white Polaroid camera. KRLD, like other metropolitan stations, then used 16-millimetre black-and-white motion-picture film. Early videotape machines were so huge that a crane had lowered KRLD’s first one through a hole cut in the roof. Until 22 November 1963, we covered on-the-spot TV news with 16-millimetre film – neither live nor videotaped. Our hand-held Bell & Howells shot silent film, and unwieldy Auricons shot film with an optical sound track alongside the strip of pictures. Our 65-year-old George ‘Sandy’ Sanderson had been shooting movie film since he’d cranked the cameras by hand. Before that wrenching November day, we had reserved live mobile television principally for broadcasting Dallas Cowboy games and other public events. On that Friday, Dallas-Fort Worth stations had pooled their mobile TV vans to broadcast John F. Kennedy’s Fort Worth breakfast speech, arrival at Dallas Love Field and luncheon address. Wes Wise and I broadcasts JFK’s motorcade live on radio only. But when the assassin fired, we repositioned our mobile TV vans to broadcast live vigils at the hospital and police headquarters nationwide. Over the next days, US networks assumed the sad duty of broadcasting the tragedy from Washington, while we continued from Dallas. Television news has kept improving its on-the-spot broadcasts ever since, and today’s 24-hour news has evolved from what we began in 1963. Technology has taken us from grainy black-and-white images produced by barely-mobile equip- ment to live two-way broadcasts around the globe by digital, portable equip- ment with audio and video of quality we did not dream of. Before communication satellites, ham radio operators helped me relay radio news by single sideband. I unscrewed telephone handsets, alligator-clipped them to tape recorders, and thereby sent CBS News better audio than the handset would produce alone. Broadcasting the Oswald shooting live on CBS, I knew that Nelson Benton and I were both on the air at once, with no way of seeing or vi FOREWORD hearing each other. And I knew that Nelson was quick enough to sense our dilemma too. We knew our technical capabilities, we knew each other and we interacted with colleagues from Dallas to New York. Emma Hemmingway’s new book aptly demonstrates that broadcast reporting, especially with today’s rapid mergers of digital electronics with cybernetics, requires a deeper understanding of both the evolving technology and of the reporters, producers and technicians who cooperate to bring news and analysis to the world. By charting the complexity of these relationships Into the Newsroom makes an important and compelling contribution to the development of our understanding of news technologies and of their significance in the reporting of all news, whether it is the most local of events, or the assassination of a president. Bob Huffaker Author, When the News Went Live: Dallas 1963 Reporter CBS News vii PREFACE Although those who concern themselves with details are regarded as folk of limited intelligence, it seems to me that this part is essential, because it is the foundation, and it is impossible to erect any building or establish any method without understanding its principles. It is not enough to have a liking for architecture. One must also know about stonecutting. (Maurice de Saxe, 1756, p.5) In one way, this is a book about stonecutting. How so, you may ask? Isn’t this a book about television news, as its rather grand title suggests? What does a tel- evision newsroom buzzing with the activities of journalists and producers, crowded with digital cameras, computers, untidy desks and half-drunk coffee cups have to do with the rather old-fashioned craft of cutting stone? The two worlds are divided not only by more than two centuries, but also by a million cultural and social differences; how could the one possibly be of relevance to the other? The answer lies in how we come to an understanding of these different worlds, existing as they do in separate times, harbouring within them separate cultural values, made up of very different people and even more different machines; the sharp tool that hones a building’s first foundation stone, or the PD150 camera that fits neatly into the crook of the video-journalist’s shoulder. It is in the way in which we try to make sense of these worlds, stumbling across both as outsiders, members of neither group, unrehearsed in the rituals or routines of either community and ignorant of their separate languages. As observers we are strangers to both of these cultures, which is in fact what makes the worlds strangely similar. You are interested in news – in the meanings of news – in how news relates to society – in what news can offer us as citizens – in how news technologies are developing to assist us in getting faster, better news in our uncertain, globalised viii PREFACE world. Already your interests have swept you way above and beyond the small provincial newsroom with its tattered chairs, outdated computers and dark dreary edit suites and you’re hurtling ahead into the more fascinating, brighter world of news corporations, capitalism and global conflict. This is the lofty height from where news should be explored! This is where news matters! This is where news and society come crashing in on one another and make mean- ingful, often dangerous, relationships in our overly complicated lives. Let us return to our humble stonecutter for just one moment. If he shared your views, he’d be standing at the top of the Empire State Building by now, certainly not wandering aimlessly around in the basement examining the lift shafts. And from such an exalted position