Objects of Journalism and the News

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Introduction

Journalism 2015, Vol. 16(1) 3–9 Objects of journalism and the © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: news sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1464884914545728 jou.sagepub.com

CW Anderson City University of New York (CUNY), USA

Juliette De Maeyer Université de Montréal, Canada

Abstract This article provides an overview of what an “object-oriented” approach to journalism studies might look like, based on a survey of articles collected for this special issue on journalism and materiality. We argue that focusing on the objects of journalism, rather than limiting or trivial, can provide scholars with insights into the social, material, and cultural context that suffuses our technologically obsessed world. The article pushes back against a dominant perspective in the Actor-Network Theory literature that sees the major value of that theory in studying technological innovation, calling instead for a theoretical approach open to questions of historical change, power, and symbolic practices.

Keywords Actor-Network Theory, Foucault, materiality, power

In her address to the 2012 Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), Mary Gray (2012) celebrated what she called ‘the twilight of toaster studies’: the impending death of a certain strain of scholarly analysis that ‘re-instantiat[ed] technological objects as the center of [social] action’. ‘We have reached’, she argues,

a critical moment in internet studies: we need to challenge ourselves and our publics to think about the Internet in the contemporary world in far more nuanced, socially-situated ways … Why? Because doing otherwise simply sets up emerging technologies as the next new ‘toaster’ to study.

Corresponding author: Juliette De Maeyer, Department of Communication, Université de Montréal, PO Box 6128, Downton Station, Montreal, QC H3C 3J7, Canada. Email: [email protected]

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A few months later, as if to both acknowledge and satirize the scholarly trend Gray wants to put out to pasture, an anonymous group of researchers ‘published’ the first issue of the aptly named The Journal of Toaster Studies (‘an academic publication about new technologies’). ‘The first issue of The Journal of Toaster Studies debuted in early 2013’, they facetiously claimed, ‘with articles by Daniel Miller (“Does the Toast make the Toaster? An Organo-materialisties Perspective … in Trinidad”) and Gary Alan Fine (“Toasty Publics: Where does the Heat Come From? Bridging the micro and macro”)’ (Anon, 2013). While obviously a joke, the new journal highlighted a particular – and relatively new – form of what we might call object-oriented uncertainty. What does all this focus on materiality and objects get us, really? Are we just looking at the communi- cative equivalent of toasters? Are we uncritically accepting the arguments of Internet evangelists who would rather we focus on the next object on the assembly line of new digital technologies and the ‘innovations’ these make possible? Throughout the course of our work on this Special Issue, from organizing the pre- conference at the International Communications Association conference in London in 2013, to the call for journal papers, to the final selection of the articles you now see before you, we have been battling nagging doubts that we were engaged in building a ‘special issue of toaster studies’. The objects of journalism included here – Wikipedia edit boxes, pica poles and proportion wheels, content management systems (CMSs), and others – are indeed occasionally toaster-esque insofar as they are often delightfully mundane. But we want to take issue with the argument that putting the objects of journalism at the center of our analysis ‘distracts us from the social context that animates the cultural work of any technology’ (Gray, 2012). Indeed, we would argue just the opposite. Starting our investigation with the objects of journalism provides a new window into the social, material, and cultural context that suffuses our increasingly technologically obsessed world. It can actually free us from a widespread societal belief that sees the digital as simply a stand-in for unthinking ‘innovation’. It can provide us with nuanced understanding of power, not as it adheres to a nameless, faceless context, but as it manifests itself in what Foucault has called the ‘micro-capillaries’ of society. Also in Foucauldian terms, it can bring genealogy into our conversations about technology, insofar as it seeks to uncover the human decisions, cultural values, organizational imperatives, and material affordances that lead technologies to be introduced into organizations in the first place. And it actually opens us up to a relational understanding of technology rather than a deterministic one, an understanding that sees the material aspects of objects as inevitably imbricated in a web of human and non-human relations. For the remainder of this introduction, we will briefly highlight some of the ways that the articles in this Special Issue make good on goals outlined above, in large part by tying them to some broad themes about objects, materiality, history, and power we think are worth emphasizing in journalism studies. We begin with a focus on the Actor–Network Theory (ANT) of Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, John Law, and others, showing how broadening what is usually understood as the mandate of ANT to include historical and cultural perspectives can be a useful complement to its recurrent foci on new technology and journalistic innovation. We then consider one particularly prevalent criticism of ANT, that it lacks an adequate theory of power and thus lacks a critical edge, showing how applying socio-technical theories to journalism in particular help demonstrate where

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at University of Haifa Library on December 27, 2014 Anderson and De Maeyer 5 the ‘criticality’ of ANT might be found. By drawing on the articles contained in this Special Issue, we conclude our brief introduction by rethinking the opposition between ‘toasters’ and the ‘social context’ of toast making, or more to the point, between the objects and cultures of journalism. What is unique about the argument that discourses, humans, and objects matter for news production has less to do with ontology – about the nature of the world – than it does with the deeply relational underpinnings of the different objects that make up that world.

Materiality, journalism, and history There is a clear trail of works in journalism studies that directly address the issue of materiality, primarily those drawing on ANT and the work on Bruno Latour. From Turner’s 2005 short essay that introduced ANT to journalism studies (Turner, 2005), to subsequent empirical inquiries that have adopted an explicitly Latourian framework (e.g. Micó et al., 2013; Plesner, 2009; Weiss and Domingo, 2010), all embrace one of the pillars of ANT: studying humans and non-humans in a symmetrical way. In journalism studies, this philosophical principle is often reframed into another, presumably equivalent methodological stance: ‘what is social is not detachable from what is material’ (Micó et al., 2013: 122). These ANT-inspired investigations into material aspects of journalism have produced valuable empirical accounts of contemporary newsmaking. They also revolve around several central themes, the primary one being that they study technological innovation and new technological tools being introduced into newswork. This emphasis on innovation and technological change is often presented as the primary focus of ANT: ‘Actor- network theory is an epistemological and methodological proposal to understand the dynamics of innovation’ (authors’ emphasis), argue Micó et al. (2013). It is the technical evolution undergone by journalism in the last decades that makes ANT so useful as an analytical lens, argues Turner (2005). Weiss and Domingo (2010) write,

We argue that an actor-network approach can be especially beneficial to trace the power relationships between the different actors involved in the development of an innovation in a newsroom, the conflicts around the definition of a technology and the process of reaching closure, including technical artifacts as another actor in the equation. (authors’ emphasis)

In these accounts, all of them important contributions to the journalism studies literature, analyzing ‘materiality’ essentially means studying (new) technologies. Such an emphasis on innovation is indeed part of ANT as delineated by Bruno Latour in Reassembling the Social (Latour, 2005). As a critique of what Latour (2005) calls the ‘sociology of the social’, Reassembling argues that innovation is precisely a domain which traditional sociology fails to properly account for: ‘in situations where innovations proliferates, where group boundaries are uncertain, when the range of entities to be taken into account fluctuates, the sociology of the social is no longer able to trace actors’ new associations’ (p. 11). In a parallel with the change that physics has undergone with the introduction of the theory of relativity, Latour (2005) further argues that it is the rapid pace of change that requires a shift of paradigm:

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In most ordinary cases, for instance situations that change slowly, the pre-relativist framework is perfectly fine and any fixed frame of reference can register action without too much deformation. But as soon as things accelerate, innovations proliferate, and entities are multiplied, one then has an absolutist framework generating data that becomes hopelessly messed up. (p. 12)

But technological innovation is not the only object that ANT aims to study. In Reassembling the Social, Latour lays out other foundations of ANT’s empirical program. He points out privileged situations that allow the scientist to produce ‘good accounts’, situations where the social (i.e. the meshing of actor-networks) becomes more visible than usual. The study of innovation is one of these privileged circumstances, but it is not the only one. Latour also highlights other situations: when acci- dents or breakdowns happen, or when things stop being taken for granted as objects are put at a distance. He refines the idea of ‘distance’ in three ways: ‘distance in time as in archeology, distance in space as in ethnography, distance in skills as in learning’ (Latour, 2005: 80). Ultimately, Latour (2005) makes an argument for historical investigations: even when ‘objects have receded into the background for good, it is always possible – but more difficult – to bring them back to light by using archives, documents, memories, museum collections’ (p. 80). The application of ANT to journalism studies has so far mostly fulfilled the first step of ANT’s original project, by primarily focusing on technological innovation. This Special Issue aims at embracing a wider idea of materiality that is not solely confined to technological innovation, but that accounts for a variety of objects in context, both historical and cultural. There should be little doubt that one of the signal contributions of these articles to the study of journalism and materiality is the reintegration of history into ANT-ian considerations that are largely (although not entirely) presentist in nature. Le Cam’s piece, traveling back to the newsrooms of late 19th century, is one obvious example of this. In this piece, Le Cam uses objects as both evidence (photographs) and as the focus of analysis (the object-filled newsrooms of Le Soir, Journal de Roubaix, Belga, Le Telegramme, and Radio-Canada) and the focus of her study (the discursive construction of these object-filled newsrooms themselves). By treating objects as both historical evidence and area of empirical focus, Le Cam is able to inaugurate what she calls a ‘spatial ethnography of labor’, a spatial turn also taken by Usher in her analysis of the International New York Times, although in a far different fashion than Le Cam. In a less obvious way than Le Cam, Rodgers’ article is also about history, although history of a far more recent vintage. By placing the arc of the Toronto Star’s CMS Torstar Online Publishing System (TOPS) ‘into digital history’, as it were, Rodgers allows us to gain a glimpse of how this system evolved, not just as a finished object that newsworkers had to deal with (or not) but rather as the product of multiple, often contradictory organizational imperatives. TOPS has a history, and by examining that historical evolution, scholars of journalism can more easily open the black-box that masks the underlying tensions and discontinuities of large socio-technical systems beneath a finished, smooth surface. This surface is often perceived as smooth, we should note, even when the system in question fails. The actual situation is, of course, far more complex, a fact that a more historical and time-bound focus helps us perceive.

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History is one form of context in which it is useful to embed ANT; organizational or professional culture is another. Graves’ paper on the overlaps and discontinuities between the journalism of I.F. Stone and Joshua Micha Marshall (founder of Talking Points Memo) straddles this line between historical and cultural context. By analyzing a form of journalism (what he calls ‘annotative journalism’) which falls outside the traditional journalistic imaginary of ‘original’ reporting about discrete events in both the mid-20th century and today, Graves turns out attention to the way that professional culture often embeds a certain understanding of materiality itself. Graves’ paper, in other words, is less about the actually existing relationship between journalism, documents, and annotation than it is about the way that journalists have thought about annotation, and in so doing, the attitudes toward certain journalistic objects that underlie in that stance. Usher’s paper, finally, can serve as a useful bridge in combining the socio-technical focus of Rodgers, the spatially oriented perspective of Le Cam, and the material-cultural perspective of Graves. In her study of the International Herald Tribune (now renamed the International New York Times), Usher demonstrates how differential understandings of time and location, certain affordances buried within digital technologies, deep human needs (like sleep), and the contested values of brand names themselves determine how a newsroom not only operates, but indeed, is formed. Newsrooms, Usher seems to imply, are not static buildings but are rather perennially provisional spaces assembled out of a range of heterogenous materials and cultures, spaces that do indeed become solid but only through a sort of organizationally useful blindness that allows news companies to function.

Power, objects, and materiality One criticism of ANT, along with other socio-technical theories drawing heavily on the micro-capillary theorizing of Foucault, is that it lacks an adequate theory of power; or, in Couldry’s (2008) more specific language, that

ANT’s initial insights into a dimension of social order (spatiality of networks, power asymmetries) are not developed for a network’s longer-term consequences for social space and its implications for power … ANT has much to contribute to understanding the ‘how’ of such asymmetries, but it is strangely silent when it comes to assessing whether, and why, they matter. (p. 7)

It is our hope that the articles in this Special Issue help reveal that this critique of the lack of critique, to the degree it is accurate, is as much a matter of emphasis in the earlier ANT literature as it is a permanent debilitation. It is no surprise that Braun’s article on the ‘hidden heterogeneities’ of MSNBC’s online interfaces does a particularly excellent job in laying bare the very real way that socio-technical objects contribute to the maintenance of oft- invisible power relations, given that the piece draws its theoretical framework, not from Latour, but from his co-conspirator John Law, whose writings on the sociotechnical have always contained the most explicit ‘critical edge’. Likewise, Ford’s overview of the processes through a variety of digital artifacts contribute to the real-time construction of breaking news on Wikipedia examines not only the way that power on Wikipedia is assembled but on the ways that it, contra to Couldry’s critique, maintains itself over time. This is an example of why a resolute focus on materiality and objects is particularly useful

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at University of Haifa Library on December 27, 2014 8 Journalism 16(1) for these kinds of genealogical expeditions; in an ontological sense, info-boxes and warning tags are purely digital objects, whose form is fluid and endlessly changeable. In reality, however, they quickly assume positions of centrality in the Wikipedia editorial process, positions that, moreover, are organizationally ‘irrational’ insofar as they were originally designed for work in constructing an encyclopedia, not a breaking news service. What was once a technological work-around, using a variety of malleable of digital tools, not only alters the breaking news workflow of Wikipedia but contributes in a real sense to the establishment of digital power dynamics that are not easily altered. But it is Keith’s article on those most mundane of newsroom artifacts, ‘pica poles, proportion wheels, and paper dummies’, that may speak best to the different ways an object-oriented analysis shines an unusual light on the power dynamics of news production. These items in the copy-editor toolkit are both cultural (they are symbols of an accrued social and organizational power in newsrooms) but also only exist insofar as they lie at the nexus of a specific, historically limited news production process. A pica pole that did nothing useful would be less than useless – it would be a joke, a sad, faded symbol of lost glory and technological advance. By interrogating what exactly these objects of journalism mean today, what they used to mean in the 1970s, where they are located in the newsroom, and what they do to in both today’s and yesterday’s journalism, we can obtain an insight into many of the transformations affecting today’s journalism.

Conclusion In the end, we want to highlight the fact that we see this Special Issue as more the launching of a long-overdue dialog than as a programmatic statement of exercise in ‘flag- planting’. As Pablo Boczkowski reminds us in the brief retrospective essay written especially for this volume, studies of materiality and technology, drawing generally from science technology studies (STS) perspectives at least, have long been part of the journalism studies tradition. We think, however, that the ideas embedded in journalism studies’ understandings of materiality could use some further fleshing out, along with a greater focus on historicization, power, and culture that we mentioned earlier in this introduction. To that end, we have asked several scholars from both within and outside the journalism studies tradition – Michael Schudson, David Domingo, Gina Neff, as well as the pioneering Boczkowski – to provide more reflective essays discussing the problems and potentials embedded within an ‘objects of journalism’ approach. Daniel Kreiss, finally, critically reflects on the issue as a whole in his concluding article. If this Special Issue brings the underlying values and deficiencies of an ‘objects of journalism’ approach into greater circulation within journalism studies, then we think it will have been a success, and worth the risk of filling an entire journal issue with reminiscences about toaster-like things. In the end, we would like to believe that the various articles here do an excellent job of illuminating some of the simple and not-so-simple material objects, relations, cultures, and organizational structures which form both the background and fore- ground of so much of journalism production and reception in the 21st century.

Acknowledgements We want to gratefully thank Christina Dunbar-Hester for introducing us to the Journal of Toaster Studies, following her invitation to join the editorial board (she accepted).

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References Anon (2013) The journal of toaster studies: An academic publication about new technologies. Available at: http://www.journalofts.org/ (accessed 6 June 2014). Couldry N (2008) Actor network theory and media: Do they connect and on what terms? In: Hepp A and Winter R (eds) Cultures of Connectivity. Creskill, NJ: The Hampton Press, pp. 93–110 [German translation published in parallel 2006 edition by Westdeutscher Verlag]. Gray Mary L (2012) CAUTION!! Boundary work ahead for Internet studies … or, why the Twilight of the ‘Toaster Studies’ approach to Internet research is a very, very good thing. Paper presented at IR13, University of Salford, Manchester, 19 October. Latour B (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Micó JL, Masip P and Domingo D (2013) To wish impossible things: Convergence as a process of diffusion of innovations in an actor-network. International Communication Gazette 75: 118–137. Plesner U (2009) An actor-network perspective on changing work practices: Communication technologies as actants in newswork. Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism 10(5): 604–625. Turner F (2005) Actor-networking the news. Social Epistemology 19(4): 321–324. Weiss A and Domingo D (2010) Innovation processes in online newsrooms as actor-networks and communities of practice. New Media & Society 12(7): 1156–1171.

Author biographies CW Anderson is an Assistant Professor of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island (CUNY) and directs research at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. Juliette De Maeyer is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication at Université de Montréal.

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Article

Journalism 2015, Vol. 16(1) 10–26 Foreign objects? Web © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: content management systems, sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1464884914545729 journalistic cultures and the jou.sagepub.com ontology of software

Scott Rodgers Birkbeck, University of London, UK

Abstract Research on ‘digital’ journalism has focused largely on online news, with comparatively less interest in the longer-term implications of software and computational technologies. Drawing upon a 6-year study of the Toronto Star, this article provides an account of TOPS, an in-house web content management system which served as the backbone of thestar.com for 6 years. For some, TOPS was a successful software innovation, while for others, a strategic digital ‘property’. But for most journalists, it was slow, deficient in functionality, aesthetically unappealing and cumbersome. Although several organizational factors can explain TOPS’ obstinacy, I argue for particular attention to the complex ontology of software. Based on an outline of this ontology, I suggest software be taken seriously as an object of journalism, which implies acknowledging its partial autonomy from human use or authorization, accounting for its ability to mutate indefinitely and analysing its capacity to encourage forms of ‘computational thinking’.

Keywords Actor–network theory, computation, digital media, newspapers, organizational theory, phenomenology, practice theory, site ontology, software, web content management systems

Introduction: Mundane troubles with software As readers of thestar.com begin their morning in late August 2011, there is a flurry of activity in the Toronto Star newsroom. That morning, at 4:45 a.m., Jack Layton, leader

Corresponding author: Scott Rodgers, Department of Film, Media and Cultural Studies, Birkbeck, University of London, 43 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, London WC1H 0PD, UK. Email: [email protected]

Downloaded fromDownloaded http://www.elearnica.ir from jou.sagepub.com at Cairo University on December 27, 2014 Rodgers 11 of the New Democratic Party of Canada, passed away in his Toronto home. Earlier that year, Layton led his party to a remarkable 103 seats in the Canadian general election, becoming for first time in party history the official opposition in Parliament. For newsroom editors, his death is a big story. The Star is Canada’s largest newspaper, and dedi- cates significant coverage to national politics. Moreover, Layton was also a long-time Toronto city councillor, and onetime mayoral candidate, making the story doubly relevant for the newspaper’s primarily urban readership. But his death, though sad, is not unexpected. Layton had fought the election while recovering from prostate cancer, and later announced a leave of absence to fight a new and unspecified cancer. The newsroom is busy because of the timing, at the beginning of the working day for many readers. The print edition, finalized the previous day, has no account of Layton’s death. The Star’s online and mobile editions, however, are providing saturation coverage, just as readers log in to their office computers or check the news on their commute. Yet, as editors add and update obituaries, editorials, news stories, commentaries, photo galleries and more, they are experiencing troubles. Near the central newsroom hub, under a large LCD screen displaying web metrics, sits Brian Kilburn.1 Brian’s not at his usual desk, indeed he is not ‘of’ the newsroom. Brian is from ‘Group IT’. He looks at the computer screen, one hand on mouse, the other on the telephone receiver. He explains to an unknown conversant that ‘TOPS is not performing as it should’. Updates on the Layton story are lagging. Using technical language, he summarizes an earlier call with Torstar Digital. He remains calm; he almost seems to be performing a service. If this is the case, his ‘clients’ are to either side of him. To his left, three web editors, currently huddled around a computer looking anxiously at a web browser displaying thestar.com. They debate whether various bits of content are old or updated versions. To his right is Lloyd Dover, the Managing Editor. Lloyd is checking and sending emails, but is also periodically craning his head, checking on Brian’s progress, and the web editors’ too. This is not the first time TOPS has caused such mundane troubles. Drawing upon an ethnographic study of the Toronto Star, this article tracks the ‘many faces’ of TOPS, a web content management system (CMS) produced by a fledgling digital media arm within Torstar, the newspaper’s parent company. For some, TOPS represented innovation in software design; for others, it was a strategically-important digital ‘property’; and for others still, it was seen as wrongly imposed on the newsroom. For those in the last category, typically journalists and mid-level editors, for 6 years, Canada’s largest newspaper was forced to cope with a web CMS that was slow, deficient in functionality, aesthetically unappealing and cumbersome. Some organization members saw TOPS as the product of ham-fisted boardroom manoeuvres, and watched it persist in frustration, while they became increasingly familiar with social media, mobile devices and cheaper off-the-shelf software packages. My argument in this paper however will be that the apparent inability of the Toronto Star rid itself of TOPS sooner has as much to do with the complex ontology of software objects as with corporate hubris or disorganiza- tion. Following a review of the extant literature, this argument will proceed through two main sections. First, I will trace the appearance of TOPS across three organizational sites – the web operation, the developers and senior newsroom managers – to provide a mul- tisited lens into the operation of web CMS as a software object of journalism. Second, I

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at Cairo University on December 27, 2014 12 Journalism 16(1) will theorize the implications of TOPS’ differential appearance across these sites by connecting with the literature in the growing field of software studies. My main finding is that taking software seriously as an object of journalism would mean: acknowledging its partial autonomy from human use or authorization; accounting for its ability to mutate indefinitely; and analysing its capacity to render humans as its objects, by encouraging forms of ‘computational thinking’. This, in turn, opens up some areas needing further investigation, including the longer-term proliferation of digital computation technologies and their associated forms of ‘IT’ expertise within news organizations, and more recent shifts away from in-house software systems, towards third-party prepackaged software ‘solutions’ that further standardize journalistic form across organizations. I end by arguing that journalism research should accept the partial autonomy of software systems from journalistic practice, and in turn, develop ways to study such phenomena as genuine objects of journalism.

Networked journalism and technologies of software Literature on the implications of digital and networked media for news work is now one of the richest and fastest moving areas of journalism studies, and it will not be feasible to account for this literature exhaustively here (for a review, however, see Mitchelstein and Boczkowski, 2009). Instead, I will focus on research which has studied, and debated how to study, the relationships between technology and professionalized journalism. This strand of debate has arguably arisen most fruitfully from qualitative researchers in dialogue with the newsroom ethnography tradition (e.g. Paterson and Domingo, 2008), who have been interested in mapping technological change in relation to situated journalistic cultures. Such work has observed the degree to which many journalistic routines and hierarchies remain founded in the assumptions of print production. It is in this apparent entanglement of print technology and practice, as much as any philosophical stance vis- a-vis journalism, which has often led to limited implementations of interactive online platforms and tools (Domingo, 2008; Steensen, 2009; Thurman, 2008). This has also formed the context for the ways in which professional journalists have normalized new genres such as blogging and microblogging, typically hosted by third-party services such as WordPress or Twitter, within more established regimes of journalistic practice (Lasorsa et al., 2012; Singer, 2005). Even as such ethnographic research provides nuanced accounts of transforming journalistic cultures in a digital era, it often under-theorizes the question of technology, and its complex and historicized interrelationships with journalistic practice. In the last decade, however, a more theoretically inflected literature has emerged in response, inspired by science and technology studies (STS) and actor–network theory (ANT), which seeks to address the journalism–technology relation head on. A notable example is Boczkowski (2004b) who, drawing on STS and focusing on the computerization of newsrooms, argues journalism research needs to go beyond merely describing the ‘effects’ of technologies. Instead, attention needs to be paid to their varied ‘appropriation’ through organizational structures, working practices and representations. Plesner (2009) makes a similar argument, though drawing on ANT, suggesting that ‘we should refrain both from

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at Cairo University on December 27, 2014 Rodgers 13 essentializing the “effects” of ICTs and from forgetting to include them in our analyses of work practices’ (p. 605). For Plesner (2009), technologies are densely interwoven into associations with other actants, and do not possess independent ‘forces or consequences’ (p. 604). Hemmingway (2008) represents the most in-depth application of ANT to the study of journalism, exploring in detail the ordinary alliances of regional television journalists and their myriad technologies. Echoing Plesner (2009) and Boczkowski (2004b), Hemmingway asserts, and goes on to demonstrate empirically, that what is crucial is not just the agency of technologies, but their agency via associations with human actors. In short, the wave of journalism research interested in theorizing technology has also been at the forefront in rejecting the implicit technological determinism of some writing on online journalism. Considering that the above research tends to be concerned specifically with digital and networked media, ‘technology’ could be seen as too broad a concept. Indeed, it is surprising that so little has been written in journalism studies on software technologies in particular. While the online publishing of news has well-recognized implications, less is understood about how this development has emerged within the much longer term proliferation of computational technologies related to and even ‘of’ journalism, such as digital page composition. Indeed, by Manovich’s (2001) definition of ‘new media objects’, focused on their provenance in computation, printed newspapers were digital media well before news went on the web. There are of course notable exceptions to this research gap. Weiss and Domingo (2010) combine the approaches of ANT and Wenger’s concept of ‘community of practice’ to trace a web CMS platform as an actant performed and positioned differently in relation to distinct knowledge communities, such as those of web editors or technical staff. In a methodological piece, Anderson and Kreiss (2013) also provide an account of CMS software. With the aim of demonstrating the analytical strengths of ethnographic research informed by ANT, they provide a remarkably detailed account of the protocols, procedures and malfunctions of a CMS which goes well beyond technical description, outlining how software infrastructures both reflect and instantiate the routines, roles and hierarchies of practical journalistic cultures (see also Rodgers, 2014: 77–78). Perhaps the most ambitious literature concerned with software in journalism studies are accounts of various experiments which bring journalists together with software programmers. Lewis and Usher (2013) convincingly argue that while such experiments might present new frontiers of possibility, it is important to remain critical and not simply take for granted the intrinsic value of computational concepts such as open source for journalism (see also Aitamurto and Lewis, 2013). Czarniawska’s (2011) recent research provides one reason to be cautious: she found remarkable standardization in the way three otherwise differentiated news agencies (Swedish TT, Italian ANSA and Reuters) formatted their news product, largely due to similar implementations of software platforms. These strands of emergent research point to some of the ways in which we might study what Anderson (2013) recently called the ‘shaggy, emerging beast’ of computational journalism (p. 1017). This article represents a modest but I hope helpful contribution to this new research agenda. My argument will centre on a claim that journalism research needs to take the autonomy of software more seriously. As the ethnographic research I am about to recount will substantiate, I accept the merit of studying

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at Cairo University on December 27, 2014 14 Journalism 16(1) technology as localized and appropriated within particular practical milieus. Yet what seems missing in much of the existing literature is recognition of the trans-local and trans-human forms of standardization that software objects introduce into such milieus. Before I expand on this conceptual point, however, I will first present an empirical inter- lude, examining the case of the TOPS web CMS within the organizational settings of the Toronto Star.

Case study and methodology This article draws upon a multi-year (2005–2013) study of the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest newspaper in readership terms, and the flagship holding of Torstar, a large media company by Canadian standards (owning more than 120 newspapers, several digital properties and Harlequin Books). Though Torstar is a publicly traded corporation, its voting shares are controlled by five families with a longstanding historical interest in the Toronto Star. Through special corporate governance structures, they ensure the newspaper remains faithful to a series of left-leaning ‘principles’ set out in the will of the founding editor, Joseph E. Atkinson. While my larger study focused on the changing relationships of journalism and urban public life, the research also produced a wealth of data around the changing practices, technologies and authority of professionalized journalism in a digital age. The corner- stones of this data are two ethnographic field studies: the first taking place over 6 months in early 2005, involving 6 weeks of participant observations and 58 interviews; and the second taking place over 2 months in summer 2011, involving 4 weeks of participant observations and 23 interviews. These ethnographic studies were significantly aug- mented by desk-based research of archival records, documentation, online materials and historical news clippings. Collected data were coded and recoded iteratively throughout the multi-year study, using computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software. An important theoretical resource for the research was Schatzki’s (2002) ‘site ontology’, which helped to analytically account for the inherent dependence of various organized practices (e.g. editing, layout, copyediting, beat reporting) upon material arrangements (e.g. office spaces, devices, infrastructures, mediums; see also Rodgers, 2013: 3–4, 2014: 72–73). In connecting practice theory with new materialist thinking such as ANT, this approach has some similarities to that of Weiss and Domingo (2010), though with a stronger emphasis on what I would term the nonhuman and nonrepresen- tational aspects of journalism work. This entailed three main dimensions: First, while I was interested in self-conscious reflections in interviews, I also emphasized narrative accounts of activities respondents considered routine and even uninteresting, but which could be analyzed as basic preconditions of work rarely discussed explicitly (cf. Markham, 2011). Second, I was interested in tracing the silent work of infrastructures (see Star, 1999), for example, software (cf. Bruni, 2005) and mundane texts such as daily editorial schedules (i.e. ‘skeds’; cf. Cooren, 2004). Finally, I sought to account for how spatial arrangements were both crystallizations of, but also conditions of possibility for, journalism and its associated technologies (see Rodgers, 2014). These three dimensions allowed me to account for objects such as TOPS as at once enacted through situated practices, yet also existing as trans-local and partially autonomous objects.

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Following TOPS TOPS began its public-facing life on 18 December 2006, when it was announced as the new ‘high-performance engine’ of thestar.com. TOPS is a web CMS: a database or repository which organizes the publication of content on web browsers and mobile apps, and allows for the simultaneous authoring, updating and management of content by users who may have little knowledge of software architecture. TOPS initially denoted ‘Torstar Online Publishing System’, a name highlighting its in-house, bespoke nature in 2006, when it was primarily intended for use by Torstar-run websites. In time, however, ‘Total’ replaced ‘Torstar’ as TOPS became more of a prepackaged product for sale to other organizations. If one read only official announcements, TOPS is the coherent outcome of a seamless development process. But such narratives conceal a much messier situation. TOPS had what I will provisionally call varying ‘edges’ (to borrow a phrase from Gaonkar and Povinelli, 2003: 392; see also Rodgers, 2014) across the different organizational sites in which it appeared. Drawing primarily from my 2011 field research, I will consider three such sites in particular: the web operation, the developers and the senior newsroom managers. These sites are not exhaustive – TOPS also appeared at other sites – but represent the three most coherent appearances of the web CMS within the partial confines of my own ethnographic analysis.

The web operation The first site at which we will locate TOPS is near the centre of the recently redesigned Toronto Star newsroom. Here, adjacent to a new central hub was the ‘web operation’, a small group of around 13 who oversaw the content – though not the underlying web architecture – of thestar.com. They sat along a row of desks, interacting occasionally but with eyes almost continuously directed at dual-screen workstations. The hub next to which they were located somewhat modestly mimicked new ‘integrated’ newsrooms ostensibly prioritizing content over medium. As if to underline this, the redesign also symbolically pushed aside another row of dual-screen workstations: those related to print page production, right to the very edge of the newsroom. However, by all accounts, digital had not displaced print; indeed as at many newspaper organizations, the complexities of producing a print product continued to hold sway. Although members of the web operation often described their work in more expansive and even aspirational terms, much of their daily labours amounted to maintaining thestar. com via TOPS. It was they who decided the relative positioning of stories and content on the main homepage. They who arrived early in the morning to manually clean up the content automatically migrated overnight to TOPS from CCI NewsGate, the CMS system for the printed newspaper. And they who liaised between department journalists and technical IT staff around the implementation of minor tweaks (e.g. photo galleries, live chats), or the resolution of minor system bugs. Having a centralized web operation of this nature, with these sorts of responsibilities, was seen as a temporary measure. In recent history, the Toronto Star had attempted to disperse ‘web evangelists’ across various departments and, indeed, in principle anyone within the news organization could add and

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at Cairo University on December 27, 2014 16 Journalism 16(1) amend content using TOPS. Yet in practice, the web operation was deemed necessary, as staff dedicated to the day-to-day editorial maintenance of the web CMS. And in this guise, TOPS largely appeared as a constraint inserted into the daily working environment of the web operation. It was a software object, a thing, with which they coped:

It sounds like it’s patched together with duct tape and elastic bands; it just doesn’t … it doesn’t give us the flexibility we need to respond to things instantly and overly creatively. I mean, I think you’ve probably seen, like we have one way we can display a photo gallery, one way we can do this and one way we can do that. It’s really a testament to those who work on the web desk that they can like get around some of the issues and present some of their … present their content as well as it is presented. They call it … I forget what it actually stands for, but they call it Total Operating Piece of Shit. (Daina Simone, Senior Editor, Digital)

For web editors, TOPS created delay, lagging several minutes between an update and its public availability to website users (as seen in the short account in this article’s introduction). TOPS also constrained – unduly for web editors – navigational and layout possibilities. For example, the TOPS template dictated that only stories with a photo could appear as the main item on the home page. Perhaps most crucially, TOPS was seen to perform poorly in terms of search engine optimization (SEO). This is even though editors such as Sheena Rutherford regarded SEO as ‘a bit of witchcraft … I’m not saying that there aren’t people who have cracked it, but I don’t know that it really can be cracked … with design elements’. Nevertheless, after reviewing several competing websites, web editors negotiated a small redesign, whereby a new column titled ‘In the News’ was created on the left hand extreme of the main page, listing several stories buried on sub- pages. Far from aesthetically appealing, the column added ‘density’ to the main page, in an attempt to drive more traffic to the website. Via such manoeuvres, the web operation largely sought to subvert TOPS.

The developers If the web operation saw TOPS as a thing to subvert, a rather different edge of TOPS emerges upon leaving the newsroom, housed in the Toronto Star’s 1970s waterfront office tower, and travelling to 590 King Street West. Here, in Toronto’s trendy Fashion District, was Torstar Digital, a division of Torstar Corporation and the developer of TOPS. Its offices were housed in a refurbished industrial loft building, with open-plan wooden desks, exposed brick walls and visible ventilation systems. It was a company clearly seeking to project the gritty entrepreneurial flair of start-up digital media: as recently as 2013, its website described a journey from just 2 to over 250 employees, beginning ‘in a small basement office with a handful of forward-thinking innovators who understood the power of digital disruption’. ‘Digital disruption’ was something of a philosophy for Torstar Digital, certainly for its President Vidar Waltersson:

You know, its independence from the assumptions, philosophies and culture of traditional media organizations is crucial … we don’t say ‘the great media company from the traditional

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world in the digital realm is’ … and are able to finish that sentence. The great digital media companies are all digital media companies. They’re Facebook and Google and Twitter … So we created those kinds of conditions, so we need the entrepreneurial flexibility, and lack of assumptions, and lack of a hard-set past culture that comes with a traditional media organization who’s been around for a hundred years. That ends up being as much a liability as an asset, and it becomes more of a liability than an asset on the Internet. (Vidar Waltersson, President, Torstar Digital)

Torstar Digital’s public story may be one of building from the ground up, but the reality is less gritty than the facade. Vidar had relatively deep roots at Torstar and the Toronto Star. He first joined the newspaper in 1995, taking a 1-year contract to help launch the Toronto Star’s first website, considered at the time to be a ‘revenue-free’ experiment. By 2005, Vidar had risen in Torstar’s executive ranks, and led a cross-media study which recommended investment in digital media properties. As a result, Torstar Digital was created, with only two employees, though these employees were given a project to grow a new digital division for a large media corporation. Indeed, by 2011, a much larger Torstar Digital was developing very few products in-house, instead primarily acquiring existing start-ups needing additional resources and expertise. TOPS was one of Torstar Digital’s early in-house projects. Although built to service several Torstar websites, its initial development was anchored to its anticipated uses for thestar.com. On its release in December 2006, it was viewed by some in the local web developer community as a significant improvement:

The Toronto Star Website (http://www.thestar.com/) has FINALLY gotten a facelift. And it’s about time too. However, this is no ordinary front-page overhaul … oh no sir … Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages, the NEW Toronto Star website is … get this … ALL CSS!!! Nary a table in site sight … [T]he old design … was rife with horribly messy markup, and had more tables than a furniture store. Code validation was nothing short of a joke. Speaking of jokes, I’m quite sure at one point, thestar.com became the butt of jokes amongst Toronto web standards designers. (http://www.pxleight.com/journal/2006/12/27/thestar-gets-a- facelift/Website now inactive, last viewed 27 December 2006)

As can be seen in this indicative quote, for developers, TOPS was a major improvement in terms of web architecture, rather than the content it organized. It is via web architecture that the developers asserted their authority vis-a-vis news organizations:

… traditionally [a newspaper] company’s digital strategy up until then was, what’s your traditional media brand, take out the spaces, put it all in lower cases, and put dot com at the end … So we had www.thestar.com and that was the Star’s digital strategy. It wasn’t about how do you get user-generated content, what are you doing in terms of video, are you offering free classified with up-scaling, or are you operating a web 2.0 experience? None of those things were really a part of the thinking in traditional media companies; they were going to ride out their brands into the digital environment. (Vidar Waltersson, President, Torstar Digital)

At Torstar Digital, traditional news organizations were seen as deeply mistaken in assuming they could simply transfer their content and brand online, and mistaken that they

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at Cairo University on December 27, 2014 18 Journalism 16(1) could still monopolize content selection and layout within the newsroom. Few working at Torstar Digital had journalistic backgrounds. Instead, it was an organization inhabited by web designers, computer programmers and digital media entrepreneurs. They tended to see ‘news’ as a category of content produced via increasingly ‘participatory’ means, and mediated by algorithmic logics and hierarchies, both of which required well-designed software architecture. It was in this vein that TOPS was repurposed in 2008 towards a major redesign of thestar.com, transforming it from a webpage to a ‘portal’ for various online ‘verticals’ (e.g. ‘yourhome’, ‘wheels’, ‘parentcentral’ and ‘healthzone’). The redesign was ostensibly collaborative – with Vidar Waltersson holding a dual role as President of Torstar Digital and Vice President for Digital Media at the Toronto Star – though as we’ll see shortly, others disagreed. In any event, by 2011, TOPS became a relatively minor property for Torstar Digital. A ‘prepackaged solution’ for the Toronto Star and external organizations for which Torstar Digital acted as an ‘outside’ vendor.

The senior newsroom managers The third edge we will trace for TOPS is that of senior managers in the newsroom. Senior newsroom managers occupied an in-between position. On the one hand, when looking towards the upper echelons of Torstar, they saw a corporation that was avowedly cautious towards digital publishing, and which had historically tended to reward ‘print people’. On the other hand, when looking towards the newsroom they collectively managed, they tended to adopt the same realism of many reporters and production staff: they assumed a progressively shrinking printed newspaper; they assumed a future with an increasingly prominent multi-platform, digital Toronto Star; and they felt compelled to take into account an audience presented to them via quantitative web metrics. So TOPS appeared to senior managers in overlapping and contradictory ways. But, similar to the web operation, senior managers largely regard TOPS as a sort of foreign object. Their concern, however, was an apparent lack of managerial authority over the platform’s design and evolution, particularly evident in editors’ accounts of the 2008 website redesign:

… we had so many things go wrong. The guy who was in charge of the web under [Reid, Editor-in-Chief, 2006-2008], he went into a corner of the newsroom, and no one even knew him. He was terrible, he was fired, and I think [Sheena] took over and discovered he’d agreed to all these kinds of things for the new website design … it was news to the newsroom that these things were being done. Cause the guy sat in his little glass bubble and didn’t speak to anyone about it. Sold us down the river into some awful things. (Jon Reilly, City Editor)

By the time I moved over in May, it was like, done, over. It wasn’t going to change. I would say it was not done collaboratively … You know, one of the favorite sayings … was ‘the disrupted cannot manage the disruption’ or whatever the hell that means … well, okay, that’s fine except the disrupted have to produce the content for whatever the hell the people who are managing the disruption are doing. (Sheena Rutherford, Associate Editor)

The neat ‘us’ and ‘them’ distinction deployed by Jon and Sheena was not so clear cut in practice. In their everyday working practices, as lead editor of the so-called web

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at Cairo University on December 27, 2014 Rodgers 19 operation and City Editor, respectively, Sheena and Jon interacted with TOPS essentially as end users. Yet they were also embroiled in regular interactions with other senior managers, from their own and other departments, where TOPS appeared as a highly ambivalent object of managerial decision-making. Ambivalent, because TOPS and indeed the entire information technology infrastructure at the Toronto Star was managed by ‘Group IT’, a digital division outside of the newsroom as such, and beyond senior editors’ direct control. Having grown to over 300 staff, and in 2011 moving to occupy vacated space on the same floor as the newsroom after its redesign, Group IT was seen as needing contain- ment. This was evident not only in relation to TOPS, but also Group IT’s management of other systems, notably the CMS system for the printed newspaper, CCI NewsGate. While NewsGate was an externally supplied rather than in-house product, its implementation at the Toronto Star was complex and cumbersome. It required several installations, in- house plug-ins and 10 years of internal training. Senior newsroom managers complained that the system’s complexity was self-fulfilling: the army of technical staff responsible for maintaining it had an inherent interest in sustaining its intricacy. But beyond its growth as a division, senior managers worried about Group IT’s ‘client service’ approach, which they regarded as both alien and insufficient:

There’s a newsroom culture and there’s an outside newsroom culture, and the thing the web people always found here is the technicians who were supposed to fix bugs and all this, they don’t understand that I mean you need it now … I know when [Sheena] was doing the web and would want to do things, you had X-number of points a month or something, and this was how tasks were allocated. If you had six points, and to, let’s say, fix the website so that, let me think, it would say ‘updates’ for the updated stories? Well that’s six points so, if you use that card, they’ll do it this month, but that’s the only thing they’ll do this month … And so they would, like, allocate points where you could buy yourself a priority. Well, we’re the Toronto Star so we kind of want, we’re the top priority site, we want staff dedicated to what we do. (Jon Reilly, City Editor)

Senior managers, accustomed to the print medium, expected a ‘master-servant’ relationship between editorial decisions and its resulting formats, but instead

… it’s reversed with online … the masters are IT telling you what you’re going to get … ‘You want it to scroll? No, you can’t have that’. Or, ‘You can have it, but it will take you four years’ … a ticket will be written, a team will get together, they’ll have a discussion, they’ll have a taskforce. It will take us a weekend to consider the options and they can come back in a couple of years. It’s a massive frustration. (Lloyd Dover, Managing Editor)

Theorizing TOPS In narrating the preceding accounts, my intent has not been to evaluate TOPS, nor valor- ize any of its particular ‘edges’, whether of the web operation, developers or senior newsroom managers. Rather, I will now mobilize these accounts to outline three themes related to the operation of software as an object of journalism. The first is to think through the ontology of software as an object in and of itself. The ordinary naming or practical treatment of TOPS as a ‘thing’ tells us something important.

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It is true that many of its apparent ‘effects’ are best understood as associations, appro- priations and even misrecognitions produced through its entanglement with aspects of situated journalistic practices. However, this cannot comprise a full account of TOPS as a software object. As Thrift and French (2002) observe, ‘software’ objects show up in several guises. Perhaps most prominently, software is imagined as commodified products, or otherwise, as the object of the field of software programming. Yet the most basic expression of software is as an underlying language of instructions, otherwise known as ‘code’. As Berry (2011) notes, studying code directly is by no means straightforward (p. 29). Programmers may work with and interpret it as a kind of a textual artefact, but for computational systems, code is not interpreted, it is directly executed. This duality of code, argue Kitchin and Dodge (2011), is at the heart of software: it is designed and created, and therefore is a ‘product of the world’; yet it is also deployed and made operable, and so it ‘does work in the world’ (p. 23). As a result, software is a form of ‘secondary agency’, in that it can operate autonomously from human use or authorization (Kitchin and Dodge, 2011; Mackenzie, 2006). To be clear, this agency is not identical to nor crudely deterministic of human agency. It remains crucial to account for the situated interactions between software and journalistic practices. But there are limits to such localized analyses:

It is no doubt reasonable to assume that whatever organizational and social implications technologies may have, these are ultimately the outcome of the ways they are enacted in local settings. Yet, the local enactment of technologies is never ex nihilo creation. It necessarily presupposes the object of enactment. Certainly, the study of the incongruence of design and use and the ways technologies are locally appropriated are essential to understanding the social involvement of technology and the diversity by which technological systems are negotiated in situ. By the same token, such perspective is not well suited to deal with layered, back-staged operations beyond the inspection, understanding, and manipulative ability of situated agents. (Kallinikos et al., 2013b: 397–398)

What this suggests is that while it is legitimate and helpful for journalism researchers to study the localized appropriation of technology, and more specifically software, it is equally important to attend to how such computational technologies introduce forms of standardized decision-making and functionality unavailable to local interpretation or authorization, yet which produces conditions of possibility for journalism practices at trans-local scales. Thus, even as we might explain the uneven appearance of TOPS across the three sites discussed here in terms such as local practical appropriation or misrecog- nition, we must also explain or at least acknowledge its partial autonomy as a web CMS software object.2 Second, we should consider the implications of software objects’ capacity to continuously mutate. As Mackenzie (2006) argues, software is a type of object which ‘undergoes phase transitions … It solidifies at some points, but vaporizes as others’ (p. 2; cf. Manovich, 2001). Software objects such as web CMS can be made and remade into potentially infinite versions which, as Mackenzie points out, perhaps explains why such objects are ordinarily understood by non-specialists as immaterial or intangible (Manovich, 2001). Thus, as Kallinikos et al. (2013a) argue, digital objects such as software have an ‘ambivalent ontology’.

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This ambivalence or mutability at least partially accounts for the growth of specialized ‘Group IT’ support seen in the account of TOPS at the Toronto Star, and known to exist in similar form in virtually all large organizations. In the context of newspapers, the need for such support has a long history, certainly predating online publishing, extending to earlier print alternatives (see Boczkowski, 2004a) as well as computerized page composition. Group IT inhabited the interstices of the three sites narrated in the preceding section, and also my field observations more generally. Their presence was not only obvious, but most clear in the ongoing maintenance of the organization’s software and computational infrastructure, for example, in fixing bugs, installing patches, running updates and implementing new installations. Group IT ultimately held responsibility for maintaining TOPS, and as a result they also had effective authority over thestar.com. So, even as the newsroom redesign pushed page production to edge of newsroom, symbolically prioritizing the web, the substantial practical work involved in page production was still understood as controlled within the newsroom.3 TOPS occupied a different terrain. It was produced by Torstar Digital, self-proclaimed experts in the ‘power of disruption’, and it was maintained and project-managed by Group IT. This division of labour was said to be founded on the ethos noted by senior web editor Sheena Rutherford, that ‘the disrupted cannot manage the disruption’. The final theme I will highlight is the ways in which software objects can encourage ‘computational thinking’. While there are complex interdependencies between software and habitual or organized practices, it is insufficient to see such interdependencies from an anthropocentric point of view alone. As Berry (2011) argues, using the example of SatNAV systems and Google Live Search, we can also become objects of software, being required to think computationally in order to affect its intended functions (p. 120). Berry observes that unlike Heidegger’s ‘ready to hand’ hammer – which withdraws from view as its user focuses on the end of ramming a nail into wood – software platforms such as Google Live Search are ‘unready to hand’. As a user types their search, algorithmically determined terms are suggested, encouraging the user to recognize, and think with, the computational agency in play. Dispersed in and around the use, maintenance and management of TOPS were several manifestations of the so-called computational thinking. For example, there were noticeable shifts in the treatment of quantitative audience data. Particularly in longer term strategic thinking, editors’ increasingly justified action in light of available audience metrics (for further discussion, see Anderson, 2011; Lee et al., 2014; MacGregor, 2007). It was also evident in those cases where editors and journalists worked with developers and IT staff to formulate and implement tweaks to TOPS, intended to optimize the discovery and presentation of content via algorithmic means, such as search engines. As should hopefully be clear, computational thinking is not a by- product of crude technological determination, but rather a phenomenology of action always already taking place through and in conjunction with the formal logics of computational technologies (see Hayles, 2012). It is important that the preceding analyses of TOPS not be seen in static terms. Between my two observation periods, not only was there increasing comfort with and acceptance of computational technologies, but also a remarkable shift in the everyday phenomenology of newsroom technologies. In 2005, aside from desktop computers, the main computational devices visible were the BlackBerry smart phones used by some

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at Cairo University on December 27, 2014 22 Journalism 16(1) senior editors. But by 2011, mobile devices proliferated: editors regularly used tablets in news meetings; reporters used smart phones for all manner of tasks, from search to story writing to video and photo capture. One result was that the mystique and novelty ascribed to web CMS, and digital media in general, seemed to be eroding. My interviews in 2011 made clear that editors and journalists increasingly felt comfortable and confident enough with their emerging multi-platform situation to turn away from questions of technology, and towards ‘content’:

I think this is also an important part of the lesson, is to understand your content, because this is what this is really about. It’s not about being on the website. It’s not about going digital I don’t think. It’s understanding how your content will play on different platforms, and how its consumed on different platforms. (Sheena Rutherford, Associate Editor)

I would argue, however, that this confidence is not quite a case of journalists comman- deering software infrastructure. Rather, it indicates a further domestication of such software and its associated infrastructures, with its status as an object partially receding from the prevailing practical language of journalism (see Helle-Valle and Slettemeås, 2008). Less and less a foreign object, more and more a silent appliance of journalism work.

Conclusion By January 2013, TOPS finally met the end of its 6-year run as the web CMS underlying thestar.com. In a major website re-launch, thestar.com shifted to a new off-the-shelf web CMS (Adobe CQ5). Its stated ethos is ‘engagement’: It presents users arriving at a story via social media or search engine referrals with linked content designed to drive them deeper into the site, and it offers regular visitors a ‘mystar’ platform with a series of personalized features and settings. In addition, the new web CMS is designed to allow much more flexible layout in both news content and advertising. Mobile versions of thestar. com were likewise shifted to off-the-shelf, third-party providers: the newspaper’s first tablet platform making use of the Pressly web app, and its mobile app and website moving from TOPS to Polar Mobile’s MediaEverywhere platform. Organizational changes went alongside changes in technical platforms. By most accounts, online news assumed elevated status in the newsroom, with priority placed on web news in the main morning meeting, and the reorganization of the web operation into departments. At the corporate level, Torstar Digital was folded to attain ‘operational savings’, with its digital properties redistributed to other divisions within Torstar. There were relatively few layoffs; the projected savings will largely result from shifting staff from Torstar Digital’s former open-plan loft offices in Toronto’s Fashion District, back to the newspaper’s modernist waterfront office building. These more recent changes no doubt emerge from a confluence of factors. One worth underlining is the Toronto Star’s relatively unique ownership arrangements, mentioned earlier. The voting trust who control its parent company ascribe near-mythical status to their flagship newspaper, and are strongly inclined to a revalorization of ‘traditional’ journalism in a digital age. So it is likely that, if only in part, some of these moves have been made to redress perceived imbalances between the authority of the different

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at Cairo University on December 27, 2014 Rodgers 23 organizational sites involved in thestar.com and its mobile platforms. But this does not necessarily imply a lessening weight for software objects in relation to journalism at the Star. If anything, these recent developments represent an example of a more widespread shift, noted by Pollock and Williams (2009), whereby organizations are replacing software systems developed in-house with externally supplied, commercialized and prepackaged IT ‘solutions’. Arguably, this introduces even greater software-mediated standardization between news organizations and indeed with other organizations and outlets also (see also Czarniawska, 2011: 176–215). My argument in this article in that journalism research needs to take seriously the trans-local, autonomous operation of software, even as they rightly emphasize nuanced research into the local and associational interactions of journalistic practice and technology. If we accept the partial autonomy of software objects such as web CMS from journalistic practices, then one possibility is that we do not regard software as objects of journalism, but instead as objects in relation to journalism. This would be somewhat pes- simistic, as it would imply journalism studies is a scholarly arena that views software as foreign objects to journalism proper. There is another possibility, however. This is to maintain that software objects are ‘of’ journalism. In this case, what would be required is a sense of ‘journalism’ as part-constituted by nonhuman or technical agency, that is, by forms of ‘secondary agency’ increasingly constituting the basic conditions of possibility for journalism. In this scenario, it would be understood that some objects of journalism (not necessarily software objects alone) are institutionalized at the point of design rather than through the performance of organizational hierarchies or everyday routines (cf. Kallinikos et al., 2013b). This opens up interesting, and certainly not straightforward, questions about whether, and in what sort of conditions, (some) journalists might learn to write code, or collaborate with software programmers (see Aitamurto and Lewis, 2013; Lewis and Usher, 2013). In summary, I have asserted that software objects do, to a degree, determine the circumstances of journalistic practices – and increasingly so. This has presented ‘digital’ journalism as not only broader than online news, but also broader than recent examples of ‘robot journalism’ whereby algorithms are being used to automatically produce certain forms of news content (e.g. see Clerwall, 2014). I have sought to point to the longer term, and perhaps more ordinary, ways in which software forms conditions of possibility for journalistic practice. While I maintain that empirical accounts of how such software objects matter for journalism should remain strongly situated and ethnographic, I have argued that it is conceptually inadequate to reduce software to such localized settings. It is worth ending with a note on the political implications of this view. The point made here is emphatically not to prioritize a ‘hidden’ or nefarious politics operating beyond human practice or consciousness. Rather, what is needed is a better account of the conditions of possibility through which the political communication embodied by journalism practices is experienced, performed and ordered.

Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

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Notes 1. The names used when referring to Toronto Star and Torstar staff in this article are pseudonyms. 2. Such attention to objects themselves, independent of human involvements, leads toward the more controversial terrain of object-oriented philosophies, one strand of which (e.g. Bogost, 2012; Harman, 2011) seeks to radically extend Heidegger’s tool-analysis beyond human experience to the phenomenology of objects or ‘things’ (for discussions vis-a-vis software studies, see Berry, 2011; Caplan, 2013). There is insufficient space here to explore this emergent intellectual field, but such approaches potentially mark a dramatic shift from investigations (including that of this article) which begin and end their investigation of software objects from the perspective of human social life. 3. At least, that is, until March 2013, when the Toronto Star outsourced its page production entirely.

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Hayles NK (2012) How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Helle-Valle J and Slettemeås D (2008) ICTs, domestication and language-games: A Wittgensteinian approach to media uses. New Media & Society 10(1): 45–66. Hemmingway E (2008) Into the Newsroom: Exploring the Digital Production of Regional Television News. Oxford: Routledge. Kallinikos J, Aaltonen A and Marton A (2013a) The ambivalent ontology of digital artifacts. MIS Quarterly 37(2): 357–370. Kallinikos J, Hasselbladh H and Marton A (2013b) Governing social practice: Technology and institutional change. Theory and Society 42(4): 395–421. Kitchin R and Dodge M (2011) Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Lasorsa DL, Lewis SC and Holton AE (2012) Normalizing Twitter: Journalism practice in an emerging communication space. Journalism Studies 13(1): 19–36. Lee AM, Lewis SC and Powers M (2014) Audience clicks and news placement: A study of time- lagged influence in online journalism. Communication Research 41(4): 505–530. Lewis SC and Usher N (2013) Open source and journalism: Toward new frameworks for imagining news innovation. Media, Culture & Society 35(5): 602–619. MacGregor P (2007) Tracking the online audience. Journalism Studies 8(2): 280–298. Mackenzie A (2006) Cutting Code: Software and Sociality. New York: Peter Lang. Manovich L (2001) The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Markham T (2011) The political phenomenology of war reporting. Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism 12(5): 567–585. Mitchelstein E and Boczkowski PJ (2009) Between tradition and change: A review of recent research on online news production. Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism 10(5): 562–586. Paterson CA and Domingo D (eds) (2008) Making Online News: The Ethnography of New Media Production. New York: Peter Lang. Plesner U (2009) An actor-network perspective on changing work practices: Communication technologies as actants in newswork. Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism 10(5): 604–626. Pollock N and Williams R (2009) Software and Organisations: The Biography of the Enterprise- Wide System or How SAP Conquered the World. London: Routledge. Rodgers S (2013) Circulating cities of difference: Assembling geographical imaginations of Toronto’s diversity in the newsroom. JOMEC Journal 1(3). Available at: http://www.cardiff. ac.uk/jomec/jomecjournal/3-june2013/Rodgers_Cities.pdf Rodgers S (2014) The architectures of media power: Editing, the newsroom, and urban public space. Space and Culture 17(1): 69–84. Schatzki TR (2002) The Site of the Social: A Philosophical Account of the Constitution of Social Life and Change. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Singer JB (2005) The political j-blogger: ‘Normalizing’ a new media form to fit old norms and practices. Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism 6(2): 173–198. Star SL (1999) The ethnography of infrastructure. American Behavioral Scientist 43(3): 377–391. Steensen S (2009) What’s stopping them? Towards a grounded theory of innovation in online journalism. Journalism Studies 10(6): 821–836. Thrift N and French S (2002) The automatic production of space. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 27(3): 309–335. Thurman N (2008) Forums for citizen journalists? Adoption of user generated content initiatives by online news media. New Media & Society 10(1): 139–157. Weiss AS and Domingo D (2010) Innovation processes in online newsrooms as actor-networks and communities of practice. New Media & Society 12(7): 1156–1171.

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Author biography Scott Rodgers is a Lecturer in Media Theory at Birkbeck, University of London. His research in the area of journalism studies is largely focused on the urban spatialities of journalistic practices, technologies and organizations.

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Article

Journalism 2015, Vol. 16(1) 27–43 News programs: Designing © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: MSNBC.com’s online sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1464884914545730 interfaces jou.sagepub.com

Joshua A Braun Quinnipiac University, USA

Abstract In this essay, I use Law’s framework of heterogeneous engineering in tandem with insights from other sociologists of systems and scholarship on organizations, as a springboard to examine a number of digital artifacts assembled by the MSNBC Digital Network over the period 2007 through 2010 and to explore the manner in which a wide variety of values, interests, and concerns became ‘invested and contested’ in their design. Specifically, this article, the result of 5 weeks of interviewing and field observation at MSNBC.com, MSNBC TV, and National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) News’ various online offices, explores the backstories of two seemingly mundane interfaces used by NBC News’ Web properties during that period, both of which are revealed to be particularly dynamic, heterogeneous, contingent, and consequential.

Keywords Heterarchy, heterogeneous engineering, interface design, MSNBC, Newsvine, television news

In this essay, I use Law’s (1987, 2002) framework of heterogeneous engineering in tandem with insights from other sociologists of systems and scholarship on organizations, as a springboard to examine a number of digital artifacts assembled by the MSNBC Digital Network over the period 2007 through 2010 and to explore the manner in which a wide variety of values, interests, and concerns became ‘invested and contested’ (Chamberlain, 2010) in their design. Specifically, this article, the result of 5 weeks of interviewing and field observation at MSNBC.com, MSNBC TV, and National Broadcasting Company (NBC) News’ various online offices, explores the

Corresponding author: Joshua A Braun, School of Communications, Quinnipiac University, 275 Mount Carmel Avenue, Hamden, CT 06518, USA. Email: [email protected]

DownloadedDownloaded from http://www.elearnica.ir from jou.sagepub.com at UNIVERSIDAD DE CONCEPCION on December 27, 2014 28 Journalism 16(1) backstories of two seemingly mundane interfaces used by NBC News’ Web properties during that period, both of which are revealed to be particularly dynamic, heterogeneous, contingent, and consequential. The first case involves MSNBC.com’s comment thread technology, derived from software originally built to curate comments on Newsvine.com, a social news site akin to Digg or reddit that was launched in 2005 and purchased by the MSNBC Digital Network in 2007. The manner in which the system surfaced ‘valuable’ contributions, identified ‘offensive’ ones, and the algorithmic processes by which value and offense were evaluated were developed and fine-tuned within the social and technological context of the original Newsvine site. When these same tools were airdropped into MSNBC. com, MSNBC TV, and NBC News properties, many of the assumptions behind them ceased to operate, generating unexpected effects and eventually resulting in a dramatic redesign of the Newsvine software that impacted both NBC News/MSNBC-branded properties and the original Newsvine social network. The second case is that of MSNBC.com story pages, the ‘front end’ visible to users of a dramatic redesign of MSNBC.com’s underlying software aimed at changing the way the company managed the technological infrastructure of its existing online brands and launched new ones. This infrastructure and the strategy behind it have largely been jet- tisoned in the wake of changes to the corporate ownership of MSNBC and NBC News’ online presence, but nonetheless represent an interesting snapshot of the online company’s erstwhile approach to distributing content online – as well as a common modus operandi of media organizations attempting to build platforms capable of leveraging numerous markets simultaneously.

Media technologies and evolving organizations As Pinch and Bijker (1984), Neff and Stark (2004), Kellogg et al. (2006), Chamberlain (2010), Nissenbaum (2011), and Anderson (2013) have noted, we can often see the improvisational nature of organizational activities, and the various interests, values, and assumptions they must accommodate, etched into the design of the technical artifacts they use and produce. This is, perhaps, especially true of media organizations, whose work is everywhere influenced – mediated – by information technologies. And indeed, there has been a good deal of scholarship on the role and production of technical artifacts within contemporary and emerging organizational forms, variously referred to as ‘postmodern’ (Hughes, 1998), ‘heterarchic’ (Girard and Stark, 2002; Stark, 1999), ‘permanently beta’ (Neff and Stark, 2004), and ‘postbureaucratic’ (Kellogg et al., 2006), among other monikers. A common thread among these studies is that the increasingly tumultuous nature of the economic landscape surrounding media in general, and media technologies in particular, has led to novel organizational forms, wherein workers and teams are organized in ways that align with neither the dependent relationships characteristic of traditional organizational hierarchies, nor with the level of independence that once commonly accompanied notions of the free market. These new organizational structures, or ‘heter- archies’ (Stark, 1999), are characterized by the flattening of conventional hierarchies, the troubling of traditional organizational boundaries, and the rise of project-based

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at UNIVERSIDAD DE CONCEPCION on December 27, 2014 Braun 29 economies (Child and McGrath, 2001; Girard and Stark, 2002; Grabher, 2002; Kellogg et al., 2006; Neff and Stark, 2004; Stark, 1999). In many of these accounts, producers of online media are held up as prime examples of heterarchic firms, while digital information technologies are said to facilitate and sustain their attendant flat organizational forms, taking on the role of awareness systems that allow teams inside and outside the organization to simultaneously monitor one another’s activity and react in real time (Boczkowski, 2010; Kellogg et al., 2006). Moreover, the concurrent use of these technologies by project teams, clients, and end users with distinct and at times disparate interests has led organizational scholars to lean on language and concepts from the history and sociology of sociotechnical systems, such as ‘boundary objects’ and ‘trading zones’ that deal with the complex interplay of artifacts and social practices (Galison, 1997; Girard and Stark, 2002; Kellogg et al., 2006; Star and Griesemer, 1989). As all these authors point out, fast-changing technological landscapes may generate solutions to organizational problems and permit new forms of organizing, but they also pepper media firms with pressures and uncertainties. All of this raises rich questions about the influence, or ‘material agency’ of technical artifacts in complex social systems, of which news organizations are just one example. Indeed, as the very term, ‘heterarchy’ indicates, much of the challenge of studying new organizational forms lies in accounting for their heterogeneity – the ‘increasingly dense and differentiated layering of people, activities, and things’, within and across contemporary organizations, ‘each operating within a limited sphere of knowing and acting that includes variously crude or sophisticated conceptualizations of the others’ (Suchman quoted in Neff and Stark, 2004: 181).

Heterogeneity and material agency in sociotechnical systems In Ron Howard’s film, Apollo 13, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) engineers at mission control are charged with figuring out a way to repair the imperiled astronauts’ life support system using only objects available aboard the spacecraft. More specifically, they famously need to fit a square peg into a round hole to connect two pieces of equipment that otherwise would not work together. Each one of the available items aboard the spacecraft, with which the engineers intend to conduct the repair, is what you might call recalcitrant (Burke, 1965), helping to solve one problem, but often creating another, which has to be solved by adding yet another item, which in turn creates another issue, and so on. Burke (1965) paints working with recalcitrant objects like these as a dialogical process, whereby the world pushes back on our raw intentions, forcing us to iteratively temper them into a viable strategy (p. 258). As he puts it, ‘the recalcitrance of your material discovered en route may eventually compel you to revise’ your plans. Pickering (1995) later encapsulated this notion of continual reappraisal in his memorable turn of phrase, the ‘dance of human and material agency’ (p. 251). More than the simple notion of ‘solving one problem while creating another’, recalcitrance, in other words, is a way of looking at agency, material and otherwise – the stubborn unwillingness of parts to bend to fit the need at hand. It is the idea that things never entirely give up their shape. In the film, the end result is an unholy-looking

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at UNIVERSIDAD DE CONCEPCION on December 27, 2014 30 Journalism 16(1) assemblage of bungee cords, duct tape, socks, and plastic bags – resources that are individually troublesome, but together solve more problems than they create. On a larger scale, Law (1987) called this process of fitting together recalcitrant actors into a working assemblage heterogeneous engineering. But, in his view, to focus strictly on the gadgetry involved in such enterprises is inevitably misleading. People and corporations are regularly in the position of having to engineer solutions to their problems with recalcitrant tools, but when the introduction of a gadget to the emerging solution creates a new problem, it is frequently patched not with another gadget, but with a lawyer, a merger, a marketing campaign, an employee training program, a new pricing scheme, and so on (Hughes, 1987, 1998; Law, 1987). Like technological resources, these bits and pieces are also recalcitrant and the problems they create may be solved with another gadget or another lawyer, and so on. This is the ‘heterogeneous’ aspect of heterogeneous engineering – technology is only one sort of tool amid the various legal, social, scientific, and economic implements that get lashed together into a working system like, say, a media organization or an online distribution strategy for TV news. That the result looks complicated when we open it up to examine it is no surprise – there are no solutions in the world, save for those full of socks and duct tape. All of these observations and theoretical frames raise an interesting proposition: if the improvisational nature of system-building activities – and the various interests, values, and assumptions they must accommodate – are indeed etched into the design of technical artifacts, might we use these tools and interfaces to examine and tell the story of contemporary media organizations? That is the task to which I turn in the remainder of this article.

Cases and methods The cases in this article grew out of a larger research project on online publishing and distribution of TV news. MSNBC.com is a particularly rich case for exploring trends discussed above: as a hybrid company built specifically to link TV and the Internet, its struggles – over how to innovate with new forms of distribution and online participation while also maintaining its standing as a traditional medium – are emblematic of many of the challenges of legacy news media organizations more broadly as they have moved online. Moreover, MSNBC.com was arguably a particularly successful negotiator of these challenges. Even amid controversial restructuring and changes in corporate ownership, by 2005 the New York Times had dubbed it ‘the most-used news site on the Internet’ (Carter, 2005). In subsequent years – up until its acquisition by Comcast – it consistently remained among the top three most trafficked news outlets in the United States, alongside CNN.com and Yahoo! News (Stelter, 2010). The particular artifacts I discuss were chosen because they allow us to pry at the various trends discussed above in interesting ways. In particular, they highlight the role of technical artifacts in negotiating and sustaining heterarchic organizational forms. The first case, Newsvine, is an illustrative example of how technical and organizational change occurs within a postbureaucratic media organization as subsidiaries and project teams pursue their own provincial objectives by way of heterogeneous engineering.

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The second case, concerning MSNBC.com’s story page redesign, illustrates a firm’s technologically mediated response to the heterogeneous challenges presented by this mode of organizing. The data for these case studies were obtained through a combined 5 weeks interviewing and field observation at MSNBC, the bulk of which was conducted in 2010 at the East Coast offices of MSNBC, NBC News, and MSNBC.com, as well as the Newsvine headquarters in Seattle, just prior to the acquisition of MSNBC and NBC News by Comcast. Over the course of the larger project, which spans 2009 to the present, I have conducted 50 semi-structured interviews with employees of MSNBC, NBC News, and MSNBC.com, along with their partners and competitors. My recounting of these cases is based on qualitative analysis of transcripts from these interviews, my descriptive field notes from 2010, and commentary appearing in press releases and trade publications.

Nice threads: Civil discourse and the design of commenting tools Newsvine’s original design The online startup Newsvine was founded amid a span of heavy experimentation with social news among technology startups. Following the notable success of several general interest and niche news aggregation sites at the turn of the millennium, including Google News, Yahoo! News, Slashdot, and Topix, news provision became a major area of online investment and innovation in the mid-2000s. In addition to Newsvine, the period between late 2004 and early 2006 saw the emergence of a host of popular and/or critically acclaimed sites including Digg, reddit, Memeorandum, The Huffington Post, and Findory. When Newsvine incorporated in 2005, with a little over US$1 million in backing from a Seattle-based venture capital firm, the startup consisted of five staffers. The group’s broad ideas for a business were eventually crystallized into a concept for a site where citizen journalism published by users would be aggregated and discussed alongside professional news content. Users would be able to rate the quality of articles, and their votes, when tallied, would determine the placement of stories on the site’s cover and section fronts. The result would be a constantly evolving news site on which the prominence of articles was gauged by quality, rather than source, leading to heightened exposure for the site’s ‘citizen journalists’ – far beyond what they would generally be able to obtain by publishing one-off stories independently. The Newsvine founders were sensitive to the complex array of factors that go into making a working social media site. They realized the social norms that grew up on their site would play a major role in dictating the quality of its content and, consequently, the company’s ability to monetize it. Maintaining a reasonably high standard of content on the site would be necessary, both to attract advertisers, investors, corporate partners, and potentially acquisition offers, as well as to ensure that Newsvine’s content could be managed and moderated by a small staff that would scale much more slowly than the site’s user base. The team thus set about marshalling a heterogeneous set of tools in an attempt to carefully engineer not just the software for the site itself, but the community that would use it.

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Among the strategies they employed were technical features, including the site’s voting mechanisms and an abuse-reporting feature that would allow the user base to be enlisted in reporting spam and offensive content. They also created a sophisticated karma system called ‘Vineacity’ that, like similar systems on other sites, totaled the amount of positive feedback a user’s stories and comments had received, but – unlike most of these other systems – also programmatically enumerated other types of achievement that the Newsvine staff saw as desirable, such as courtesy to others and connectedness within the community. These technical features helped to incentivize pro-social behavior and to minimize less helpful contributions on the site. And the developers engaged in other, more directly social forms of engineering as well. For example, in the early phases of the site, Newsvine developers selected as alpha and beta testers friends and acquaintances they thought would be positive influences on the community as it grew. The developers also took care early on to open the site up to the public incrementally, so as to prevent positive community norms cultivated in and by the existing community from being drowned out by a sudden influx of new users. In other words, new users were initially added only at the rate at which they could be acculturated by the existing user base, a socialization process underwritten by the technical mechanism of giving new users limited numbers of registration invitations to extend to friends. These technical and social strategies were also paired with commercial incentives for creating good content and inviting high-quality contributors to the site. Specifically, Newsvine instituted a revenue-sharing program that awarded users who kept popular blogs on the site a share of the revenue from the display advertising appearing on their stories and user pages. And if an existing member of the community invited popular users to the site, she would receive a cut of the ad revenue from her invitees’ content as well. In collaboration with the user base, the staff also developed a set of five brief, prominently displayed, and easily citable policies called the ‘Code of Honor’, akin to Wikipedia’s ‘pillars’ in that they served as a sort of legal– philosophical document for the site – aspirational moderation guidelines frequently referenced both by Newsvine’s staff moderator and users when discussing acceptable behavior or reporting abuse. What I have mentioned here are, by necessity, only a few of the numerous technical, social, commercial, and policy-oriented strategies put forward by Newsvine in an attempt to grow a user base that would produce consistently high-quality content and be manageable by a small staff of one or two moderators. The heterogeneous combination of strategies worked well, or at least yielded some notable successes. Thanks to ardent self-policing by the user base (and other interventions not discussed here), the site’s rapidly scaling community could be moderated by one person who could leave each weekend without the domain devolving into chaos. The quality of its discussions led to the site being selected by the New York Times as one of the first three social networks for which the paper’s website added share buttons. Newsvine also earned the Time magazine’s award for ‘Top News Site of 2006’, among other accolades, and the startup received multiple acquisition offers over the subsequent year. But nowhere is the intimate and constant interpermeability of technology and its heterogeneous context more apparent than when that context shifts abruptly, which is precisely what happened when the Newsvine startup was acquired.

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Social • Selection of friends and “friends of friends” as alpha and beta testers. • Incremental opening of the site to new users at a rate that allowed them to be socialized by the existing user base. • Human moderators responding individually to abuse reports and user missteps. • Entreaties from founders to the community to help socialize new members. • Inclusion among the “Vineacity” karma awards of editorial prizes given by the site’s proprietors for exemplary user contributions. Technical • Automated voting mechanism for determining prominence of user contributions. • Automated abuse reporting mechanism. • “Vineacity” karma system that awards users for pro-social achievements. • Artificially limited numbers or registration invitations during beta testing. • Comment collapsing algorithm for automatically hiding user contributions repeatedly flagged as offensive. • Graphical icon automatically applied to new users’ contributions to identify them to the community. Commercial • Revenue sharing program that gave users a cut of the ad revenue on popular columns. • Inclusion in the revenue-sharing model of financial incentives for inviting productive users to the community. • Deals with professional news publications to drive traffic to the site. • Sought acquisition to pay back investors and bankroll continued expansion of the social media site. Policy- • The “Code of Honor,” a brief and highly readable set of moderation Oriented guidelines promoted to and adopted by the user community.

Figure 1. A selection of the heterogeneous tools employed by Newsvine in the service of its goal of creating a productive and commercially viable social news site. Note that nearly every element put in place was challenged in some way by (or served as a response to) the company’s acquisition by MSNBC.com.

Newsvine becomes an MSNBC.com property In 2007, Newsvine was purchased by MSNBC.com, a joint venture between Microsoft and NBC Universal that, among other things, was the primary website for NBC News and MSNBC TV. Newsvine became one of, and eventually the primary, system for user commentary on MSNBC.com, as well as one of the main content management systems in use by NBC journalists. This transition was ultimately a fruitful one, but in the short term it wrought numerous complications that turn out to be instructive for the study of sociotechnical systems and how they play within and across organizational boundaries (Figure 1). Newsvine, upon its acquisition, became the primary discussion tool for MSNBC.com stories, which received tens of millions of visitors every month. As a result, Newsvine itself also began receiving lots and lots of new users, who were not ‘friends of mine and friends of theirs’ as then-Newsvine CEO Mike Davidson referred to the site’s original

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at UNIVERSIDAD DE CONCEPCION on December 27, 2014 34 Journalism 16(1) self-selecting community. Many of these new users streaming in from MSNBC.com had never heard of Newsvine or the Code of Honor, they did not understand ‘Vineacity’. ‘The people that come over to Newsvine in that way [from MSNBC.com ‘Discuss’ links] are not familiar with the ethos of Newsvine’, noted Davidson.

They feel like they are about to leave a comment on a major media site. Sometimes there are bad behaviors that go along with that. If you’re reading some sort of article – or watching some sort of video – by a pundit on MSNBC … [and] you want to leave a comment about it, flaming what you just saw, you’re not necessarily aware that that’s not really acceptable behavior on Newsvine.

And as one might expect, for a technological interface built around a carefully cultivated and largely self-policing user base, this began to have repercussions. The Newsvine Blog entry from this time in early 2008 reads, in part,

[The influx of new users] is a good thing, of course … but it’s [also] potentially a bad thing because as we all know, when new users come en masse to a Newsvine thread, they aren’t always aware of how we do things around here. We were all new at one time. Please welcome in our new visitors as you would a new guest to your own cocktail party, with diplomacy and patience. We hope that the Newsvine community puts its best foot forward when receiving new participants into the collective discussion.

The post listed off several of Newsvine’s initial technical responses to this problem, including the addition of a special label to new users’ comments meant to flag for the existing community which users should be given helpful advice and/or a wide berth. The post, and particularly the excerpt above, is interesting in the manner in which it lays out a heterogeneous solution to the problems incurred by integration with MSNBC.com. Technological fixes were being delivered, yes, but the post is also an entreaty to experienced Newsvine users to help socialize the unwashed masses from MSNBC.com, to make them amenable to the site’s system of moderation. And interestingly, a technical fix – the special label for comments by newly registered users – was added to the interface and used in combination to identify for the community individuals in need of social engineering. This is yet another example of how the Newsvine staff saw design and social practice as mutually supporting and intimately intertwined. There were those in Newsvine’s core user base who answered the developer blog’s clarion call to help draw MSNBC.com users into the Newsvine community and acquaint them with the site’s norms. However, as Davidson noted above, many of the people coming in from MSNBC.com were apt to view the Newsvine page they landed on as a normal comment thread on a mainstream news site, responding to – or worse, flaming – the single story and leaving, never to return, opting out of Newsvine’s reputation economy and normative structure entirely. Although the growth of online communities frequently leads to escalating ‘conflict and coordination costs’ (Kittur et al., 2007), and challenges to established norms – including flames – can at times lead to better articulations of a community’s existing values (Franco et al., 1995), what was happening at Newsvine was the introduction of a ceaseless, directed flow of users who not only did not share the

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at UNIVERSIDAD DE CONCEPCION on December 27, 2014 Braun 35 community’s norms, but mistook it for something else entirely. Newsvine developer Josh Yockey noted,

At first the Newsvine users tried to interact with them as if they were part of the Newsvine community. So they’d reply to their comments and teach them about the Code of Honor if they looked like they were violating it. And I think eventually most of them just stopped. Because they realized these people weren’t coming back. … I think a lot of the Newsvine people just realized that it wasn’t worth going into these ten thousand comment-long threads and thoughtfully replying to each one of them. ‘Excuse me, you should educate yourself on the Code of Honor’. You know, they just got out.

By ‘got out’, Yockey did not mean here that the existing user base left the site. Rather, in his account they remained on Newsvine, but began avoiding the comment threads for MSNBC.com stories like an unsavory neighborhood. Meanwhile, although Newsvine’s full-time human moderator was still on duty, ready to respond to bad behavior in these threads, much of his job was dependent on the ability of the community to accurately locate and report abusive comments among the thousands of user contributions that poured in daily. Unfortunately, the community that understood and abided by the norms on which the moderation software was predicated was increasingly avoiding MSNBC. com discussion threads altogether. This is not to say that no abuse reports were being filed on MSNBC.com threads. The individuals filing them, however, were not necessarily the ones familiar with the site’s original normative structure. In addition to adding noise to the queue of Newsvine’s human moderator, these abuse reports would also trip up the site’s automated moderation mechanisms. On a site like Newsvine, when enough users report a story or a comment as abuse, it is automatically ‘collapsed’ by the system, meaning that the text of the comment, while not removed altogether, is hidden by default (users who wish to read a collapsed comment can click its heading to reveal the text). It is worth noting that any reasonably effective comment collapsing algorithm1 is itself a heterogeneous product. When debates get heated, some comments may simultaneously be voted up by some users and reported as abusive by others; to work effectively, a collapsing script has to operate on a sliding scale so that as an article draws more attention and registers more ratings in aggregate, it also takes more negative votes to bring down a comment. Common sense tells us that five abuse reports on a comment that has only been rated eight times should probably be collapsed. But how about a comment with a thousand total ratings that has been flagged five times? Creating a collapsing algorithm that intelligently weighs the balance of votes for and against a comment is a tricky challenge, simultaneously technical and social. By analogy, Law (2002), in examining engineering equations used in aircraft design, underscored the manner in which mathematical expressions that on their face purported to simply explain the physics of lift, wing contouring, and airspeed were ultimately as much or more about the comfort and safety of crews and pilots, as well as the commercial and political conditions under which aircraft were designed. Bruno Latour (1990) refers to this process, through which the messy and diverse world of experience is reduced to an equation, an engineering diagram, an algorithm, as

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at UNIVERSIDAD DE CONCEPCION on December 27, 2014 36 Journalism 16(1) deflation. While Newsvine comment threads are far removed from the life and death world of experimental aviation, we can similarly understand moderation algorithms as concealing a great deal of hard-won experience, and containing within them a set of working assumptions about what we tend to think of as fundamentally social problems: the extent to which controversy should be tolerated and/or valued in discourse, as well as the perceived nature and values of the community flagging and voting on those comments. They are thus heterogeneous technologies in the sense that their functioning is inex- tricably linked to interrelated technical, social, and policy concerns. Automated moderation systems at times seem deceptively simple, but thinking about them in this way reveals a surprising amount of complexity at work. The upshot of this observation, as it pertains to MSNBC.com comment threads, was that the algorithm designed to respond to complaints by users familiar with Newsvine’s site policies was often being used instead by visitors who, as one producer caricatured it, ‘are screaming at their TV and don’t realize there’s a human on the other end’. In this new context, many comments got collapsed not because they violated community norms, but simply because the ‘Report Abuse’ button became a weapon in the arsenal of angry one-off commenters. Vitriolic comments and abuse of community participation mechanisms plague many legacy news providers (Braun and Gillespie, 2011). MSNBC.com was not unique in this respect, though they had, perhaps, hoped to alleviate such problems by integrating their mainstream media site with an existing online community with a reputation for good behavior. Ironically, though, prior to the acquisition of Newsvine, many of MSNBC. com’s discussion tools had required that comments be vetted by Web producers prior to their publication,2 which had resulted in discussion threads that, to readers anyhow, appeared comparably civil, if somewhat sparsely populated. So, as MSNBC.com’s new Newsvine-powered discussion threads filled publicly with vitriol, an initial reaction of some MSNBC.com staffers I spoke with was that there was perhaps something wrong with Newsvine’s software, its moderation technology, or the culture of its users. What turns out to be interesting, then, is that the exact same technology – the same user interface and underlying algorithms – that worked so well for the original Newsvine site appeared to break when integrated with MSNBC.com content. And while the Newsvine comment platform on MSNBC.com continued to function flawlessly from a strictly technical perspective, it was indeed malfunctioning in a sense. It ceased to operate at an optimal level because it was, in fact, a sociotechnical system that had been stripped of the social, as opposed to the technical, components that allowed it to function correctly. As these issues became better understood, MSNBC.com and Newsvine stepped in to solve them in ways that could fill another article. MSNBC.com increased its staff moderation presence in discussion threads, doing more to quickly remove vitriolic comments, help commenters understand each section’s standards of discourse, and simply let users know by their participation that they were not yelling into thin air, but that publishers were reading their comments. Meanwhile, Newsvine began to redesign its software platform and the heterogeneous system of which it was a part to cope with a new user base. The company took the creation of generative communities from a massive mainstream media user base as its new challenge for innovation.

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The resulting platform is an interesting one: discussions on Newsvine.com now take place among small groups of users – while there are spaces for public discussion, generally speaking you must join one or more groups to comment. The intention is that users in these smaller groups will get to know one another in ways they never could in threads with thousands of comments, thus limiting the sorts of bad behavior that come with the relative anonymity of comment threads on large news sites. Moreover, while the actual workings behind the new ranking mechanism for Newsvine stories are somewhat opaque, the idea in 2010 was that the visibility of comments and posts on the site would in many cases be determined by the amount of positive feedback awarded the group, as opposed to the individual, allowing the algorithm, or potentially the administrators of the system, to feature groups whose discussions were determined by the community to be most interesting or whose discourse was most civil. ‘Newsvine 3.0’, as the revised system has been branded, was rolled out in beta on Newsvine.com and subsequently introduced as the primary commenting system of a revamped MSNBC cable site. Its most interesting con- versational groups may at some point be a featured commentary on the latter site and on NBCNews.com, the two successors to the original MSNBC.com. The integration of MSNBC.com and Newsvine thus has had dramatic impacts on the design of Newsvine.com, ultimately spurring a total redesign of the site. And as Newsvine’s software became integrated into the larger MSNBC.com website, replacing older blogging tools, community features, and content management functions, Newsvine’s evolution likewise had a major impact on MSNBC-branded and NBC News–branded properties as well. Ultimately, the acquisition of Newsvine by MSNBC. com transformed both sites in far-reaching ways, beyond the mere technical requirements of allowing their various software platforms to interoperate.

MSNBC.com’s flexible architectures The year 2010 saw an extensive redesign of MSNBC.com’s story pages, which were not only receiving an updated look, but also being built on top of a new software architecture. This architecture upgrade, which involved the introduction of a software system called SkyPad, was in part intended to help speed up the site’s years-long development cycles. Newsvine’s former director of technology, Josh Yockey said of MSNBC.com,

[Around 2005] they had a lot of problems with stability and the server just not being up. And so they [subsequently] made an organizational focus on ensuring that there was no chance that when you went to MSNBC.com there wasn’t a fast page showing you news. And to that monomaniacal goal they ended up sacrificing a lot of agility in their development. So they were very careful about rolling out features and very careful about developing them and very careful about testing everything through. The upshot of which is that everything was really stable, but if somebody went in and said, ‘Hey, we want to change our blog platform’, it would have been two and a half years to get something turned around.

To make development more flexible, and hopefully much faster, MSNBC.com added what they referred to as a ‘compositional layer’ to MSNBC.com’s publishing platform in the form of SkyPad. Former president Charles Tillinghast explained SkyPad as a virtual

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‘punchdown block’, after the old routing systems used with phone equipment. A punchdown block allowed its operator to plug a collection of wires into either end and make connections at will between any sender and any receiver. In the same way, where MSNBC.com and other sites in the MSNBC Digital Network – subsidiaries like Newsvine, BreakingNews, and EveryBlock – had once consisted of distinct Web interfaces connected to their own independent databases, SkyPad was intended to ultimately allow any site in the MSNBC Digital Network to access data from any other, and con- versely to allow the company to spin up databases for information not tied exclusively to any one site. ‘The whole point of all this is that you can replace the front end and back end components independently’, said Tillinghast:

So it’s not a monolithic system. These are all components. And that way you could, say, upgrade the editorial UI to keep it all fresh and webby, even though you don’t change anything on the back. Or you could add a new database on the back so that you could do more queries for stories or populate databases. For example, a long time ago we fed in the bridge repair data for the entire country so that after the Minneapolis bridge collapse, you can go and find out what the status of a bridge in your own neighborhood is. We were pulling that out of the database. Well, now that database could just be plugged right into SkyPad and it becomes really easy for an editor to query, to do a report like that without much effort.

SkyPad was thus intended to have several important effects. First, it would speed up development by increasing the modularity of the sites employing it. User interfaces and databases would become isolated components to be updated and swapped out like so many interchangeable parts, thus limiting the scope of the work that had to be done to refresh any one piece of the site. Second, it would increase the diversity of data sources developers and, ideally, editorial staff could draw from – rather than trying to fit some interesting new data set into a Procrustean database tied to a particular site’s content management system (CMS), a new database could be created for that content and ‘plugged in’ to SkyPad. Third, and finally, SkyPad would effectively serve as a massive application programming interface (API), allowing developers and designers to easily call up and flexibly present data from any source within the MSNBC Digital Network, which in turn would mean they could ideally assemble new page templates and whole new websites on the fly. One of the first products to come out of SkyPad was the 2010 MSNBC.com story page template, which allowed editors to mash up, arrange, and continually update any combination of text, video, photos, illustrations, user comments – and ultimately other media as well – from across the MSNBC Digital Network. An important advantage was that the page for any news story on the site could be continually updated over the course of a breaking news event to allow for the constant addition of new information in a wide variety of media formats. Being able to update a single story page with a broad variety of different media, which could be continually linked to and revisited at the same URL, was seen as a dramatic improvement over the previous CMS’s workflow, which would generally involve publishing text, videos, and story updates all as their own individual items on the site, or combining them only through inflexible templates that did not allow editors to place different media in ways that best told the story they intended.

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The ability to combine fresh news updates with older multimedia content on the same page also provided a solution to a common problem encountered by the websites of TV news organizations. Namely, while their flagship brands are often evening newscasts, news websites do most of their traffic during daytime hours (Boczkowski, 2010). Promoting clips from the previous evening’s broadcast – quite literally ‘yesterday’s news’ – on a news website can put it at a competitive disadvantage with other online news outlets, and as such TV news websites often have a tortured relationship with many of their cable and broadcast properties. TV producers want their content featured prominently online, while web editors often find it more competitive to tuck it away in favor of breaking stories. The flexible SkyPad story pages provided a creative technical compromise, allowing TV stories to be used as supplemental content on a page that could still be continually updated with the latest breaking news. The same trading zone-style compromise also made it possible to take advantage of moments of alignment between editorial staffs and products whose tenor and target audiences might be viewed as incompatible on a larger scale. For example, the op-ed style commentary of Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow might not generally have meshed well with the neutral-minded reporting espoused by editors of other portions of MSNBC. com (Stelter, 2010). But if one of these programs contained a traditional breaking news segment, it could still easily be slotted into the story page for that topic on a one-off basis, allowing editors and producers to take advantage of opportunities for cross- promotion whenever and wherever they arose, while allowing different teams within the larger organization to maintain their independent and often quite disparate editorial voices and brand strategies.

Generality in the service of specificity The development of the all-new SkyPad architecture proceeded apace with a similarly flexible and repurposable architecture called ‘M3’, which was focused on blogs and developed for MSNBC.com by its Newsvine subsidiary. The amount of effort put into developing both platforms was substantial, labor intensive, and – most interestingly – aimed at making them useful in a broad array of highly specific, even unforeseeable editorial circumstances. If the MSNBC Digital Network saw a brief window of opportunity to acquire or launch a new brand, it could now, in theory, spin up a corresponding site rapidly, whatever the unique editorial requirements. If the über-specific editorial need ever arose to mash up local exit polls with bridge repair data, that too would be possible in theory under the new system. This all dovetailed with MSNBC.com’s publicly espoused ‘one size does not fit all’ market strategy of creating editorial products to suit a broad variety of needs. In addition to serving the needs of a large heterarchic organization, full of distinct technical and editorial subcultures pursuing loosely coordinated goals in a rapidly changing technological environment, the new platforms were also aimed at helping MSNBC. com to grow beyond its existing audience. While the site had long done well among an undifferentiated audience of general news consumers, the year 2010 saw the launch of numerous branded sites and blogs on MSNBC.com and within the larger MSNBC Digital

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Network aimed at reaching specific target markets – moms, foodies, social media junk- ies, gamers, and so on. What’s interesting is that this proliferation of niche brands and their highly specific needs was underwritten by the construction of ever more generic and multi-purpose publishing tools, built to be easily re-branded, to accept a wide variety of content, and to allow for rapid repurposing and cross-posting of content across branded properties. This proliferation of targeted brands and editorial products, combined with increased architectural flexibility, was a strategy for aggregating as many niche audiences as possible via a single technical platform. It was, in effect, an attempt at mass reach without mass mediation. In other words, MSNBC.com’s architectural overhaul reflected a recognition not only of diverse motives within the company, but among users whose activities had become highly influential in a distribution environment increasingly moderated by social media. As former CEO Charles Tillinghast put it, the idea was that users who were part of niche communities related to the online company’s myriad interest-based columns and brands – astronomy blogs, hyperlocal news sites, and so on – would frequent these online locales as a means of locating content relevant to their own social networks and ‘share it out from there’ as a means of gaining social capital. And while, in the wake of recent changes to MSNBC.com’s corporate ownership, the 2010 story pages – along with SkyPad and aspects of M3 – have been phased out, they collectively represent a design and editorial strategy that is increasingly common across many online media companies from AOL, MSN, and Yahoo! to Gawker, Vox Media, and Cheezburger, Inc.

Discussion By tracking the changes to, and technical compromises ultimately embodied in, the design of everyday artifacts in use on a news site, I have argued we can tell a nuanced story about the organization itself. So what have we found? As evidenced in these cases, online publishing at a large media organization, where many different interests, companies, and editorial subcultures are both spread across large physical distances and lying under one figurative roof (Deuze, 2007; Girard and Stark, 2002; Kellogg et al., 2006) is a highly complex enterprise and a tremendous example of heterogeneous engineering, wherein resources must be lashed together creatively in ways that align the interests of many groups and actors, technical and social, that have their own provincial requirements and rarely bend perfectly to meet the need at hand. There has been no shortage of scathing criticism on the part of journalism scholars and industry observers over the past decade to the effect that ‘legacy’ media organizations have failed to take strategic lessons from the success of social media startups. Insofar as the Newsvine acquisition was an early and earnest attempt on the part of one such firm to take social media seriously, it illustrates how startups and older media organizations each operate within unique networks of oft-recalcitrant resources and face unique challenges. The Newsvine case demonstrates that the heterogeneous infrastructure and resources of a startup cannot simply be plugged into a legacy news organization or vice versa.

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Rather, legacy media are often caught in the teeth of the shifting tectonic plates described by organizational scholars: a transition on the part of firms from operating largely via top–down hierarchies optimized for the production of scarce commodities to new and emerging organizational structures often centered around the creation of infor- mational goods. On the one hand, legacy news media are purveyors of just the sort of goods around which new organizational practices frequently pivot. On the other, the bureaucratic and economic structures from which they sprang – and which, in many cases, allow them to continue to exist – have traditionally been very much about the production of scarce commodities along the lines of newspapers, bound magazines, and discrete newscasts. It is not surprising, then, that MSNBC.com and many other legacy news firms have developed hybrid organizational forms that can be classified neither as hierarchies nor as collections of free agents. They are heterogeneous structures, or – to wit – prime examples of heterarchy (Stark, 1999). And rather than having a homogenizing effect on organizational cultures, vertical integration and corporate partnerships tend to make things more complex, populating news organizations with diverse organizational subcultures, each with their own heterogeneous strategies and assemblages of tools. In scholarship on sociotechnical systems, many (though not all) case studies have centered around projects wrought by more traditional organizational forms examining systems from a more or less top–down perspective. While systems scholars, keenly aware of the nuances of the sociology of knowledge, have readily acknowledged that the appearance of a system largely depends on where, and from whose point of view, one begins to trace out the networks of relationships involved in it (e.g. Latour, 2005; Star and Griesemer, 1989) in a ‘postmodern’ or ‘heterarchic’ environment, this observation becomes far more than a truism or methodological caveat. It is, rather, the key to understanding contemporary media systems full of agents with distinct goals, acting and react- ing to one another simultaneously. For MSNBC.com executives, for example, the acquisition of Newsvine was a way to add a social media offering to its portfolio, so as to leverage an emerging and highly engaged portion of the news market. Simultaneously, from Newsvine’s perspective, MSNBC.com was a financier whose deep pockets could pay back investors and bankroll further development of their social media site. In other words, if MSNBC.com was an architect enrolling Newsvine in the sociotechnical system it was building, Newsvine was equal parts an architect in its own right, enrolling MSNBC.com as a resource in its own emerging network. The interaction of these interleaved systems and system builders, each a recalcitrant resource from the perspective of the other, altered both systems profoundly. But neither was a simple subordi- nate of the other. Trying to make sense of heterarchic news media organizations only works when we are willing to hold in abeyance our tendency to view large systems as singular – if contested – objects of inquiry. Rather, in tracing out the associations involved, we must admit we are dealing with multiple overlapping systems. These are promulgated simultaneously by different system builders within and across organizations, each of whom has defined in their mind’s eye a system that accords with their own unique goals and understandings, attempting to unfold their own provincial teleology by rearranging shared resources.

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When we view sociotechnical systems from the perspective of a single system builder, we risk telling aggrandizing tales in which system builders remake the world in their image, as formerly recalcitrant actors are domesticated and slotted into a top–down organizational chart. When we instead see actors as enrolled simultaneously in different systems, each strategizing and unfolding according their own provincial teleologies, we have what you might call a more ‘relativistic’ view of systems, in which what a system looks like depends heavily on vantage point – on the position from which the observer traces it out – and in which constructs like power and position are dynamic and not so easily tabulated.3 At MSNBC.com, this state of affairs became etched into the design of its technologies. The overhaul of story pages and their underlying architecture were, in effect, a material acknowledgment of the reality of relativistic systems. They were tools for a flattened hierarchy, designed to be as flexible as possible so as to meet the needs of many user and editorial groups, reconciling the requirements of on-air and online staff and the myriad desks and project teams within the larger organization.

Funding This research was funded by a dissertation grant from the Cornell Graduate School.

Notes 1. A software algorithm is a set of rules that determines how a program should respond to a given set of inputs – in this case, whether it should collapse a comment based on the running tally of positive votes and abuse reports. 2. For a discussion of gatekeeping practices as they pertain to comment threads, see Hermida and Thurman (2008). 3. Another way of saying this is that understanding sociotechnical systems, the way they are defined differently by different actors and the way they are reimagined to fit new realities and arrangements of resources, is about understanding narratives. It is no coincidence, for example, that Kenneth Burke, who offers up such a compelling description of the role of material agency in tempering the systems we imagine and build toward, was a literary theorist. If building a sociotechnical system is about working teleologically toward one’s preferred arrangement of resources, narrative has been similarly described as a means of ‘ordering the universe’ (Cooren, 2000; Greimas, 1987). For more on the connection between narrative and organization, see Weick (1995).

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Cooren F (2000) The Organizing Property of Communication. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Deuze M (2007) Media Work. Cambridge: Polity. Franco V, Piirto R, Hu HY, et al. (1995) Anatomy of a flame. IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 14: 12–21. Galison P (1997) Image and Logic. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago. Girard M and Stark D (2002) Distributing intelligence and organizing diversity in new media projects. Environment & Planning A 34: 1927–1949. Grabher G (2002) The project ecology of advertising. Regional Studies 36: 245–262. Greimas AJ (1987) On Meaning (trans. PJPFH Collins). London: Frances Pinter. Hermida A and Thurman N (2008) A clash of cultures. Journalism Practice 2: 343–356. Hughes TP (1987) The evolutions of large technological systems. In: Bijker WE, Hughes TP and Pinch TJ (eds) The Social Construction of Technological Systems. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, pp. 51–82. Hughes TP (1998) Rescuing Prometheus. New York: Pantheon Books. Kellogg KC, Orlikowski WJ and Yates J (2006) Life in the trading zone. Organization Science 17: 22–44. Kittur A, Suh B, Pendleton BA, et al. (2007) He says, she says: Conflict and coordination in Wikipedia. Paper presented at the annual ACM conference on human factors in computing systems, San Jose, CA, 28 April. Latour B (1990) Drawing things together. In: Lynch M and Woolgar S (eds) Representation in Scientific Practice. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, pp. 19–68. Latour B (2005) Reassembling the Social. London: Oxford University Press. Law J (1987) Technology and heterogeneous engineering. In: Bijker WE, Hughes TP and Pinch TJ (eds) The Social Construction of Technological Systems. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, pp. 111–134. Law J (2002) Aircraft Stories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Neff G and Stark D (2004) Permanently beta. In: Howard PN and Jones S (eds) Society Online. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, pp. 173–188. Nissenbaum H (2011) From preemption to circumvention. Berkeley Technology Law Journal 26: 1367–1386. Pickering A (1995) The Mangle of Practice. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago. Pinch TJ and Bijker WE (1984) The social construction of facts and artefacts. Social Studies of Science 14: 399–441. Star SL and Griesemer J (1989) Institutional ecology, ‘translations’ and boundary objects. Social Studies of Science 19: 387–420. Stark D (1999) Heterarchy. In: Clippinger JH (ed.) The Biology of Business. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, pp. 153–179. Stelter B (2010) Memo hints at name change for MSNBC.com. The New York Times, 6 October. Available at: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/06/memo-hints-at-name- change-for-msnbc-com/ Weick KE (1995) Sensemaking in Organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Author biography Joshua A Braun is Assistant Professor of Communications at Quinnipiac University. He is currently completing work on a book about online distribution of television news, forthcoming in 2015 from Yale University Press.

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Article

Journalism 2015, Vol. 16(1) 44–60 Horseshoes, stylebooks, © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: wheels, poles, and dummies: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1464884914545732 Objects of editing power in jou.sagepub.com 20th-century newsrooms

Susan Keith Rutgers University, USA

Abstract This essay examines five largely unsung artifacts of 20th-century newspaper journalism – the U-shaped copy desk, stylebooks, pica sticks, proportion wheels, and paper dummies – to tell a story about power shifts in US newsrooms. The essay also offers a new model of 20th-century newsroom eras, arguing that these objects of journalism mark what might be called the age of the copy desk, a time between the 1920s and 1970s when copy-desk editors exercised a quiet control over content. That power faded over the decades, symbolized by the disappearance of the distinctively shaped copy desk and the loss of relevance of most of the other tools. It was replaced, this essay argues, by eras of the writer from the 1970s into the 1980s and the designer from the late 1980s into the 21st century.

Keywords Copy desk, copy editor, designers, journalism, journalism history, newspaper, reporter power, reporters

Introduction This essay examines five rarely studied objects used in newspaper production in the 20th century – the horseshoe-shaped copy desk, the stylebook, the pica measuring stick, the photo proportion wheel, and the paper page dummy – to tell a story about power shifts in US newsrooms. The essay argues that these pieces of material culture – simple products

Corresponding author: Susan Keith, Department of Journalism and Media Studies, School of Communication and Information, Rutgers University, 4 Huntington St., New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA. Email: [email protected]

DownloadedDownloaded from http://www.elearnica.ir from jou.sagepub.com at UNIVERSIDAD DE CONCEPCION on December 27, 2014 Keith 45 of the fields of furniture making, book publishing, graphic design, photography, and printing – together symbolized in US newspaper journalism one historical stage in construction of how the news looked. From at least the 1920s to as late as about the 1970s, this essay maintains, copy editors (known as ‘sub-editors’ in Britain and some other parts of the world), working at U-shaped tables, used stylebooks, pica sticks, proportion wheels, and page dummies as tools of newsroom power, designating the relative importance of different events as presented in newspapers and exerting control over both the wording and appearance of news. These material artifacts, closely guarded in newsrooms – if an editor lost a pica stick, it could be difficult, at some newspapers, to obtain a replacement – also symbolized one type of ‘editor power’. That power faded over the decades, a casualty of several factors that gradually shifted newsroom clout from copy desks to reporters and section editors in the 1970s and 1980s and of the adoption, during the later 1980s, of a different system of objects for creating newspaper pages: pagination and desktop publishing software. Although stylebooks remained a part of newsrooms, the decline in use of pica poles, photo proportion wheels, and dummies heralded a shift to the ‘designer power’ of the 1990s, which has been displaced by the (many would argue too-slow) drive to digital in the 21st century. This essay draws on work by Barnhurst and Nerone (2001, 2003) but proposes a greater focus on frontline newsworkers. It also acknowledges the perspective of Latour (2005), who calls for researchers to reconsider the place of objects in social processes, seeing ‘any thing that does modify a state of affairs by making a difference’ as an actor (p. 71). Such copy-desk actors are particularly interesting to study in the second decade of the 21st century, as traditional editing practices are being disrupted, with many newsrooms dismantling their copy desks, centralizing copy-editing and design functions for several newspapers in one geographic location, and doing away with traditional copy editing for online stories entirely (Channick, 2011; Keith, 2009; Lypny, 2013; Myers, 2012). The essay proceeds in two parts. The first discusses objects of the copy desk and how they were or are used. The second discusses where the era of those objects fits into the history of US newspapering, proposing a rethinking of the usual ordering of 20th- century newsroom eras.

Objects of editing Horseshoes, stylebooks, pica sticks, proportion wheels, and dummies The most visible of the five objects of journalism examined in this essay was the U-shaped table, or ‘horseshoe’, around which copy editors sat, sometimes described as ‘the most notable feature of the classic newsroom’ (Nesvisky, 2008: 46). The middle of the U was occupied by the chief copy editor, whose position led to his being referred to as ‘the slot’, a term still used in many newsrooms to describe the supervisor of the copy desk. He (virtually all were men) handed paper copies of stories to copy editors sitting around the outside of the desk, who came, as a result, to be called ‘rim editors’ or ‘rim- mers’. When these rim editors finished editing the stories, they passed them back across the desk to the slot, who reviewed the copy editors’ work, made changes if necessary, and sent the edited stories to the composing room to be set into type (Brown, 2010).

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It is not clear when newspapers began to use the horseshoe configuration – which allowed editors ‘to see and interact with everyone else at very close range’ (Nesvisky, 2008: 46) – but journalists’ memoirs and biographies of journalists refer to U-shaped copy desks existing as early as the 1920s and 1930s (Berkow, 2007; Currell, 2009). At some newspapers, sports and other departments that produced specialized copy had their own, often smaller, U-shaped desks (Duscha, 2005; Wilson, 2006). Editors working at these desks employed – and encouraged reporters to use (Davis, 1992) – consistent rules of spelling, punctuation, word usage, and editorial style (appropriate abbreviations, capitalization, etc.) outlined in stylebooks. In the United States, the stylebooks used most often were those published by the Associated Press – available in something like its present form since 1953 (Moynihan, 2003) – or United Press International, though midsize and larger newspapers compiled their own primary or secondary stylebooks (Garst, 1943; Miles, 1995). Some of the copy editors used pica sticks, also known as ‘line gauges’, ‘printer’s rulers’, ‘pica poles’, and ‘pica rulers’. These flat measuring sticks typically are 12 inches long, though they are available in 6-, 18-, and 24-inch sizes. They are marked with both inches and picas, a unit equal to one-sixth of an inch that is used to measure the width of a block of text, and sometimes with other measures (Ryan and Conover, 2004; Williams, n.d.). Pica sticks can be made of plastic or wood, but the iconic version is stainless steel calibrated with black markings and capped by a rounded head that often contains a hole for hanging the tool. Proportion wheels consist of two flat circles of heavy paper or lightweight plastic, the smaller superimposed upon the larger, that are used to size photographs or illustrations. The circles, which are marked off in units of measure, are connected in the middle with a fastener so that they can turn independently. To use a proportion wheel, a copy editor would find a number on the inner circle that corresponded to the width of an original hard-copy photograph or illustration and turn that circle so that it lined up with a number on the outer circle that corresponded to the desired width of the image. A small window in the top circle would display a percentage by which the image had to be reduced or enlarged to obtain a photograph or illustration of the desired size (Gurney, 2010). Paper dummies were sheets of paper, divided into columns corresponding to the number of columns of type on a newspaper page, on which copy or design editors drew mock-ups of finished newspaper pages, placing stories, headlines, graphics/illustrations, photos, and photo captions. These ‘maps’ served as guides for printers using hot type or compositors working with pre-pagination versions of photomechanical typesetting (sometimes called ‘area composition’) to put together pages. Later, when design was fully computerized, dummies were often used by copy editors or designers as a way to visualize pages before beginning on-screen work. These five tools often were employed together in US newsrooms. A copy editor sitting at a horseshoe-shaped desk would edit a story, correcting errors and checking questions of style in the stylebook used in that newsroom. Next, the copy editor or a colleague designated to design pages would use the proportion wheel to determine the size of art elements and employ a pica stick as a straight edge while drawing on the paper dummy to indicate where stories, photos, headlines, and cutlines (photo captions) should be placed. The editor would label the dummy to designate which page it represented and

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at UNIVERSIDAD DE CONCEPCION on December 27, 2014 Keith 47 write information about the percentage to which photos should be reduced or enlarged on a paper tag attached to the images. In many newsrooms, photos and dummies were collected by clerks, rolled together and sent to the composing room by pneumatic tube (Bennett, 2009; Lamb, 2012).

The people who used the objects These tools were used by copy editors, often called the ‘last line of defense’ against errors in newspapers because they (or their supervisor) would be the last newsroom workers to see stories, headlines, and cutlines before they appeared in print (Vane, 1997). The job of copy editor seems to have developed as a separate newsroom position in the United States around the time of the Civil War. The position did not take on a specific name, ‘copyreader’, however, until the 1870s and did not develop into an entity separate from the city desk until the 1880s (Solomon, 1993). Over the decades, particularly after World War II, copy desks dealt with a series of changing technologies. They went from marking stories on paper and sending them to be set into lead type by Linotype operators,1 to dealing with wire stories that had been sent via teletypesetting (TTS) equipment directly to those linecasting machines (Wilson, 1953). Later, many copy editors worked with optical-character recognition readers (Compaine, 1980; Randall, 1979, 1986). Computer-based editing arrived in the 1970s and 1980s, eliminating the need for a horseshoe-shaped editing desk, as stories could be handed off by the slot electronically, in a variety of models (Russial, 2003; Walsh, n.d.). At some newspapers, however, U-shaped tables continued to be used, at least as furniture on which electronic screens were positioned, well into the 1980s (Himmel and Himmel, 2009; Rhomberg, 2012; Soderlind, 2006). Through most of these changes to the way text was processed at newspapers, the way routine visual decisions were made remained roughly the same as in the 1930s, when large dailies shifted responsibility of the look of the newspaper from printers to editors (Barnhurst, 1994). Copy editors – or, at some newspapers, specially designated copy-desk members called ‘makeup editors’ or ‘layout editors’ – designated how stories and images would be played on dummies that guided blue-collar production workers in the composing room. Copy-desk workers did not, certainly, always have free rein in these decisions. They worked, especially in designing front pages, under the guidance of the newspaper’s editor or managing editor. In addition, their work likely was influenced by design principles advocated by typographers such as Ben Sherbow (1921), who wrote several popular books and redesigned the New York Tribune in 1922. Copy editors with journalism degrees – and that was far from all of them between the 1930s and 1960s – would have received some instruction in layout if they took a course in copy editing, texts for which generally included a chapter such as ‘The Principles of Makeup’ (Brown, 1952). Later in the 20th century, copy editors with journalism degrees might even have had an entire course in newspaper design, such as those pioneered by Edmund Arnold, a newspaper- man-turned-typographer-turned-design guru, who taught at Syracuse University and Virginia Commonwealth University (Miller, 2007). Given, however, the speed of breaking news and the possibility of responding to developments by remaking pages in the multiple daily editions that metropolitan

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at UNIVERSIDAD DE CONCEPCION on December 27, 2014 48 Journalism 16(1) newspapers once produced (Barnhurst, 2011; Hobbs, 2010), copy editors and associated newsworkers could not help having an impact, at an occupational level, on how news was presented. It was they who wielded the tools of design. That fact, and the fact that copy editors and the copy-desk supervisor (known in different newsrooms by such titles as ‘the slot’, ‘the news editor’, and ‘the copy chief’) were the last to touch reporters’ copy, put the copy desk in a position of quiet power. In fact, one might even say that for several decades, there existed in US journalism a now largely unrecognized ‘age of the copy desk’ – signified by the relevance of U-shaped tables, stylebooks, pica poles, paper dummies, and proportion wheels.

Newsroom eras: A new approach In The Form of News (Barnhurst and Nerone, 2001) and a related article (Nerone and Barnhurst, 2003), Barnhurst and Nerone suggest that US newspapering can be read as having passed through several periods of style (visual characteristics), type (a newspaper’s mode of production, encompassing ‘its machinery, its business plan, and its division of labor’ (Nerone and Barnhurst, 2003: 436)), and ideals (roughly the societal idea of a newspaper’s purpose). They see the US colonial period as being the era of ‘the printer’s paper’, the 1820s–1880s as being a period of both ‘the editor’s paper’ and ‘the publisher’s paper’, and the 1880s ushering in the ‘industrial paper’ in an era of increased mechanization. In their timeline, the second decade of the 20th century, when profes- sionalizing impulses were being felt in many fields, including journalism, brought the era of the ‘professional paper’, which lasted until the 1950s (p. 436). The 1980s brought the beginning of the ‘corporate paper’, ‘more sophisticated at targeting specific readership segments and packaging them for advertisers’ and ‘less interested in mass readership and more interested in high income and highly motivated subscribers’ (p. 439). Each of those divisions is useful for understanding the broad sweep of newspaper history. This essay, however, aims to add to that timeline a layer of detail and an understanding of the shifting balance of power among frontline newsworkers, tied in part to the use of the objects of editing described here. It proposes that decades roughly analogous to Nerone and Barnhurst’s professional and corporate paper eras encompass ages of the copy editor, the reporter/writer, and the designer. Of course, periodization in history is always somewhat problematic. Although attempting to understand the past by seeing it as composed of different time periods can help us see major developments in context, the exercise is necessarily reductive, and it is rarely possible to say that one age ended cleanly at a precise point and that another imme- diately began. In addition, as Bentley (1996) wrote, identifying eras of history

depends on prior decisions about the issues and processes that are most important for the shaping of human societies. … Even within the framework of a single society, changes in perspective can call the coherence of conventionally recognized periods into question. (p. 749)

Furthermore, as Kaufmann (2010) wrote, place cannot be ignored: ‘Periodization relies on the historicist assumption that not everything is possible in all times, but it is also true that not everything is possible in all places’ (p. 3). So the eras discussed here should be understood with the following cautions:

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•• Eras may have sometimes overlapped, with the power of one type of newsroom worker rising before that of another had fully faded. •• Eras likely will have been expressed differently in different locales, with, for example, reporters being more influential from the mid-20th century onward in some newsrooms than in others. •• Individual counter-examples surely existed, such as the untouchable reporter or columnist who was able to avoid the constraints of even a strong copy desk.

These limitations do not, however, seem reason to shy away from offering an alternative reading of already existing periodization of US journalism history, one that provides a different perspective on the newsroom.

The era of the copy desk The idea that there might have been an era of the copy desk is far from the usual scholarly narrative. The copy desk has generally been portrayed, when it has been studied at all, as a place of problems, not power. There has been a persistent stereotype that copy desks were ‘where grizzled reporters went when they got too old to chase fire engines or police cars’ (Himmel and Himmel, 2009) or a work home of last resort for newsroom drunks (Pulford, 2005; Ramsey, 2008; Reed, 2009). Solomon (1989, 1993) has suggested that the importance of what came to be known as the copy-editing function declined after it no longer was performed by an assistant to the city editor. (For a description of the copy-editing function as part of the city desk, see Williams and Martin, 1911.) As the newsroom division of labor increased, he has written, the esteem in which copy editors were held fell. To describe the early 20th-century copy desk, Solomon (1993) drew on a memoir by former New York deskman Charles Stewart (1943), who referred to the copy editor as one who ‘seldom held his head high … [H]e had been called the old maid of the profession, he had been accused of murdering the creative talent of reporters’ (p. 44). More recently, copy editors have been conceptualized as a ‘special challenge’ (Willis, 1988: 154). Their generally evening work schedules remove them from day-to-day interaction with top editors. Their mandate to be pre-publication advocates for readers puts them in an adversarial position vis-a-vis reporters, sometimes giving rise to a perception that they are ‘trolls in the night, slashing’ (Dunlap, 2002: para. 7). Solomon (1994) argued that the introduction of the video display terminal (VDT), an early type of electronic screen, in the last quarter of the 20th century moved the copy editor away from being a wordsmith and into work that contained a large component of technological drudgery. Not surprisingly, then, copy editors were found to be more likely to be psycho- logically burned out than other newspaper journalists (Cook and Banks, 1993). Some have reported that they felt as though they were constrained from involvement in newsroom conversations and debates about ethics (Keith, 2005a) and were dissatisfied with their work (Zahler, 2007), including prospects for advancement (Keith, 2005b). These fairly contemporary findings, however, are only part of the picture of the copy desk in US newspaper history. Many former newsroom workers have remembered the copy desk as a commanding presence. It was the home of ‘important people who did the

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at UNIVERSIDAD DE CONCEPCION on December 27, 2014 50 Journalism 16(1) final editing on every story in the newspaper’ (Currell, 2009) at Toronto’s Evening Telegram in the 1920s. The copy desk shared with the city desk prime placement in front of reporters’ desks in 1948 at the Indianapolis Times (Wilson, 2006) and occupied a ‘highly visible perch’ at the ‘center of it all’ (Lamb, 2012: para. 3–4) in the mid-1970s at the Christian Science Monitor. The copy desk was ‘the brain, the nerve center’ (Parker, 1997: para. 2) of the Post-Journal of Jamestown, New York. Even Stewart (1943), whom Solomon (1993) cited as offering evidence of the sad lot of copy editors, had more to say about desk work than Solomon quoted. Stewart went on to write,

I knew copyreaders who could speak seven languages fluently, who could tell you the exact date of any significant event in history or how far the street numbers ran on Sixth Avenue, who could imitate a writer’s style more expertly than the writer himself could handle it … and who knew where to look for every fact that wasn’t at the pencil’s tip. I have suggested that a certain shyness may account for the fact that some of them chose the copydesk rather than the street. That was not all. Copyreaders were usually more in demand than reporters. Even though the technicalities might be easily learned, on the desk it was harder for a beginner to fake an experience which he lacked. Frequently good newspapermen got sidetracked to the copydesk because of their special talents. Just as frequently they chose the copydesk because of the satisfaction of being the last one to see a piece of copy before it went into the paper, of doing the final polishing, and of making full use of their stores of information. (pp. 44–45)

Similarly, Duscha (2005) recalled that a copy chief of the St Paul Dispatch and Pioneer Press in the 1930s was working on a doctorate, and Davis (1992) remembered that the Winston-Salem Journal & Sentinel copy desk was home in the early 1950s to ‘one of the first of many linguistic geniuses’ (p. 175) he would meet on copy desks. This image of copy editors as talented storehouses of knowledge complicates the usual narrative of the US newspaper copy desk. Also suggesting that it is counterproductive to see the copy desk as an afterthought in US journalism before 1980 is the fact that the desk was often home to, or at least associated with, the position of telegraph or wire editor. This person, and/or an assistant, evaluated news arriving by telegraph and, later, other electronic means from wire services and other sources outside the newspaper’s coverage area. The position was established enough by 1894 that it could be referred to without explanation in a humorous column in a publication for train engineers and firemen (An office drama, 1894). It continued to be relevant in US newsrooms, though under different names – such as ‘wire editor’, ‘news editor’, or ‘national-foreign editor’ – into the 21st century. In 1911, Williams and Martin noted that ‘although he often receives suggestions from the managing editor and his work is subject to the latter’s direction, the judging of news is left to the telegraph editor’ (p. 213). That decision-making power also was evident in White’s (1950) study of ‘Mr. Gates’, a wire editor at an Illinois newspaper shown to be making news selections based, in part, on his personal biases. Although later work (Whitney and Becker, 1982) raised questions about whether telegraph/wire editors were merely reproducing choices already made by wire services, replications of the White research in the 1960s (Snider, 1967) and 1990s (Bleske, 1991) suggested that wire editors contributed their own professional influence to newspaper content.

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Furthermore, as Nerone and Barnhurst (2003) note, the copy desk served as the vital link between the editorial and mechanical departments, acting as a funnel through which all text and images had to pass. Without reporters, one might have produced a newspaper filled with telegraph/wire copy. Without photographers or artists, one might have published a paper devoid of illustration. But without the copy desk and its special skills, one might not have been able to publish even a poor edition of the newspaper unless city editors and other section editors knew copy-desk procedures – including how to use pica poles, proportion wheels, and paper dummies – well enough to fill in. Between the 1930s and 1960s, having a strong copy desk became a mark of minimal competency for a metropolitan US daily newspaper. Publisher Alicia Patterson is said to have viewed Newsday, serving the New York City suburbs on Long Island, as not as strong as it could have been in 1954, despite winning a Pulitzer Prize, because its copy desk was ‘almost nonexistent … leading to amateurish style snafus’ (Harris, 2007: 239). That was certainly not the case during the 1950s and 1960s at The New York Times, where Theodore Bernstein – an assistant managing editor, Columbia Graduate School of Journalism professor, and author of several books on language – lay down rules for grammar, style, and usage. These rules, Talese (2007) wrote, ‘were memorized by deskmen throughout the newsroom, who were held accountable by Bernstein for the maintenance of his principles; thus the deskmen, in the interest of a more readable and grammatical newspaper, gained new and rather heady power’ (pp. 109–110).

The era of the reporter/writer The power of copy desks, however, did not last. Although it is not possible to point to a precise moment when the age of the copy editor ended in US newspapers – and certain objects from it, such as stylebooks, remain key newsroom tools in the 21st century – one place to think about the beginning of the age of the reporter/writer is with the intersection of the New Journalism, ‘reporter power’, and journalism review movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Although non-fiction writers had been using techniques of fiction since at least the 19th century (Hartsock, 2000; Sims, 2008), such work gained new prominence as ‘New Journalism’ in the 1960s in the writing of Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Gay Talese, Jimmy Breslin, Norman Mailer, and Hunter S Thompson. New Journalism tended to both highlight the writer and have a political edge. Sims writes, ‘It challenged the authority of Journalism’s empire of facts and the sanctity of Literature’s garden of imagination … [and] confronted both Journalism and Literature with the social habits and institutional structures that sustained them’ (p. 110). That political edge connects New Journalism with the reporter-power movement, which during the late 1960s and 1970s attacked the institutional structure of newsrooms, including the primacy of editors. The movement called for reporters to have a greater stake in newsroom decision-making and more freedom to pursue various types of stories in different ways (Diamond, 1970; Dorfman, 1974, 1978), including methods common to New Journalism. The reporter-power push was part of a broader US questioning of authority and the status quo reflected in the civil rights movement, anti-Vietnam war protests, the women’s movement, the American Indian movement, and, at the end of this

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at UNIVERSIDAD DE CONCEPCION on December 27, 2014 52 Journalism 16(1) period, the gay rights movement. Schudson (1981) has termed this ‘critical culture’. As he has written, ‘The rebellion of young reporters in the 1960s, then, was … one manifes- tation of a social and cultural movement. The movement affected younger journalists first and most profoundly, but this, in turn, influenced older and more powerful journalists’ (pp. 179–181). One of the most visible manifestations of the reporter-power movement grew out of police violence in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Reporters for the city’s four daily newspapers were dismayed when, after the national press covering the convention left town, local media outlets began to accept Mayor Richard J. Daley’s revisionist takes on the violence. A group of these journalists created Chicago Journalism Review (Macek, 2011), a publication designed to examine local media with a more critical edge than the then-7-year-old Columbia Journalism Review displayed (Ron Dorfman, interview with the author, 2012). The review inspired, by varying esti- mates, 25–40 local journalism reviews around the United States, including St Louis Journalism Review, Philadelphia Journalism Review, Buncombe: A Review of Baltimore Journalism, [MORE] in New York, and The Unsatisfied Man in Denver (Bertrand, 1978; Dennis, 2011; Keith, 2013; Klotzer and Block, 1993). James Boylan (1998), a former editor of Columbia Journalism Review, writes that these publications ‘usually attacked the residual power of publishers, the authority of editors, or the insufficient zeal of reporters in discomfiting politicians, business, and the military’ (p. 84). None of these three inter-connected movements, however, survived intact. New Journalism ‘died a long time ago’, Weingarten wrote in 2005. Likewise, Boylan (1998) noted that ‘“Reporter power” enjoyed a brief heyday and then expired’. Struggling with inadequate financing despite drawing thousands of subscribers, Chicago Journalism Review lasted only 7 years, and most other reporter-produced reviews, largely run by volunteers with full-time jobs, succumbed more quickly. (Four reviews associated with universities survive.) All three movements, however, helped bring reporters increased recognition and paved the way for other changes that helped to gradually shift the balance of power in US newspaper newsrooms. Among those changes was the growth of investigative reporting. In the 1970s, Bob Greene set up an investigative reporting team at Newsday that became a model for others around the country (Aucoin, 2007). Greene also organized The Arizona Project, a 1976 effort in which journalists from around the country spent 6 months in Phoenix carrying on the work of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles, who was killed in a 1976 car bombing, apparently by someone angered by his reporting on organized crime (Wendland, 1977). About the same time (1974–1976), Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were gaining national renown for their Watergate reporting, though some have suggested that the media’s role in the investigation has been overstated (Feldstein, 2004). Such projects cast ‘a new romantic aura over a profession whose entrepreneurial talents had lain largely dormant in the 1940s and 1950s’, Lambeth (1986: 116) notes. Meanwhile, several mid-career training and fellowship opportunities for journalists emerged, joining the Harvard Nieman Foundation fellowships, which started in 1938. What are now the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford University were begun in 1966 (Mission and History, n.d.: para. 2). In 1973, the National Endowment for

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at UNIVERSIDAD DE CONCEPCION on December 27, 2014 Keith 53 the Humanities Journalism Fellowship, now the Knight-Wallace Fellowship, was begun at the University of Michigan (Past fellows 1973–1974, n.d.). Although these fellowships were not limited to reporters, in reality most of the awards went to writers, further increasing their newsroom stature. Writers also were the target of many conferences at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a training center for working journalists established in 1975 as the Modern Media Institute by Nelson Poynter, publisher of the St Petersburg (Fla.) Times (A Brief History of the Poynter Institute, 2010). During the 1980s, especially, star writers began to more often be given the freedom to write long and spend months on projects (French, 2000). Although some newspapers had been known before this time as ‘a writer’s newspaper’, it became more common to use that term to refer to a newspaper that offered more leeway to those crafting stories (Cumming, 2010; Gaines, 2003; Kaniss, 1991; MacPherson, 2006). In short, as Underwood (1995) has written, ‘this was the heyday for reporters’ (p. 50).

The era of the designer The era of the reporter/writer had challenged the power of copy editors, but the next shift, from the latter 1980s to the early 21st century, constrained both writers and traditional copy-desk operations. In this era of the designer, some writers and reporters retained power, especially at newspapers known for investigative reporting or long- form work. In other newsrooms, however, reporters lost power because design was prioritized and story length and placement began to be more often determined by efforts to make the newspaper visually appealing. In addition, newsrooms embraced new objects of journalism that writers generally did not learn how to use: proprietary pagination systems (such as those created by Harris, Hastech, Atex and, later, CCI Europe) or desktop publishing software (such as QuarkXPress, launched in 1987, and Aldus PageMaker, launched in 1985, acquired by Adobe in 1994 and updated to InDesign in 1999) (Chagnon, 2002). The situation for copy editors was more ambiguous. Some larger metropolitan dailies moved design from the copy desk to separate design desks (Auman, 1994). At these newspapers, the copy desk, which had lost power in the era of the reporter, also lost the ability to influence the display of news. At other newspapers, the copy desk retained the design function and gained greater control over page production, freed from dependence on composing-room workers, whose jobs were eliminated (Howells and Dearman, 1996). Copy editors no longer merely conceived of page designs – using pica sticks, proportion wheels, and paper dummies – they also physically produced the designs, using some of the newest technology in the newsroom. This change, however, forced copy desks to take over tasks once assigned to blue- collar workers, taking editors away from what had been their primary duties: editing stories for errors of fact, spelling, grammar, and style; writing headlines; and writing photo captions (Brill, 1994). One study found that paginating pages took editors 10– 15 minutes more per page than drawing paper dummies, the equivalent of about five copy-editing shifts a day for a newspaper that produced 200 pages a day, with zoned edition and page makeovers (Russial, 1994). Another found that Washington state copy editors perceived that pagination simultaneously improved and hurt their newspapers,

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at UNIVERSIDAD DE CONCEPCION on December 27, 2014 54 Journalism 16(1) making them more attractive but resulting in ‘substantially less emphasis on traditionally journalistic tasks, such as editing for accuracy and improving text’ (Underwood et al., 1994: 119). So, in a sense, although the copy editors at these newspapers were the designers in this age of the designer, their new work was displacing some of the traditional role of copy desks. The era of the designer was not, however, determined solely by technology. As Barnhurst (1994) and Barnhurst and Nerone (2001) have persuasively argued, interest in newspaper design had been building for many decades before electronic tools for designing newspapers were invented. Since at least the 1920s, studies had tried to measure the legibility and readability of various typefaces, though without, Barnhurst (1994) suggests, much understanding of the structure of type. As early as the 1930s, major dailies were hiring typographic consultants to redesign their pages with the sensibilities of 20th- century modernists, rejecting the traditional design they saw as a product of ‘whims of history, thriving on neglect’ (Barnhurst, 1994: 178). During the 1950s and 1960s, newspaper design consultants continued their work, producing redesigns that emphasized lightness, white space, horizontal organization of text, and the use of rectangular packages, or ‘modular design’2 (Barnhurst, 1994; Barnhurst and Nerone, 2001). Although some newspapers, such as The New York Times, retained a traditional look at least on the front page, design also received increased attention during the 1980s and 1990s because of high-profile cases of new or revamped newspaper products. The most notable was USA Today, launched in 1982 as a color-filled newspaper with short articles, relatively large photographs, numerous illustrations, color-coded sections, and a front page that functions ‘as a bulletin board for what is inside’ (McCartney, 1997: para. 47). This presentation – designed to promote scannability (Cooke, 2005) – defied the conventions of what a newspaper looked like at the time (Kostelnick and Hassett, 2003) and mirrored the quick-hit style of news then developing in television journalism. Another striking redesign was Knight Ridder’s conversion of the Delray Beach (Fla.) News into a newspaper targeted at the disposable incomes of Baby Boomers. It was reborn in 1990 as the Boca Raton News, ‘a pastel-colored hodgepodge of snippets of news … sold from pink newspaper boxes’ (Kurtz, 1993: 84). The design and content, which were heavily influenced by focus groups (Bellew, 1991), included, at least initially, a pink flamingo incorporated into the nameplate, a ‘no jumps’ rule that kept front-page stories short, and maps that showed cities that appeared in the datelines of even two- and three-paragraph stories (Kurtz, 1993; Norman, 2009). One important component of the shift toward designer power in newsrooms was the founding in 1979 of what is now the Society for News Design (SND), organized by journalists who had attended the first seminar on design at the American Press Institute. (A similar organization for copy editors, the American Copy Editors Society, would not emerge until 18 years later.) SND publishes a glossy magazine, Design, and sponsors an annual workshop that for several years in the mid-1990s drew more than 700 attendees (Annual Workshop, n.d.). It also produces an annual book that compiles images of the best of the previous year’s news design, many examples displayed at near-thumbnail size. Barnhurst (1994) suggests that such display ‘rewarded only those designs that stood out when greatly reduced or seen from more than an arm’s length’ (p. 190). As a result, it was those ‘big, roomy designs’ (p. 190) that were widely imitated.

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The era of the designer ended early in the 21st century, as newspapers struggled with declining circulations – a drop of about 30 percent between 1990 and 2010 (Edmonds, 2012) – and print advertising revenues that were receding far faster than online ad revenues grew (Edmonds et al., 2014). With the resulting widespread layoffs and buyouts, it became less important that every newspaper page always be beautiful. At some newspapers, design desks were disbanded and copy editors were hurriedly taught to design and paginate pages, sometimes using a series of basic templates created by the few designers left (Keith, 2009). Several newspaper groups, including the United States’ largest chain, Gannett Co. Inc., formed centralized design hubs where pages were created by designers working hundreds of miles from the people who would read the newspapers (Channick, 2011). As one former journalist put it, ‘Design’s time as a prominent part of storytelling in print at newspapers seems to have come and gone’ (Zhu, 2011: para. 4).

Next? One might reasonably ask, ‘If the era of the designer recently ended, what era is next?’ There is no easy answer, for if it is difficult, as this essay concedes, to precisely label the beginnings and ends of historical periods, then it is foolhardy to try to label a period that cannot be seen from some distance, in context with other times. It does not seem a stretch, however, to wonder whether it would be prudent, some years from now, to consider whether the second decade of the 21st century might finally have been an era of news-crafters connected with newspapers’ online or mobile entities: producers, digital videographers, mobile ‘backpack’ journalists (Martyn, 2009), and even non-professionals who create ‘user generated content’ (Singer, 2010). Yet newspapers’ slowness to fully embrace digital media (Kirchhoff, 2009), partly because they did not make as much money as news managers hoped, makes it seem as though the current period might be merely an interstitial prelude to some other era we cannot yet conceive.

Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes 1. The Linotype, invented by Otto Mergenthaler and first demonstrated in workable form in 1886, combined the processes of casting lead type and setting it into lines of text. It had been widely embraced, even at small newspapers, by the 1930s (Morano, 2002). 2. For a critique of this terminology, see Barnhurst and Nerone (2001: 214–215).

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Author biography Susan Keith is an associate professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. She does research on the evolution of journalistic practice, visual communication, media ethics and law, and media history. She worked as a journalist for 16 years before earning a PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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Article

Journalism 2015, Vol. 16(1) 61–64 What sorts of things are © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: thingy? And what sorts of sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1464884914545733 thinginess are there? Notes jou.sagepub.com on stuff and social construction

Michael Schudson Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, USA

Abstract Actor-network theory may help sociological studies of communication to see some things that would have been harder to see without it. It is useful and important in calling attention to the ways that “things” and not only persons can be actors (or “actants”) in the human social world. Still, it may be the peculiar hubris of the scientific laboratory that led to the presumption that things do not act in human affairs. In social criticism and in common sense, we have long known that they do. And we know also that some “things” are more “thingy” than others – obdurate, with a kind of independent agency. Hardware is more thingy than software but both are “things.” Actor–network theory (ANT) raises important questions about the place of things in social life – it does not in itself provide answers.

Keywords Actor–network theory (ANT), black-box, actant

Under the inspiration of actor–network theory (ANT), the papers in this volume challenge the sociological studies of communication that have generally assumed that actors in history are human beings or groups of human beings who act upon or interact with things or objects of various sorts, whether natural things or things we have made, when we do science or make music or do absolutely anything. Too often we have ‘black- boxed’ an object or material thing and have thereby failed to look inside at how its active

Corresponding author: Michael Schudson, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Pulitzer Hall, MC 3801, 2950 Broadway, New York, NY 10027, USA. Email: [email protected]

Downloaded fromDownloaded http://www.elearnica.ir from jou.sagepub.com at Izmir Institute of Technology on December 27, 2014 62 Journalism 16(1) processes shape our affairs, an impact based on its specific features that, in most cases, could well have been different and might still be made different. To treat the objects in our environment as actors (of a sort) in social studies of making and doing seems reasonable to me, and more than reasonable – important. It offers a cor- rective to certain blind spots and it implies a program of reform or, if that is too grandiose – at least, it implies a vocabulary for advancing new insights. Still, this program may be struggling with a straw man. It ascribes to the thinkers it criticizes the view that there is a radical separation of persons and things in which persons act and things are acted on. This may be how many scientists picture themselves. It may be how sociologists of science have pictured the world. But many others have long known better without the benefit of ANT. I don’t think Ralph Waldo Emerson was an ANT theorist when he wrote that ‘things are in the saddle, and ride us’. He was criticizing the ways his mid-19th century contemporaries had let new objects – railroads, say, construct their future. He feared people were ceding agency to these Things, abdicating to them the guid- ing role in history. He was doing social criticism, not ANT. It is not new to accord a kind of independence and volition to Things. This is as familiar in the language of social criticism (think of the power of the term ‘Frankenstein’) as ANT is unfamiliar. It may be that ANT allows us to see some things that we could not have seen so well without it; and it may allow us to say some things we could not have said so well or so economically without it. We do, I think, have other language for black-boxing. When we black-box something, we ‘take it for granted’. When we black-box a thing, we ‘bracket’ it. When we black-box something, we treat it as background and it becomes ‘wallpaper’. But neither ‘take for granted’ nor ‘bracket’ nor ‘wallpaper’ has quite the richness of associations of black-boxing. It is no accident that ANT began in the sociology of scientific laboratories. There, scientists not only use tools they do not interrogate but they frequently design new equipment whose properties they know very well because they have intentionally designed in those properties. But then, time passes, and the individually designed equipment gets passed down, unconsciously what was once intentional and well considered gets black- boxed, and the scientists come to believe they are masters of the universe. But they are not. Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar in their 1986 afterword to Laboratory Life respond to one reviewer (Ron Westrum) who objected to the book’s lack of unity or continuous action, the relative incoherence of its narrative. And then they say,

… our aim was precisely to avoid giving the kind of smoothed narrative characteristic of traditional constructions of the ‘way things are’. For example, we did not want an account in which the early presentation of dramatis personae implied that humans were to be taken as the primary category of actors within the laboratory. (Latour and Woolgar, 1986: 176)

And this may be why many more people read The Double Helix than Laboratory Life for access to what science might be like from the inside. We like to have heroes in our stories even if in this case author James Watson presents himself as almost an anti-hero, at least, a picaresque, cantankerous hero. ANT is unlikely to have emerged in realms where the humans involved are constantly aware of the agentive powers of non-human actants. Laboratories are consciously

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at Izmir Institute of Technology on December 27, 2014 Schudson 63 engineered to provide an antiseptic environment in which all sources of variation can be controlled, observed, and measured. The lab is therefore not a seedbed for contamina- tion, but it may be a breeding ground for hubris. It generates the illusion for scientists that they know exactly what they are up to. ANT is a conceptual apparatus for deconstructing that hubris. It would not have arisen, say, in the study of agriculture. Farmers do not consider themselves masters of the universe. Their livelihood depends on the weather, and they know it. Their daily routine depends on the seasons. Their waking time depends on the cows. The most important determinants of their days are forces outside themselves. Somewhere between the scientists striding through the lab as if they owned every bit of it and the farmers praying for rain might be the scientists who work with lab animals. I once visited a biologist who studied frogs in his lab, and I remember that he spoke of his frogs as if he were an anthropologist, affectionately familiar with his tribe. For him, the frog tribe was not interchangeable with rats, mice, or fruit flies. He knew a lot about frog behavior, even about individual frogs and their idiosyncratic behavior, and even if the behavior was not strictly related to the questions his research addressed. He did not for a second think he controlled these frogs – each had its own features – frog affordances, if you will, that made them suitable (but far from perfect) for his purposes. He learned what they could or could not do; he learned from them what he could or could not do with them. He would not have found ANT the least bit shocking – of course the frogs were actants in his research! But are they the same sort of actants as those that Latour and Woolgar faced – the mass spectrophotometer, the amino acid analyzer, the radioimmunoassay, or the counter- current distribution chromatograph? I suspect not. I suspect there are not just Things and Persons. There are at least Inanimate Things and Living Things and Persons. Among inanimate things, there are Hard Things and Soft Things and in-between things. Parenthetically, persons as well as things can be differentiated in ways that influence their role in the production of scientific knowledge – they differ by rank in an academic hierarchy. They differ by personality, the more assertive and the more deferential. They differ by their skill sets. And in relation to the volitional masters-of-the-universe human- ness that ANT seeks to de-center, there are the non-volitional bodily aspects of human beings themselves. Nikki Usher’s paper shows that a basic determinant of the processes of the global newsroom is that people universally sleep about one-third of the normal day, and invariably during the night hours of the part of the globe they inhabit. Even Watson and Crick and Einstein and Newton slept. We carry our own Thinginess in our Human-ness. Thinginess, in this sense, is a feature of the world that influences our control of the action before us without our conscious intent launching it. Thinginess, then, can be inside our bodies. Moreover, by this account, Things differ in thinginess, too. We conventionally distinguish between hardware and software. Both are things. But hardware lasts a long time, and it is not easily changed. Software is flexible and can be tweaked, you can improve it repeatedly over time with relative ease, you don’t have to start over. Likewise, we conventionally distinguish between legal–political entities that have some of the hardness of hardware and voluntary civil society entities, that have some of the flexibility or tweakability of software. Both are things but they are thingy to different

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at Izmir Institute of Technology on December 27, 2014 64 Journalism 16(1) degrees. Even within a legal–political entity, say, the US Congress, there are entities that do not have formal status and do not require legal approval. The first enduring ‘caucus’ in the US Congress appeared in 1958. It – the Democratic Study Group – and the scores of other caucuses that sprang up in the decades thereafter – had the great property that no one had to approve their establishment. They were just established, period, by the con- sent of any individuals who wanted to sign up. And they could be disbanded just as easily. Human volition was not as constrained by these Things as it was by committees and subcommittees that required congressional or party approval. A Thing is no less a Thing for being a cultural convention or a social practice to which, to some extent, individual human volition must bow. The news interview was invented in the late 19th century. I don’t think journalists think of the interview as having been invented but as natural, always there. It has been black-boxed over time. It is a Thing. But it is a complicated thing, a two-part Thing. It is a social thing – with certain practices and conventions a reporter employs when doing an interview with a public official or a bystander at a fire or a wounded victim at a crime scene. And then there is the interview as a news format, sometimes a transcript of the full interview, sometimes just brief bits inserted into a news story but, in either case, operating by literary conventions that generally constrain how a journalist conducts or writes up an interview. Are Things more in the saddle riding us at some historic moments than at others? Do our understandings about the mutability and tweakability of Things of different sorts influence what is riding what? I think ANT, as far as I understand it, raises valuable questions. I worry only that this theory like any approach or set of ideas that comes to be named a ‘theory’ needs to work hard not to become untweakable itself. It gains something – a following, and a vocabulary, and an interacting set of players who improve one another’s work – but it should do that without fetishizing itself.

Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Reference Latour B and Woolgar S (1986) Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Author biography Michael Schudson is the author of Discovering the News (1978), The Good Citizen (1998), Why Democracies Need an Unlovable Press (2008) and other works. His book Opening Up: Where Transparency Came From, 1945–1975 is forthcoming.

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Article

Journalism 2015, Vol. 16(1) 65–68 The material turn in the study © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: of journalism: Some hopeful sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1464884914545734 and cautionary remarks from jou.sagepub.com an early explorer

Pablo J Boczkowski Northwestern University, USA

Abstract This brief article presents some remarks about the material turn in journalism studies. It argues that this turn might push these studies in a more cosmopolitan theoretical direction by inviting analysts to engage with a wide array of fields of inquiry. It also contends that this turn might unsettle two major common methodological practices in studies of newswork: a focus on journalists and on newsrooms as the critical actors and locales. Looking at the objects of newsmaking might reveal the broad spectrum of actors implicated in this process—not just journalists—and the spatially distributed network of connections—that include the newsroom as one key locale, but not the only one—from which the news emerges.

Keywords Newswork, materiality, Science and Technology Studies

I would like to begin with my own intellectual journey with the hope that it will illuminate broader issues that might be relevant to this Special Issue. I started doing research on online news production 18 years ago. I was a second-year doctoral student in Science and Technology Studies (STS) at Cornell University and my favorite hometown newspaper, Diario Clarín in Argentina, had just launched its online edition. I did not have a professional journalistic background or knowledge of the mass communication literature. I was simply fascinated by what this encounter between the ‘old’ medium of print and the ‘new’ medium of the web might mean for the process of innovation in the media

Corresponding author: Pablo J Boczkowski, Northwestern University, Frances Searle Building, 2240 Campus Drive, Room 2-146, Evanston, IL 60208-2, USA. Email: [email protected]

Downloaded fromDownloaded http://www.elearnica.ir from jou.sagepub.com at University of Haifa Library on December 27, 2014 66 Journalism 16(1) in particular and in other areas of productive activity in general. As a student of Trevor Pinch, focusing on technology was the obvious thing to do. I knew close to nothing about journalism, but Bruce Lewenstein in the Cornell’s Communication department was a great guide to media scholarship. Because of my ignorance, and a larger naivete about broader social science discourses, I expected to find some readily available theorizing about the material aspects of newswork. Instead, the more I read, the more I realized that technology was a vastly under-explored territory in journalism scholarship. Digitizing the News was my attempt to tackle how materiality matters in newswork, in particular to understanding the process of innovation in the emergence and early evolution of online newspapers in the United States. This Special Issue would have been unthinkable back in 1996 when I began my journey, and even in 2003, when I turned in the final revisions of the book manuscript to my editor at The MIT Press. But in the past 10 years – which is a very brief period of time for the typical pace of the academy – things have changed considerably. There has been a proliferation of studies looking at various aspects of how materiality matters in newswork, and an incorporation of a number of conceptual approaches to do this, dominated by STS and in particular actor–network theory. Furthermore, there is not only a significant level of activity but also a lot of excitement about what this activity might mean for the study of journalism more generally. However, as it often happens with relatively rapid change, there is comparatively less sense of collective direction. I see this Special Issue as a potentially critical moment to reflect on where we have been and where to go next, and applaud the organizers for their leadership in getting us to become more programmatic. What might the next phase of this material turn mean for the study of journalism? What are some of the theoretical and methodological challenges that might lie ahead? Theoretically, the material turn might push journalism scholarship in a more cosmopolitan direction. This domain of inquiry is not the first one in the humanities and social sciences to experience an interest in material culture over the past decades. There are insights and lessons to be learned from engaging in conversation with scholars from these other domains. Such conversation should be approached as a two-way street, trying to incorporate ideas from other domains but also aiming to influence them. As noted above, so far the main source of intellectual stimulation for the material turn in journalism studies has been my own field of origin, STS. It has many helpful insights to offer, but also some limitations that are worth keeping in mind. STS-inflected scholarship has been excellent in shedding light on the processes through which people and things inter- twine. What has come out of this orientation is a special sensibility toward complexity and relative indeterminacy in sociomaterial life, and an imaginative vocabulary for cap- turing this complexity and indeterminacy in specific locales. What has suffered from this orientation is an attempt to grapple with the outcomes of these processes at a system- wide level. Also lacking are causal explanations of variance in outcomes that transcend the particulars of the case or cases analyzed in a given study. Explanations of variance in outcomes tend to simplify the complexity of the processes that generate those outcomes, and yield a picture with relatively limited levels of contingency. Scholars of journalism have a lot to gain if they can keep incorporating the insights of STS but also generate an epistemic apparatus that can avoid some of these limitations, an apparatus that they can in turn offer to STS scholars as an example of the two-way street I mentioned above.

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The trajectory of my own research program illustrates the power and limitations of an STS-inflected orientation toward studying the news. Materiality and process were core themes of Digitizing the News and, as mentioned above, an STS approach was central to this book. It is worth noticing, however, that despite the centrality of the ‘objects of (online) journalism’ in that book, the cross-local explanations of outcome variance relied on factors such as relationships across newsrooms, representations of the user, and the character of newsroom practices. My second book, News at Work, aimed to understand the dynamics of monitoring and imitation that generate significant lack of diversity in the news. Material matters figured in the argument to a certain extent, but I found that a focus on the objects of mimicry did not have much explanatory power to account for outcome variance regarding work practices and the resulting news products. My third book, The News Gap, assesses whether there is a divergence between the stories the media deem newsworthy and those that interest the public, and, if so, measures this divergence and accounts for the factors that increase or decrease it. My co-author, Eugenia Mitchelstein, and I did find that difference in the uptake of technological affordances is a relevant explanatory factor that accounts for some variance in size of the news gap. To get at this difference, one does not need the typical constructionist lens of STS, however. As a matter of fact, this lens would probably obscure rather than clarify in this case; instead, a more traditional sociological understanding of material practice suf- fices. My current book-project-in-progress, How Institutions Decay, examines the demise of print newspapers in Buenos Aires, Chicago, and Paris as a window into understanding how institutions unravel and try to renew themselves. Although the data collection and analysis are still ongoing, an initial read of some of the interview material suggests that while the historical evolution of information infrastructures have some heuristic power to account for the dynamics of institutional decay, it is in a way different from the typical STS take on them. The reason that I bring up the evolution of my own research program is to offer a cautionary note on the actual promise and potential peril of a particularly influential form of enacting the material turn in journalism studies. Methodologically, the material turn might unsettle two major tendencies in studies of newswork: a focus on journalists and on newsrooms as the critical actors and locales, respectively. Despite the truism that ‘sources make the news’, most of the scholarship to date has concentrated on the practices of journalists – and I have contributed my fair share to this tendency in my first two books. However, if the objects of journalism acquire a greater prominence in future research than what they had in the past, we will likely see a broadening of the actors having central roles in our inquiries: programmers, technicians, data visualization experts, bloggers, and so on. This would reflect changes that have been already going on in news organizations around the world. More radically, a focus on objects might also entail adding techniques of artifact analysis to the traditional ethnographic and content analysis tools that we have normally deployed in studying journalism. In this day and age, it is not only sources but also algorithms what make the news, as witnessed by the adoption of tools such as Google Analytics, Chartbeat and in-house systems inside news organizations, and the public success of Google News and content farms such as Demand Media. Understanding the causes, dynamics, and consequences of this algorithmic trend will require broadening our methodological apparatus. The material turn has also called into question the inevitability and centrality of the

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at University of Haifa Library on December 27, 2014 68 Journalism 16(1) newsroom as the critical locale of newsmaking. This is not to say that newsrooms have become irrelevant, but that they have to be placed within a larger and more intricate web of content creation, as Chris Anderson’s brilliant analysis of the contemporary news ecosystem in Philadelphia has clearly shown. From journalists and newsrooms to geeks, graphistes, bloggers, algorithms, and news ecosystems, if allowed to grow to its fullest potential, the material turn will bring some powerful methodological renewal to the study of news and newsmaking.

Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Author biography Pablo J Boczkowski is the author of Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers (MIT Press, 2004), News at Work: Imitation in an Age of Information Abundance (University of Chicago Press, 2010), and The News Gap: When the Information Preferences of the Media and the Public Diverge (MIT Press, 2013; joint with Eugenia Mitchelstein), and co-editor, with Tarleton Gillespie and Kisten Foot, of Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality and Society (MIT Press, 2014).

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Journalism 2015, Vol. 16(1) 69–73 Research that empowers © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: responsibility: Reconciling sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1464884914545738 human agency with jou.sagepub.com materiality

David Domingo Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium

Abstract Despite the virtues of an emphasis on materiality in Journalism Studies, such an approach risks dis-empowering journalists as agents of change in the evolution of their profession. The principles of actor-network theory offer an opportunity to reconnect studies that are sensitive to the role of technology in the newsroom with the agency of the human actors that use it. By exposing the contingent nature of news practices, researchers can encourage journalists to take responsibility on the configuration of their work and the technical tools they use. The article proposes as well a collective discussion about the normative position of researchers and their engagement with fostering social change in the media industry.

Keywords Actor-network theory, materiality, journalism, agency

The articles collected in this special issue demonstrate the value of putting an emphasis on materiality and the agency of technology in order to explain the nuances of news production processes in the newsrooms. However, in our quest to render the objects of journalism visible, I worry that we are taking some risks regarding the actual social impact of our research results: by emphasizing the agency of materiality, we may invol- untarily dis-empower the journalists who are part of our ethnographies and surveys. In the following pages, I defend the need for a collective discussion about the role of

Corresponding author: David Domingo, Département des sciences de l’information et de la communication, ReSIC, Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), 50 avenue F. D. Roosevelt CP 123, 1050 Brussels, Belgium. Email: [email protected]

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Journalism Studies in the debates about the evolution of journalism as an institution, and about the normative position of researchers and their engagement with fostering social change. The strong magnetism of materiality as an element in our current objects of study makes this debate more urgent than ever, as we run the risk that journalists may delegate theresponsibility for changes in their practices to technological innovations. In the context of this debate, I want to vindicate the contribution of actor–network theory (ANT) to Journalism Studies, in part because it is at ease with the agency of materiality, but most importantly because it proposes a role for researchers that could help us in finding our place in these times of uncertainty about the social practices of journalism. ‘Whatever a scholar does when she writes an account, she is already part’ of the reality she is researching, argues Latour (2005: 258). He invites us to be self-reflexive, not only to avoid imposing our analytical categories in the analysis but also to accept and make explicit our engagement as researchers with improving the society we serve. We do not usually verbalize it, but many of us study journalism because we adhere to those normative principles that connect it to a healthy democracy and engaged citizenry, and because we are worried that trends in the media industry may be harming our aspirations for a journalism that better serves our societies. Much of the ‘second wave’ of newsroom ethnographies (Cottle, 2000) has focused on explaining the factors that prevented innovations such as the Internet to reshape journalism in the direction of utopian discourses (Domingo, 2008), hoping that journalists would act upon those factors to consciously develop new forms of news production that break away from these constraints. My feeling is that we have not equipped journalists well enough with our research results, and we have not given them the knowledge they would need to transform our findings into social action. And the way we have dealt with materiality is at the center of this problem. ANT has been accused of being apolitical, as it seems to flatten social structures into networks of associations between a heterogeneous collection of actors that includes people, ideals, symbolic constructions, and material elements, seen as equally important elements to analyze (Plesner, 2009). On the contrary, instead of erasing power and ine- quality from our research vocabulary, ANT invites us to not take it for granted, to trace when power is exerted through action. As researchers, we cannot assume that actors have power, but we can see them exerting power when they manage to make other actors do what they want, to shape their actions (Latour, 2005: 66). This is how ANT has contributed to rescue materiality from oblivion, by demonstrating that technological artifacts, as an actor in the network, can shape the work of journalists. Nonetheless, while ANT in science and technology studies has focused on the process of definition of innovations, in Journalism Studies, it has focused on the adoption of technologies, usually black- boxing previous steps in the development of those technologies before landing at the newsroom. We should not limit ourselves to the analysis of the interactions between technology and humans and their ‘mutual shaping’ (Boczkowski, 2004). We should trace the networks of relationships that have configured each technical tool and each journalist that uses it, their histories and multiple alliances beyond the newsroom. Technology, in its materiality, has embedded values, definitions of ideal users, and ideal uses (Williams, 1981), which were negotiated already long before they entered a newsroom. Technology is therefore configured in ways that may be fragile or strong, it brings a baggage with it that will determine how much journalists will be able to reshape it or be reshaped by it.

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Content Management Systems (CMSs) are a good example of a technology in the newsroom that can benefit from a reconstruction of its process of conception and development (see both Anderson and Kreiss (2013) and Rodgers, this volume, for a further elaboration of this point). In a Catalan newsroom where I conducted an ethnography between 2003 and 2006, the CMS for the news website had initially been created in- house by the computer systems department without involvement of journalists (Domingo, 2006). Once an online news team was established, the liaison between the technical staff and the journalists was the online editor-in-chief, who was comfortable with programming languages, but was not involved in daily news production. The consequence was that his decisions on the evolution of the CMS were more aligned with what the computer systems department saw as potentially viable than with what the online journalists felt was necessary to make their work smoother. Requests based on the daily news production experience were usually disregarded as being the result of the lack of advanced knowledge about online publishing: web reporters mainly had a print journalism background and had learned to work for the new medium by doing, once they were assigned to the online team. What at first sight looked as the agency of technology shaping many of their news practices was in hindsight the result of a long process of definition of the CMS where interactions between different human actors privileged certain workflows over other possible alternatives. The only chance for these dis-empowered online journalists to rebel against the agency of materiality was to boycott some of the tasks inscribed in the CMS: they were not able to change it, but they could still slightly adapt its use to what was more conveni- ent to their practices (Schmitz-Weiss and Domingo, 2010). And here is where I defend that we should reposition materiality in its relationship with humans, in order to empower them, in order to encourage social action that overcomes situations of injustice, big or small. As researchers, we have the moral commitment of trying to make the world a better place to live in. Latour (2005) urges the researchers of the social to ‘explore what is possible’ (p. 261), rather than focusing on the description of the structures that constrain our actions. By tracing the ways in which some actors have managed to exert power over others, how their relationships have been configured over time, without imposing aprior- istic explanations, we may be able to provide narratives that show how contingent any configuration is, and therefore how prone to change it may be once actors see themselves in research results that render visible and explicit the associations mobilized in a specific social context. In this research agenda, committed to understanding change in order to foster change, the agency of materiality should not become a wall so solid, so thick, that journalists cannot look inside to act upon it. We may not have the intention of dis-empowering humans with our research results, but it is a good precaution to include a vaccine against technological determinism in the ontological principles that guide our research design. While ANT acknowledges the agency of materiality, Hemmingway (2008) proposed that we should also recognize that technologies do not have the ‘self-reflexivity’ of humans and therefore are not ‘capable of intentionality and motivation’ (p. 180) – and that is still the case with newsgathering hardware and content-generating algorithms. This step should not take us toward social determinism, neutralizing the agency of materiality, but rather toward reclaiming the responsibility of humans in shaping their own future – much

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at UNIVERSIDAD DE CONCEPCION on December 27, 2014 72 Journalism 16(1) of which occurs before eventually black-boxed technologies are introduced to social settings. The agency of technology can be very powerful in shaping human actions, but it is cold, deprived of an intentionality of its own, and predictable as soon as we trace the origins of its configuration. Software has been designed by humans, who embedded definitions in it that, once put in circulation, may exert power over its adopters with the implacability of materiality. In short, the risk of emphasizing the agency of technology is that we may foster that journalists give up their responsibility, delegate it to the machines, and convince themselves that they can only follow the flow of technological change. The interviews with some online news pioneers by the Riptide project bluntly illustrate how eagerly journalists adopt this attitude, arguing that ‘a distributed and aggregated system of news works fine, and the withering of traditional journalism is thus no great loss’ (Edmonds, 2013). Instead, by tracing the intentionality and motivations of human decisions in the processes of technological design and adoption, we may be able to fulfill the moral imperative of our role as researchers: we can expose the contingent nature of news practices and journalism as an institution, we can show human actors how much they are responsible for the current configuration of their work, and we can encourage them to take that responsibility in order to fight for a change in whatever they do not feel comfortable with, collaborate with them to explore the alternatives. Part of this process necessarily includes problematizing the normative definitions of journalism (Domingo et al., 2014), treating them as another actor in the network. Normativities are constantly (re)defined by the actions of journalists and technologies but, at the same time, normativities shape these actions the moment that actors invoke them to justify (consciously or not, through discourses or through algorithms) their practices. And in this, we as researchers also need to be transparent in our engagement, self- reflexive about our own normative ideals of journalism, and responsible about the contribution we want to make to society. With ANT, we force ourselves to be very systematic at collecting evidence on continuity and change in journalism, avoiding to impose predefined categories, and, in a second step, we should acknowledge that we are part of the network we are tracing and share our results as engaged actors committed to foster social action (Latour, 2005: 256–257).

Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

References Anderson CW and Kreiss D (2013) Black boxes as capacities for and constraints on action: Electoral politics, journalism, and devices of representation. Qualitative Sociology 36(4): 365–382. Boczkowski PJ (2004) The processes of adopting multimedia and interactivity in three online newsrooms. Journal of Communication 54: 197–213. Cottle S (2000) New(s) times: Towards a ‘second wave’ of news ethnography. Communications: The European Journal of Communication Research 25(1): 19–41. Domingo D (2006) Inventing online journalism: Development of the Internet as a news medium in four Catalan online newsrooms. PhD Thesis, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona.

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Domingo D (2008) Interactivity in the daily routines of online newsrooms: Dealing with an uncomfortable myth. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13(3): 680–704. Domingo D, Masip P and Costera I (2014) Tracing Digital News Networks: Towards an integrated framework of the dynamics of news production, circulation and use. Digital Journalism. Epub ahead of print 2 July. DOI: 10.1080/21670811.2014.927996. Edmonds R (2013) ‘Riptide’ project explains how legacy media got washed out to sea by digital currents. Available at: http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/business-news/the-biz-blog/223087/ riptide-project-explains-how-legacy-media-got-washed-out-to-sea-by-digital-currents/ (accessed 10 May 2014). Hemmingway E (2008) Into the Newsroom: Exploring the Digital Production of Regional Television News. London: Routledge. Latour B (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Plesner U (2009) An actor-network perspective on changing work practices: Communication technologies as actants in newswork. Journalism 10(5): 604–626. Schmitz-Weiss A and Domingo D (2010) Communities of practice innovation processes in online newsrooms as actor-networks and communities of practice. New Media & Society 12(7): 1156–1171. Williams R (1981) Communications Technologies and Social Institutions in Contact: Human Communication and Its History. New York: Thames & Hudson.

Author biography David Domingo is Chair of Journalism at Université Libre de Bruxelles (Brussels). He specializes in the evolution of online journalism, focusing on innovation processes in the newsrooms and the redefinition of the profession in digital communication spaces.

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Journalism 2015, Vol. 16(1) 74–78 Learning from documents: © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: Applying new theories of sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1464884914549294 materiality to journalism jou.sagepub.com

Gina Neff University of Washington, USA

Abstract This article briefly reviews theories of materiality emerging in communication technology studies and organizational communication and then suggests three ways that journalism scholars might apply these theories to studies of news production. How journalists work, how journalism is shaped within newsrooms, the ways the news industry is changing, and ultimately, the effects of digital transitions can all benefit from including a focus on the ‘objects of journalism’. First, objects, such as documents, help scholars describe the social settings where objects are found. Second, the objects of journalism help scholars uncover lines of authority, contexts of news routines, and richness and persistence of news practices. Third, studying the objects of journalism can help explain the persistence of so-called residual practices that might otherwise seem dysfunctional in digital news. Materiality theories can help journalism scholars explain the impact of the transition to digital news on the work and practices of journalists and the news industry as a whole.

Keywords Materiality, technology, Science and Technology Studies, ethnography, theory

Journalists, like many other creative and cultural workers, find that they must rapidly make sense of changing conditions within the digital economy. New digital technologies change old organizational routines and workplace practices in ways that can be surprising and unexpected, and in most workplaces, the transition to digital is far from a straightforward, one-to-one substitution of one set of tools for another. Instead, it entails changes in work practices and organizational routines along with changes in medium.

Corresponding author: Gina Neff, Department of Communication, University of Washington, 102 Communications, Box 353740, Seattle, WA 98195, USA. Email: [email protected]

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My aim here in this essay is to suggest how to apply the theories of materiality emerging in the subfields of communication technology studies and organizational communication to scholarship on news media and journalism. I argue that scholars can use these emerging theories of materiality to describe how journalists work, how journalism is shaped within newsrooms, the ways the news industries are changing, and ultimately, the impact on the products of the news industry. Materiality theories can help scholars explain the impact of this transition on both the news industry and the work and practices of journalists. Newsroom ethnographies, like other qualitative studies, have been very good at assessing how people assign meanings to everyday objects in social settings. What the new literature on materiality affords scholars are tools to extend these socially constructed meanings of things to their social functions and in the process highlight the social roles that these everyday objects play. These new theories emphasize what things do, rather than what things mean to people. Materiality theories can therefore help scholars uncover the less apparent functions, processes, and roles that these objects can support in social settings. Materiality, done right, helps scholars see the physical evidence of social structure, or in the words of Bruno Latour (1991), ‘society made durable’. Communication scholars have rediscovered materiality because theorizing the process of digital change has required it. ‘The unfinished project’ for communication technology studies, according to Leah Lievrouw (2013), has been to find a path between the social construction of technology’s multiple meanings while veering clear of strongly deterministic accounts of technology’s power to change society. With new theories of the importance of materiality in communication, technology scholars are beginning to recognize ‘the social and material character of communication technology [are] equally definitive and co-determining’, as opposed to previous paradigm that viewed technology from a broadly constructivist and culturalist lens, holding that material objects are dependent entirely on the humans around for social meaning (Lievrouw, 2013). In other words, the return to studies of materiality suggests that the medium matters after all. Journalists, like other knowledge workers, produce meanings for a living. But the tools that shape their work and the material properties of the media through which they communicate can have an enormous impact on how they do that work. Part of the challenge for communication scholars is to wrest objects away from our disciplinary tendency to connect them to the production of intended meaning of human communication. As Lievrouw (2013) puts it, scholars have been more likely to see technology as the ‘outcomes or products of abstract social forces, cultural discourses or economic logics’ rather than as having material properties that influence their social roles and functions. This requires a bit of intellectual courage within a field that has positioned humans squarely in the center of meaning-making. Anthropologist Ian Hodder (2012), who has written about the ‘entangled’ sets of relationships and dependencies between humans and things, shows the degree to which this is challenging for social scientists and humanists: ‘It is one thing to say that humans identify with things. But it is another to say that humans only exist in their relation to things’ (p. 27). Qualitative research in media and communication is quite good at examining the human meanings invested in things. But the field has yet to develop a rich theoretical language and methodological toolkit for studying the things of social life on their own terms. For an example of material studies, consider

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Gupta’s striking ethnography of the state violence inflicted on India’s poor through ‘red tape’. Forms and other bureaucratic writing do not just communicate messages, though they do that. They also form a ‘constitutive role as that which defines what the state is and what it does’ (Gupta, 2012). In other words, how documents circulate, who has access, and how they are stored may be as important for the social role that they end up playing as the messages written on them are. Documents ‘materialize’ organizational communication (Ashcraft et al., 2009).

Thinking through documents Documents are particularly interesting objects because they are ubiquitous in practically every workplace and the basis of almost all knowledge and bureaucratic work. As Lisa Gitelman (2014) has written, ‘Documents are important not because they are ubiquitous … but rather because they are so evidently integral to the ways people think and live’. Yet, media and communication scholars have until recently treated documents literally as products and process of human meaning-making rather than as material that shapes how organizations work. Documents, broadly defined, have three main roles that arise from their material affordances: (1) recording actions, (2) circumscribing the organization, and (3) supporting conversation (Neff et al., 2014). The change of a medium, say from paper documents to digital documents, can have an enormous impact on how these roles play out. The stability of the medium for a document can provide a record of a ‘meeting of minds’ (Kaghan and Lounsbury, 2006). The flexibility of the medium of documents can support brainstorming among ‘communities of conversationalists’ (Taylor and Van Every, 2000: 32). The mobility of the medium of documents carries information across different contexts and also ‘enforce humans to follow specific organizational pathways’ (Cooren, 2004: 388). Documents serve to materialize thoughts, literally helping shape the process that Kuhn and Jackson (2008) call ‘accomplishing knowledge’ in which people frame, reframe, and resolve problematic situations in order to realize a capacity to act (p. 461). Documents make certain problems and solutions visible and thinkable, functioning as ‘epistemic objects’ (Knorr Cetina, 1999). The question remaining for scholars who watch people work documents is, how to analyze these multiple uses, functions, and roles in ways that neither seep into technological determinism nor ascribe all of documents’ power to the intended meanings of their authors? In other words, can we bring thoughtful ways of considering the role of media and technology in the work that people do every day with documents and how might this be applied to journalism studies?

Applying materiality theories to journalism studies What follows are three suggestions on how to bring materiality to journalism studies. First, things matter because of the social settings that they are embedded in. One does not need to ascribe to the ideas of agency within actor–network theory in order to take seriously the set of interconnections between things and people. By extension, sets of relationships in newsrooms can be studied through the ‘objects of journalism’. How are newsroom practices structured through particular kinds of databases, workflows, and

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on December 27, 2014 Neff 77 physical configurations? When do changes to these objects reconfigure journalists’ practices easily and which are the ‘sticky’ older practices when new tools and objects appear? Scholars can use the objects of journalism to map out the contours and boundaries of new production, and this will become increasingly important as the ‘where’ of journalism shifts with digital production. Second, the objects of journalism serve to mediate authority, routines, and practices. Focusing on objects can help show the lines of authority, the contexts of routines, and the richness of practices within organizations, including news organizations. All bureaucratic functions are mediated at least partially through objects. Analysis of the objects of journalism can help show scholars how decisions are made, what work is done, and who collaborates. In this way, objects stand in as the actors playing the part of social structure: authority, hierarchy, and power are all enacted through, with, and sometimes despite objects. Social scientists should pay attention to them. Third, the materiality of what counts as evidence will change, but not necessarily in the short run. Professional codes, legal regulations, and industry standards all take time to adopt and adjust to new kinds of objects. In our own research, virtual teams struggled to recreate the ‘messy talk’ practices of face-to-face meetings around paper documents when digital technologies made online meetings possible (Dossick et al., 2014; Dossick and Neff, 2011; Neff et al., 2010). The ‘imbrication’, or interlocking, of social actions and technology means that social practices may take time to change to new technologies even though in the long run they co-constitute one another (Leonardi, 2012). For journalism studies, this means the move to digital will come with all sorts of residual practices geared toward paper even as those practices are increasingly and seemingly dysfunctional in a digital environment. The sanctity and protection of the reporter’s notebook have long legal precedent but not the smartphone, even though it increasingly functions as such. What counts as evidence, or legally protected, or organizationally manageable takes time to shift through different sets of objects. On a concluding note, journalism scholars who want to study the organizational processes of news production, distribution, and consumption should consider including an analysis of objects. The challenge for qualitative scholars closely attuned to finding meaning is to account for objects’ social functions in these settings as well, and the field of communication has a growing theoretical and methodological toolkit to borrow. Including objects in our analysis does not diminish the role for human agency. Rather, scholars can more fully account for it with attention to the roles that objects play.

Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

References Ashcraft KL, Kuhn TR and Cooren F (2009) Constitutional amendments: ‘Materializing’ organizational communication. Academy of Management Annals 31: 1–64. Cooren F (2004) Textual agency: How texts do things in organizational settings. Organization 11(3): 373–393. Dossick CS, Anderson A, Azari R, et al. (2014) Messy talk in virtual teams: Achieving knowledge synthesis through shared visualizations. Journal of Management in Engineering. Available at: http://ascelibrary.org/doi/abs/10.1061/%28ASCE%29ME.1943-5479.0000301

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Dossick CS and Neff G (2011) Messy talk and clean technology: Communication, problem solving and collaboration using building information modeling. Engineering Project Organization Journal 1(2): 83–93. Gitelman L (2014) Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gupta A (2012) Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hodder I (2012) Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Available at: http://doi.wiley. com/10.1002/9781118241912 Kaghan WN and Lounsbury M (2006) Artifacts, articulation work, and institutional residue. In: Rafaeli A and Pratt MG (eds) Artifacts and Organizations: Beyond Mere Symbolism. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 259–278. Knorr Cetina K (1999) Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kuhn T and Jackson MH (2008) Accomplishing knowledge: A framework for investigating knowing in organizations. Management Communication Quarterly 21(4): 454–485. Latour B (1991) Technology is society made durable. In: Law J (ed.) A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination. London: Routledge, pp. 103–131. Leonardi P (2012) Car Crashes without Cars. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lievrouw L (2013) Materiality and media in communication and technology studies: An unfinished project. In: Gilespie T, Boczkowski P and Foot K (eds) Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 21–52. Neff G, Fiore-Silfvast B and Dossick CS (2010) A case study of the failure of digital media to cross knowledge boundaries in virtual construction. Information, Communication & Society 13(4): 556–573. Neff G, Fiore-Silfvast B and Dossick CS (2014) Materiality: Challenges to communication theory. In: Lievrouw L (ed.) International Communication Association Theme Book 2013: Challenging Communication Research. New York: Peter Lang, pp. 209–224. Taylor JR and Van Every EJ (2000) The Emergent Organization: Communication as Its Site and Surface. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Author biography Gina Neff is an associate professor of communication at the University of Washington and at the School of Public Policy at Central European University. She is author of Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries (MIT Press, 2012) and co-editor of the collection Surviving the New Economy (Paradigm, 2007), which addresses workplace changes across news and media industries.

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Article

Journalism 2015, Vol. 16(1) 79–98 Infoboxes and cleanup © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: tags: Artifacts of Wikipedia sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1464884914545739 newsmaking jou.sagepub.com

Heather Ford University of Oxford, UK

Abstract Wikipedians use a number of editorial elements, including infoboxes and cleanup tags to coordinate work in the first stage of articles related to breaking news topics. When inserted into an article, these objects are intended to simultaneously notify editors about missing or weak elements of the article and to add articles to particular categories of work. This categorization practice enables editors to collaborate iteratively with one another because each object signals work that needs to be done by others in order to fill in the gaps of the current content. In addition to this functional value, however, categorization also has a number of symbolic and political consequences. Editors are engaged in a continual practice of iterative summation that contributes to an active construction of the event as it happens rather than a mere assembling of ‘reliable sources’. The deployment and removal of cleanup tags can be seen as an act of power play between editors that affects readers’ evaluation of the article’s content. Infoboxes are similar sites of struggle whose deployment and development result in an erasure of the contradictions and debates that gave rise to them. These objects illuminate how this novel journalistic practice has important implications for the way that political events are represented.

Keywords User-generated content, participatory media, journalism practice, Wikipedia, materiality, power, actor networks, socio-technical systems

Constructing news narratives Journalism is in the process of being re-imagined as the number and variety of journalistic sources continues to multiply. This re-imagining is being driven both by traditional news organizations that are starting to incorporate participatory journalism aspects into their

Corresponding author: Heather Ford, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, 1 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3JS, UK. Email: [email protected]

Downloaded Downloadedfrom http://www.elearnica.ir from jou.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on December 27, 2014 80 Journalism 16(1) work (Deuze et al., 2007) and by amateur media workers, technologists, and institutions such as governments and non-governmental organizations becoming key players in the business of producing news (Powers, 2014). In this changing environment, there is a growing blurring of boundaries between what constitutes journalists, journalism, and the media (Mitchelstein and Boczkowski, 2009). Participatory journalism, also known as networked (Jarvis, 2006), open-source (Deuze, 2001), or citizen journalism (Goode, 2009), is defined by Deuze et al. (2007) as ‘any kind of newswork at the hands of professionals and amateurs, of journalists and citizens, and of users and producers benchmarked by what Yochai Benkler calls commons- based peer production’ (p. 323). The promise of participatory journalism is that it will enable ‘the people, formerly known as the audience’ (Rosen, 2006) to sidestep traditional gatekeepers of the news so that they can narrate their own stories. Wikipedia is often provided as a poster child of this promise. According to Dan Gillmor (2008), Wikipedia is an example of a wave of citizen journalism projects initiated at the turn of the century in which ‘news was being produced by regular people who had something to say and show, and not solely by the “official” news organizations that had traditionally decided how the first draft of history would look’ (Gillmor, 2008: x). For Benkler (2007), a project like Wikipedia

enables many more individuals to communicate their observations and their viewpoints to many others, and to do so in a way that cannot be controlled by media owners and is not as easily corruptible by money as were the mass media. (p. 11)

Although Wikipedia opens up its representations to the authorship of many more individuals, this does not necessarily result in a less restrictive environment for the development of diverse narratives about the world. Researchers have found that articles about cities, towns, and regions still reproduce traditional asymmetries in the representation of place (Graham, 2011), that Wikipedia’s coverage of history suffers from an overreli- ance on foreign government sources (Luyt, 2011) and that there are significant gender- associated imbalances in its topic coverage (Lam et al., 2011). These asymmetries are often attributed to a lack of editors from certain groups (Graham, 2011) or a culture that is alienating to certain groups (Reagle, 2013), but there is less analysis of how the tools and practices that Wikipedians employ may have a significant bearing on the narratives that dominate the encyclopedia. In this article, I start to address this gap by examining the tools and practices that Wikipedians use to construct a single narrative about a political event (what journalism scholars have traditionally called ‘news’). I look, in particular, at two types of Wikipedia tools: infoboxes and cleanup tags that were used extensively in the ‘Egyptian Revolution of 2011’ Wikipedia English article. Infoboxes are summary tables on the right-hand side of an article that enable readability and quick reference, while cleanup tags are notices at the head of an article, warning readers and editors of specific problems with articles. By discussing the use of these tools in the context of Bowker and Star’s (2000) theories of classification, I argue that these tools are not only material but also conceptual and symbolic. They facilitate collaboration by enabling users to fill in details according to a pre-defined set of categories and by catalyzing notices that alert others to the work that

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on December 27, 2014 Ford 81 they believe needs to be done on the article. Their power, however, cannot only be seen in terms of their functional value. These artifacts are deployed and removed as acts of social and strategic power play among Wikipedia editors who each want to influence the narrative about what happened and why it happened. Infoboxes and tabular elements arise as clean, simple, well-referenced numbers out of the messiness and conflict that gave rise to them. When cleanup tags are removed, the article develops an implicit authority, appearing to rise above uncertainty, power struggles, and the impermanence of the compromise that it originated from.

Wikipedia, journalism, and non-routine work The majority of Wikipedia research by journalism scholars has focused on traditional media’s experimentation with wiki technologies and processes (see, for instance, Bradshaw, 2007 and Glaser, 2004) or traditional media’s use of Wikipedia as a source (by Lih, 2004; Messner and South, 2011, for example), but there is still little research on Wikipedia’s coverage of breaking news as a serious journalistic endeavor. A notable exception is the work of Brian Keegan (2013) on the history of Wikipedia’s coverage of breaking news topics, the rapid growth of breaking news articles as a proportion of the entire corpus (Keegan et al., 2013), and the large-scale network dynamics of breaking news articles (Keegan et al., 2013). Although Keegan’s work effectively demonstrates a big picture perspective on Wikipedia breaking newswork, we still know little about the practices that structure the narratives it produces. One of the defining features of the work processes related to Wikipedia articles is the vast quantity of automated and semi-automated tools that are used to coordinate work on the platform. Over the 13 years of Wikipedia’s existence, volunteer editors have created templates, bots, statistics, and snippets of code – some that are automatically triggered by a particular user action, others that become part of normative practice over time. These tools are used by Wikipedians under the framework of its ‘Neutral Point of View’ (NPOV) policy to form an assemblage of components that must be examined together to understand how Wikipedians are able to rapidly collaborate to produce a single narrative in environments of high variability. Two articles published in 2010 emphasize the role of objects – particular automated objects or ‘bots’ (short for robots) in the smooth functioning of Wikipedia. Niederer and van Dijck (2010) expose the increasingly important role of bots in the rise of Wikipedia, arguing that it is impossible to understand Wikipedia’s response to vandalism without an appreciation of the encyclopedia as a socio-technical system driven by collaboration between users and bots. Geiger and Ribes (2010) demonstrate the role of non-human actors in the process of vandal banning, arguing that the decentralized activity enabled by automated and semi-automated tools is a type of ‘distributed cognition’ that delegates important moral decisions about what should be included and excluded from the encyclopedia to non-human actors. More recently, Geiger (2014) has examined the role of ‘bespoke code’ on Wikipedia in supporting and structuring work and by algorithmically enacting a particular vision of what encyclopedia is and ought to be. Geiger (2014) defines bespoke code as ‘a software code that runs alongside a platform or system, in contrast to code that is integrated into server-side

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on December 27, 2014 82 Journalism 16(1) codebases and runs on the same servers that host the platform or system’ (p. 3) and describes a range of bespoke coded tools, such as bots, semi-automated tools, and templates, urging others to continue to emphasize the ‘concrete, material, local, and specific conditions that make projects like Wikipedia operate in the manner that they do’ (p. 12). It is two of these bespoke coded objects (infoboxes and cleanup tags) that this study focuses on.

This study In order to understand how a narrative is constructed in the context of a rapidly evolving news article on Wikipedia, I look at the development of the ‘Egyptian Revolution of 2011’ article on English Wikipedia, with a particular focus on some of the bespoke coded objects that editors used in developing the narrative as events progressed. I chose this case because its subject is situated outside the main frame of reference of the majority of English Wikipedia’s mostly Western editors, creating the potential for a wide diversity of viewpoints to be exhibited in the article’s construction. I employed a ‘trace ethnographic’ (Geiger and Ribes, 2011) approach to studying grounded practices of the ‘2011 Egyptian Revolution’ Wikipedia article. Geiger and Ribes call this technique ‘trace ethnography’ because the researcher is able to reconstruct a social situation by observing the traces left by Wikipedians in pursuing their work and craft these traces into rich, thick descriptions (Geertz, 1994) of the process of the article’s construction. Trace ethnography combines deep ethnographic understanding of practice through participation in a particular community with the ability to reas- semble social action using the traces that participants leave when navigating Wikipedia’s socio-technical spaces. I supplemented this detailed examination of traces by interviewing four frequent editors of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution article. I selected editors who were the most frequent contributors to the article and its talk pages and interviewed those who responded positively to my email invitations and to introductions by fellow interviewees. These interviews served not only to verify my perceptions about what happened during the time of the events in Egypt, but also added information necessary for me to develop a rich description of the article’s construction process. My use of trace ethnography in this instance is informed by about 10 years of involvement in the Wikipedia community as an advisory board member of the Wikimedia Foundation, educator, activist and, only more recently, as an editor. In this study, I chose to focus on the objects used directly in the shaping of articles relating to breaking news of political events in order to understand how the Wikipedia assemblage resulted in the particular narrative that it did in the context of rapidly evolving information. Looking at these mundane artifacts provides an opportunity to understand what work these objects are doing for editors and for Wikipedia as a whole – an understanding of how ‘individuals and communities meet infrastructure’ (Bowker and Star, 2000: 22). Such an understanding was obtained by engaging in what Bowker and Star (2000) call ‘infrastructural inversion – learning to look closely at technologies and arrangements that, by design and by habit, tend to fade into the woodwork’ (p. 34). This ‘close looking’ involved a detailed observation of the first 24 hours of edits of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution article, reconstructing an account of what happened by analyzing ‘diffs’ (two versions of an article with their differences highlighted), and

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on December 27, 2014 Ford 83 following discussions about templates and other objects that were employed during this time. I then used grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006, 2013) to analyze the 100+ pages of ‘talk’ during the next 18 days leading up to the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak on the 11 February 2011. I did this by developing an iterative coding scheme according to questions about what was happening in the data and following up on related edits and related articles about the use and development of tools used in the article. It was important not only to analyze data specifically within the frame of the article, but to follow up on discussions relating to the deployment and removal of particular artifacts, their relation to policy, and a host of other ‘process’ documents since these conversations form such an integral part of Wikipedia’s socio-technical space. I looked at the first 2 weeks because this is when editorial elements were chosen and stabilized – acting to frame the narrative of the page, classify it into a particular category of event, and display relevant warning signs. In this study, I focus on two objects that have particularly important implications in the construction of articles relating to breaking news: cleanup tags and infoboxes. Cleanup tags and infoboxes are two types of Wikipedia’s bespoke coded ‘templates’. These templates consist of snippets of code that are used across a variety of pages and include boilerplate messages, standard warnings or notices, cleanup tags, infoboxes, and navigational boxes. Cleanup tags are specialized templates that are appended to the head of an article by editors who wish to alert editors and readers about particular changes that need to be made to the article. An example is the ‘copyedit’ tag that appends a notice about the state of the article and a request for assistance:

This article may require copy editing for grammar, style, cohesion, tone, or spelling. You can assist by editing it.

In practice, cleanup tags have the dual function of warning users about potential weaknesses of the content and alerting editors in particular work groups or ‘WikiProjects’ (Morgan et al., 2013) about the existence of new content or new work to be done. According to best practice, cleanup tags should be temporary, not permanent, and they should be accompanied by explanations on the article’s talk page about what the problem is and how it might be fixed. Editors are discouraged from using tags to perform ‘tag bombing’ (adding numerous tags to pages or one tag to multiple pages unjustifiably) or from employing tags to show that they disagree with the article. In practice, however, editors do sometimes use these methods for subtly voicing their disagreement. Because any editor has the ability to add (or remove) a cleanup tag to an article, this act is the equivalent to a TV viewer being able to add warning messages about the accuracy of the content before others watch it. An infobox template, such as the infobox template for a ‘news event’, is a type of template formatted around a particular set of categories that provide summary details of articles with a common subject. According to the infobox help page (Wikipedia authors, 2013a), Wikipedia’s infoboxes grew out of so-called taxoboxes (taxonomy infoboxes) that users developed to visually express the scientific classification of organisms. Today, infoboxes are used for a wide variety of topics – from mathematics to history and events, and from arts and culture to science and nature.

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Figure 1. An early version of the infobox used in the 2011 Egyptian Revolution article on Wikipedia (11 February 2011).1

These elements played an important role in the development of the article dedicated to documenting the events, reasons, and responses of the protests that occurred in Egypt in early 2011 (Figure 1).

‘The 2011 Egyptian Revolution’ article Day 0: 24 January 2011 A day before major protests were scheduled in Egypt, Egyptian Wikipedia editor, The_ Egyptian_Liberal (or ‘AB’ as he called himself in the interview) prepared an article

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on December 27, 2014 Ford 85 entitled ‘2011 Egyptian Protests’ for posting the next day. Although Egyptian local media as well as blogs and social media were publishing news stories about calls for protest on National Police Day in Egypt the next day, there were few stories in the international media covering planned events. The_Egyptian_Liberal, who was a university student at the time, believed that the protests the next day would be significant.

AB: I thought the thing was going to be big … before the revolution became a revolution. Two days before I thought: this is going to be big. HF: Why did you think that? AB: The frustration in the street. And especially what happened in Tunisia. There were a few self-immolations in Egypt that weren’t covered in the media and by bloggers as much as Bouazizi in Tunisia. When people set themselves on fire you know something is seriously wrong with the society you live in. (Interview, October 2012)

The_Egyptian_Liberal was not the only person to edit the article under that username. For security reasons, three other people were editing the article from the same account during events in Egypt in the following days:

During the revolution it was not only me editing from the page. I had different people who didn’t have an account on Wikipedia who wanted to edit Wikipedia especially at the time of the revolution they really wanted to help. So we were three different people with different writing styles … Two that were helping most were not Egyptian. (Interview, October 2012)

In the following weeks and months in which the article developed, The_Egyptian_ Liberal, as the only significant Egyptian editor of the article, played a major leadership role, forming alliances with other key editors and spurring editors to keep working as media attention died down.

Day 1: 25 January 2011 (first day of the protests) The_Egyptian_Liberal published the article on English Wikipedia on the afternoon of what would become a wave of protests that would lead to the unseating of President Hosni Mubarak. A template was used to insert the ‘uprising’ infobox to house summarized information about the event including fields for its ‘characteristics’, the number of injuries, and fatalities. This template was chosen from a range of other infoboxes relating to history and events on Wikipedia, but has since been deleted in favor of the more recently developed ‘civil conflict’ infobox with fields for ‘causes’, ‘methods’, and ‘results’ (Figure 2). The first draft included the terms ‘demonstration’, ‘riot’, and ‘self-immolation’ in the ‘characteristics’ field and was illustrated by the Latuff cartoon of Khaled Mohamed Saeed and Hosni Mubarak, with the caption ‘Khaled Mohamed Saeed holding up a tiny, flailing, stone-faced Hosni Mubarak’. Khaled Mohamed Saeed was a young Egyptian man who was beaten to death reportedly by Egyptian security forces and the subject of the Facebook group ‘We are all Khaled Said’ moderated by Wael Ghonim that contributed to

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Figure 2. Infobox from the first version of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution (then ‘Protests’) article.1 the growing discontent in the weeks leading up to 25 January 2011. The infobox would ideally have been a filled by a photograph of the protests, but the cartoon was used because the article was uploaded so soon after the first protests began. It also has significant emo- tive power and clearly represented the perspective of the crowd of anti-Mubarak demon- strators in the first protests. Upon its publication, three prominent cleanup tags were automatically appended to the head of the article. These included the ‘new unreviewed article’ tag, the ‘expert in politics needed’ tag, and the ‘current event’ tag, warning readers that information on the page may change rapidly as events progress (Figure 3). These three lines of code that constituted the cleanup tags initiated a complex distribution of tasks to different groups of users located in work groups throughout the site: page patrollers, subject experts, and those interested in current events. The first tag was automatically appended to the article when it was created using the ‘Article Wizard’, a series of forms that takes new editors through the process of creating an article. This was the first (and perhaps the most significant) challenge faced by the article. As soon as an article is published on Wikipedia, it is added to a list of unreviewed articles watched by page patrollers who then review the article and determine whether it qualifies for speedy deletion, whether it should be nominated for deletion (involving a

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Figure 3. The three cleanup tags automatically appended to the article when it was published at 13:27 UTC on 25 January 2011.1 more lengthy, consultative process), or whether it should be allowed to continue. Administrators are able to speedily delete an article without consensus on a number of grounds, including for copyright violations or ‘no indication of importance’. Over half of deleted articles are deleted via this process, with the rest determined by the more lengthy process where regular editors are able to nominate an article for deletion and have a discussion about whether it should remain (Geiger and Ford, 2011). Editors working on Wikipedia’s ‘new pages patrol’ are presented with a list of new articles tagged with red alerts if an article has no categories, no citations, or is not linked to any other articles in Wikipedia. This article contained one reference to a mainstream news source, Agence France-Presse (AFP) that described how Egypt was bracing for a day of nationwide anti-government protests, ‘with organisers counting on the Tunisian uprising to inspire crowds to mobilise for political and economic reforms’ (AFP, 2011). The article also linked to other Wikipedia articles and contained a list of categories including ‘Riots in Egypt’ and ‘2011 in Egypt’. It is entirely possible that this article could have been removed for attempting to ‘forecast’ the future by including a citation that reported only what was expected to happen and not what did, in fact, happen. Wikipedia attempts to prevent writing about events too soon and before their significance is recognized. This is expressed in the policies entitled ‘Wikipedia is not a crystal ball’ and ‘Wikipedia is not a newspaper’ (Wikipedia authors, 2014). The second cleanup tag (that help was needed from an expert in politics) alerted users in the WikiProject Politics group to the existence of the article when it appeared in a list of other articles seeking assistance from WikiProject participants. The third cleanup tag (‘current related’) alerted users to the rapidly developing nature of information on the page and added the article to the category of pages entitled ‘current events’. Despite the existence of these warning tags, the article endured, as mainstream media started to report on what was becoming a significant protest. As the day progressed, The_Egyptian_Liberal continued to fill out the ‘Background’ section of the article, listing individuals who had set themselves on fire in protest against worsening economic conditions, and adding to the growing list of references. About 2 hours later another editor joined him, removing the ‘new article’ template and ‘political expert’ needed tag, improving the grammar, adding links to other Wikipedia articles, and listing relevant categories. The actions of these two editors at the beginning stages of its development were crucial in solidifying the long-term future of the article.

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Days 2–4: 26–28 January 2011 Protests continued to spread throughout Egypt and the death count rose to seven. By this stage, editors who would become the article’s main contributors and coordinators had joined the article. The majority of these editors were American or lived in the United States at the time of the protests. They included Ocaasi, SilverSeren, Aude, and Lihaas. These editors joined The_Egyptian_Liberal in coordinating work on the talk page, medi- ating disputes, and discussing the overall trajectory of the article and others relating or spinning off from it. Some of these editors had worked together on articles before, and they quickly settled into a routine, falling into roles based on their strengths and expertise in relation to one another and to the needs of the article. Many of them were avidly watching the live feed of events on Al Jazeera English TV as they edited, and editors would edit in informal shifts in order to cover events as they progressed in Egypt. Ocaasi and The_Egyptian_ Liberal formed a partnership in leading work on the page. Ocaasi is a native English speaker and had seriously started editing Wikipedia a few years before. The_Egyptian_ Liberal is not a native English speaker but, as the only significant Egyptian contributor and with connections to important political players in Egypt, he was able to play a key role in highlighting who was notable in the new political environment and to verify information that required contextual knowledge:

We developed a highly symbiotic relationship. (The_Egyptian_Liberal) knew who was an important in Egypt… he had the connections while I had the ability to research and write particularly well in English. (Interview with Ocaasi, October 2012)

Aude was a seasoned Wikipedian who had lived in Egypt before and had some knowledge of the political context there. She maintained a list of reliable sources on her talk page, chimed in on debates, and coordinated attempts to get Al Jazeera to license their photographs under Creative Commons, when the editors were struggling to find openly licensed images. SilverSeren was a university student at the time who worked on finding sources, verifying information, and contributing to debates on the talk page. Lihaas contributed significantly to the talk pages and was a frequent editor of the article.

Days 5–8: 29 January–1 February 2011 As widespread protests continued in Egypt and the death toll rose to at least 100, the position of the army continued to be ambiguous. Soldiers were ordered to use live ammunition but refused and protest groups gave their support to ElBaradei to negotiate the formation of a temporary national unity government. Wikipedia editor, Knockledgekid87, nominated the article for a ‘POV (point of view) check’ by inserting the NPOV tag into the article. He alerted editors in the talk page as to the rationale for the tag by arguing that Carlos Latuff’s political cartoons, used to illustrate the article, ‘seem(ed) to side with the protesters’ (Wikipedia authors, 2013b). Other editors proceeded to argue against the presence of the tag and then to discuss possible compromises.

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Ocaasi wrote that merely adding pro-Mubarak cartoons to balance the pro-protester images could not solve the problem since the format of political cartoons lent themselves to a particularly popular perspective. ‘Political cartoons’, he wrote, ‘don’t usually side with oppressive regimes’. After conceding to the request by replacing most of the cartoons with photographs of the protests (Figure 4), Ocaasi removed the tag at 04:55 UTC on the 29 February, writing in his edit summary,

removing NPOV check tag. most issues resolved. no ongoing disputes on talk. npov will continually be checked and improved, but no obvious issues warranting the tag.

Later, the same day, Michaelzeng7 added the ‘news release tag’ warning (Figure 5) that the article ‘reads like a news release, or is otherwise written in an overly promotional tone’ and pointed to the ‘Wikipedia is not a newspaper’ section of the ‘What Wikipedia is not’ policy (Wikipedia authors, 2013b). This policy indicates that ‘Wikipedia should not offer first-hand news reports on breaking stories’ and that, although ‘editors are encouraged to include current and up-to-date information within its coverage, and to develop standalone articles on significant current events’, not all newsworthy events ‘qualify for inclusion’ (Wikipedia authors, 2014). Ocaasi responded on the talk page that editors were already dealing with the problems indicated by the tag and that it was therefore unnecessary. He wrote that editors were ‘trying to integrate a ton of new information in an encyclopedic way already’ and that he would ‘vote to ignore all rules while they worked it out’. ‘Ignore all rules’ (IAR) is one of three Wikipedia ‘principles’ that states, ‘If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it’ (Wikipedia authors, 2013c). IAR has a controversial history vis-a-vis the encyclopedia because it has been used by some editors to disrupt Wikipedia in the past (Ford, 2013). Here, it was being used to try and counter what was seen as a rebuke to the work of editors.

Day 9: 2 February 2011 In central Cairo, Mubarak supporters on horses and camels armed with swords, clubs, stones attacked anti-government protesters in what was later known as the ‘Battle of the Camel’. Keeping track of death counts in the article had been an issue of contention before this day but it came to a head when anonymous user, 94.246.150.168 (Internet Protocol (IP) address resolves to Poland), complained that numbers of dead in the article contradicted numbers in the table (Figure 6) and that the table should be removed. The editors argued about whether the table should be moved or kept in the main article, with some com- plaining that editors might be doing ‘original reporting’ by synthesizing data from a number of sources. ‘Original research’ is forbidden by Wikipedia policy and defined as ‘material – such as facts, allegations, and ideas – for which no reliable, published sources exist’ (Wikipedia authors, 2013d). The Poland-based user 94.246.150.168 continued to complain about ‘outdated figures’ in the tables, the fact the numbers did not add up and that they were different from what reliable sources were reporting. The argument about the validity of the table reached

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Figure 4. The existence of the ‘POV’ tag resulted in all cartoons (except for the cartoon of Mubarak ‘pulling the plug on the Internet’) to be removed.1

Figure 5. News release tag warning.1

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Figure 6. A death count table from the 13:11 UTC, 31 January 2011 version of the ‘2011 Egyptian Revolution’ article.1 breaking point when The_Egyptian_Liberal wrote that these death counts were more than just numbers in a table:

Listen dude, I honestly cant be bothered fighting with you. I have family in Egypt that I am worried sick about. The last time I checked the numbers it said the total was 149 in the table. We can make sure it stat(e)s the right numbers. A lot of people come to Wiki to know how many people have died where their family lives (due) to the lack of communication in Egypt. so keep that in mind.

The ‘fatalities’ category was a constant issue of contention since there was no one source that had a complete list of casualties and editors had to stitch together a number of sources as the numbers rapidly increased. Poland-based editor 94.246.150.168 argued against using the wording ‘confirmed death toll’ when sources were reporting ‘unofficial esti- mates’ due to ‘confusion on the streets’. S/he also noted the difficulty of deciding which deaths should be directly attributed to the protests since there were also deaths relating to looting and jailbreaks that occurred at the same time. Lihaas countered,

Absolutely it should be included, prison deaths too, because they are a result of the protests and what goes on now. Sure someone who gets a heart attack fishing on the nile wont be, but then again that would never be in any source so it wont be included.

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As with the majority of disagreements that occurred in the writing of the article, these interactions centered on disagreements on how to classify: whether deaths attributed to looting, for example, should be included in the death toll for the protests as a whole. Disagreement was tense and extremely personal when the significance of these numbers surfaced; these were not only numbers on a page but deeply affected the lives of those who were personally affected by the story.

Days 10–17: 3–10 February 2011 By the second week of major protests, there was still a heavy military presence in Cairo but Interior Ministry stated that the army remained neutral. Lihaas wrote on the talk page that the infobox had been changed from a ‘civil conflict’ to a ‘military conflict’ template and wondered aloud whether it was ‘too soon’ for this change. The ‘military conflict’ infobox (sometimes referred to as a ‘warbox’) on Wikipedia is used for conflicts including ‘a battle, campaign, war, or group of related wars’, whereas examples for the ‘civil conflict’ infobox includes what editors deem a ‘protest, clash with police etc’. The insertion of this infobox reflected growing concerns about whether the military was siding with the government against protesters. This was a subtle attempt to change the classification of the event from a conflict between the public and the government to a conflict driven by the military. Wikipedians recognized that classification of the article was significant – even if only through this subtle means – and so, after some discussion, the infobox was reverted back to the ‘civil conflict’ infobox template.

Day 18: 11 February 2011 onward In the second instance of what had been called the ‘Friday of Departure’ by the opposition movement, there was an escalation of protests, with the presidential palace, parliament, and state TV buildings remaining surrounded by protestors. Mubarak and his family reportedly left the palace by helicopter headed for Sharm el-Sheikh and Vice President, Omar Suleiman announced after 18:00 Cairo time that the presidency had been vacated and that the army council would run the country. Mubarak’s resignation was followed by nationwide celebrations. Soon after the resignation announcement, editors conducted a poll on whether to change the title of the article from ‘protests’ to ‘revolution’ as it was already being continually changed and then reverted by other editors. The result of the extensive poll in which a number of editors added their voice to the decision (some bringing extensive lists of references to mainstream media sources that were calling events in Egypt a ‘revolution’) was a decision to move the article to ‘2011 Egyptian Revolution’. On Wikipedia, articles can be found using different titles but they must resolve to a single title. In this case, searching for 2011 Egyptian protests will take users to the article now entitled ‘Egyptian revolution of 2011’. By about March 2011, edits to the article had stabilized. As of 10 April 2014, there have been 7765 edits to the article with almost 2000 distinct authors.

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Discussion

Looking at the diffs in the first day of the article’s growth, it becomes clear that the article is by no means a ‘blank slate’ that editors fill progressively with prose. Much of the activity in the first stage of the article’s development consisted of editors inserting markers or frames in the article that acted to prioritize and distribute work. Cleanup tags alerted others about what they believed to be priorities (to improve weak sections or provide political expertise, for example), while infoboxes and tables provided frames for editors to fill in details iteratively as new information became available. The act of inserting an infobox with categories that require updating as the event progresses, or cleanup tags alerting editors to the weaknesses of the article sets off a number of signals to editors about what work needs to be done on an article. The choice of the ‘uprising’ infobox, for example, provided the frame for other editors to understand the context of the event so that they could use their knowledge of this particular type of event to fill out the details of the article. The modularity of infoboxes in particular enables faster distributed collaboration among editors with varying levels of subject expertise. Editors can look for specific missing information such as casualty numbers without knowing too much about the current affairs of Egypt, for example. In addition, infoboxes’ modularity has proven particularly useful in helping to coordinate translation into other language Wikipedias. These simply summarized tables have meant that ‘repeated items can be more easily translated, rather than having to interpret long sentences with complex verb and clause structures’ (Wikipedia authors, 2012). Translating an infobox that starts with the category ‘population’ requires a single noun translation – something that can be achieved much more easily than a complex sentence about the population of a particular country. This modularity has driven the recent Wikimedia Foundation initiative, WikiData, which aims to develop a semantic approach to Wikipedia infoboxes by being able to populate, alter, and translate data from a central location. Infoboxes are examples of Wikipedia editing tools that enable the kind of rapid collaborative editing seen in articles relating to breaking news events. These tools are, however, not only material but also conceptual and symbolic (Bowker and Star, 2000). Their symbolic power is exposed when information resists categorization such as when editors were trying to combat the fact that composite figures were not yet available in the form the infobox or casualty tables required. Taken far from its origins in taxoboxes, the inad- equacies of the infobox were exposed when The_Egyptian_Liberal revealed in a moment of frustration what this was really about: not numbers, but people – people who were dying and families who were worrying about those ‘back home in Egypt’. Classification work, as Bowker and Star argue, is intensely political. And much of Wikipedia work, especially in the beginning stages, is classificatory. A key principle of Wikipedia editing is that each article be linked to other Wikipedia articles and to the Web. According to Bowker and Star, ‘every link in hypertext creates a category. That is, it reflects some judgment about two or more objects: they are the same, or alike, or func- tionally linked, or linked as part of an unfolding series’ (Bowker and Star, 2000: 7). The editing of Wikipedia articles involves continuous linking and classifying. Alternative article titles are linked together by virtue of being automatically redirected to

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on December 27, 2014 94 Journalism 16(1) the primary title (‘2011 Egyptian Protests’, the earlier title, now redirects to the new title ‘Egyptian Revolution of 2011’, for example). The choice of words and phrases classifies the subject of the article according to particular classes of event (such as ‘protest’, ‘uprising’, ‘revolution’, or ‘military intervention’) and editors list other articles they believe are related in the ‘See also’ section (linking the article to the Algerian and Tunisian protests in the first version). They also link to categories of articles in the list of categories at the foot of the page (including ‘2011 riots’ and ‘riots in Egypt’, for example). In the same way that classification work is embedded into the fabric of everyday life, classification work on Wikipedia is similarly embedded and thus ordinarily invisible. As Bowker and Star argue, these standards and classifications only usually become visible when they break down or become objects of contention. The title of the Egyptian Revolution article, for example, endured much debate, with editors arguing whether to call the events a ‘protest’, ‘uprising’, or ‘revolution’, among others. Editors also complained about the way in which editors were ‘forecasting the future’ with the use of the future tense in the article. One editor complained early on about the opening phrase of the article that stated protests took place ‘from January onwards’ when it was still January. S/he complained that the article was written as though it was predicting the future with phrases weighing up relative scale of events when the significance could not have been foreseen. Transparency is an important axis of control in Wikipedia articles – especially in the first phase of their development. It is at this stage that editors leading the direction of the page were engaged in a contest with those who were questioning the quality of the article using cleanup tags. Editors continuously added cleanup tags relating to the instability of the article due to its current event status and what they believed to be attacks against NPOV at a time when the article was highly unstable. Cleanup tags were consistently removed because editors argued that they ‘were already working on the issues’ noted in the tags. Yet the removal of such tags to the casual reader may give the illusion of a return to stability before such stability had been reached. In the context of this article, battle over the visibility of cleanup tags could be seen as reflective of personal battles between editors, and less about warning readers of possible problems. This illusion grows steadily with time as infoboxes and tabular elements with their clean, well-referenced numbers, and short, simple phrases develop an implicit authority – erasing the earlier resistance to the tabular form. Like Bowker and Star’s analysis of the International Classification of Diseases, these translated tables and infoboxes can be read as ‘a kind of treaty, a bloodless set of numbers obscuring the behind-the-scenes battles informing its creation’ and that ‘this dryness itself contains an implicit authority, appearing to rise above uncertainty, power struggles, and the impermanence of the compromises’ (Bowker and Star, 2000: 66). When infoboxes and tables are translated, they lose their link to the messiness that gave rise to their initial development. This messiness is parallel to the struggle to turn competing voices (sources) into a single, clean narrative on Wikipedia. Such messiness resulted in some battles being waged and won – not necessarily because of any particular merit on grounds of truth or even accuracy, but because it made more sense for the rapid development of the article. In many ways, the opportunity for such battles is lost as time goes on since it is much more difficult to shift information when it becomes lodged in the tight tabular form.

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The appearance and disappearance of cleanup tags and the development of infoboxes facilitate the kind of rapid collaboration Wikipedia is becoming known for but they have two important political effects. The first is the potential of obscuring the battles fought behind the scenes of an article when cleanup tags are removed and infoboxes translated. The second is that these objects also contain an implicit authority – appearing to rise above uncertainty, power struggles, and the impermanence of the compromise that originated the information contained by them.

Conclusion Wikipedians use a number of technological tools to coordinate work on the encyclopedia. Cleanup tags set in motion a number of specialized work routines and warn users about the instability of the article, while infoboxes provide spaces for iterative work by editors who may not possess in-depth subject knowledge but who are able to more easily fill in the spaces provided by editors leading the overall direction of the article. In addition to enabling rapid collaboration, however, these artifacts also have conceptual and symbolic effects. Cleanup tags, when removed, give an illusion of stability before such stability may have been achieved. Infoboxes lend information a degree of authority by their material form, legitimating certain knowledges at the expense of others. This has the effect of erasing information’s messiness as the ‘spill over’ of excluded knowledges loses their connection to the process that enabled their classification – especially in the case of translations. When this happens in the realm of a rapidly developing article about a political event, it has a significant effect on framing the narrative of what happened and why. When the event is still ongoing and the stakes are high, these tools can have enormous political effects that remain invisible to both the average user who is unaware of the reasons that editorial elements are removed or added, as well as to the majority of editors who are looking for whether individual facts are accurate rather than whether they preclude or frame the narrative as a whole. While we may look to bots and other automated forms to observe the delegation of power to technology, these more mundane classification technologies may be as powerful and less visible. Because they are deeply embedded in daily practice, they require a close following of human editors in order to understand how editors achieve both material and symbolic effects by their choice of classification technologies and systems. As Bowker and Star note, classification works beyond the individual level of the individual ‘mind’. ‘Classifications as technologies are powerful artifacts that may link thousands of communities and span highly complex boundaries’ (Bowker and Star, 2000: 287). Rediscovering the messiness of their origin and exposing the communal nature of knowledge building highlights the ways in which what looks to be merely technical decisions almost always have social and political effects.

Acknowledgements Thank you to Gillian Bolsover, Eric Meyer, and the anonymous reviewers of this article for their invaluable comments and suggestions, and to the Wikipedians who I interviewed for their generos- ity and dedication.

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Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. The author’s PhD work is funded by the University of Oxford’s Clarendon Fund and the Desmond Tutu Award.

Note 1. All Wikipedia screenshots are licensed by the Wikimedia Foundation under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-sa/3.0/

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Author biography Heather Ford is a PhD student at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford where she studies how Wikipedians construct public accounts of history as it happens. She has worked as a researcher, activist, journalist, educator, and strategist in the fields of online collaboration, intellectual property reform, information privacy, and open-source software in South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

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Article

Journalism 2015, Vol. 16(1) 99–118 Blogging Back then: Annotative © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: journalism in I.F. Stone’s Weekly sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1464884914545740 and Talking Points Memo jou.sagepub.com

Lucas Graves University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA

Abstract This article develops the concept of ‘annotative journalism’ through a close review of two muckraking investigations, 50 years apart, by the newsletter I.F. Stone’s Weekly and the website Talking Points Memo. These cases stand out in hindsight as investigative coups, though neither relied on the tools we associate with that kind of journalism: anonymous sources, secret documents, and so on. Instead, both investigations proceeded mainly through the analysis of published texts, in particular news reports, in light of a wider media and political critique. Annotative journalism unsettles core practices and assumptions of objective reporting. It rejects narrative coherence in favor of a set of critical textual practices, revealing reporting routines to the reader and building explicit arguments from and about the work of other journalists. And it troubles the professional distinction between reporting and opinion; these ‘scoops’ came through, not in spite of, the politics of the journalists who worked on them.

Keywords Annotation, blogging, I.F. Stone, intertextuality, muckraking, objectivity

Introduction Online journalism in general, and blogging in particular, have invited frequent comparisons to earlier eras of journalism: to ancien regime France, to pre-revolutionary pam- phleteering, to the party press of the 19th century (e.g. Barlow, 2007; Darnton, 2010). This article proposes a very particular comparison, to a mid-century, muckraking newsletter, in order to highlight the material, textual practices of blogging as a form of

Corresponding author: Lucas Graves, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 821 University Avenue, Suite 5115, Madison, WI 53706, USA. Email: [email protected]

Downloaded fromDownloaded http://www.elearnica.ir from jou.sagepub.com at Cairo University on December 27, 2014 100 Journalism 16(1) newswork – one that defies customary distinctions between factual reporting and opinion or commentary. I call this annotative journalism, defined simply as journalism that proceeds mainly through the critical analysis of published texts, where those may be news accounts, official documents, or other material, publicly available texts.1 Annotative journalism is not simply investigative reporting, but rather a style of newswork that unearths new facts by publicly dissecting and comparing news accounts and other evidence through the lens of a wider media and political critique. This larger critical-political framework obviates the narrative coherence of conventional American news, so central to classic studies of news and newswork (e.g. Lule, 2001; Tuchman, 1978; Zelizer, 1992). The result is an ideological journalism which is nevertheless more transparent in important ways than its objective counterpart. It reveals reporting routines to the reader and builds explicit arguments both from and about the work of other journalists, making visible the intertextual nature of news production. The annotative journalism developed by a network of blogger–journalists over the last decade finds a remarkable precedent in the work of I.F. Stone, and especially in I.F. Stone’s Weekly, the newsletter he produced from January 1953 through the end of 1971. The muckraking tradition has often been seen as an antecedent of blogging (e.g. Barlow, 2007; Cohen, 2008; Rosenberg, 2009). The obvious parallel is that like the best- known blogger–journalists, Progressive-Era muckrakers did not strive to be dispassion- ate presenters of fact. Consider Lincoln Steffens’ (1904) frank disavowal of journalistic detachment, offered in the introduction to a collection of his essays on urban blight and corruption. ‘This is all very unscientific, but then, I am not a scientist. I am a journalist’, Steffens (1904) wrote, continuing,

I did not gather with indifference all the facts and arrange them patiently for permanent preservation and laboratory analysis. I did not want to preserve, I wanted to destroy the facts. My purpose was … to see if the shameful facts, spread out in all their shame, would not burn through our civic shamelessness and set fire to American pride. That was the journalism of it. I wanted to move and to convince. (p. 12)

But beyond that political parallel lies an important material one: the distinctive set of textual practices invited by a journalism that seeks ‘to move and convince’. Informed by the Progressive faith in science and reason, turn-of-the-century muckrakers practiced an evidence-driven, argument-building brand of reporting (Swados, 1962; Weinberg, 2001). They assembled facts and gathered documents on an unprecedented scale from diverse textual sources, including news accounts – data that gained coherence in the broader project of progressive political and economic reform.2 As Guttenplan (2009) writes, ‘it was the Populist critique of the economy that gave the facts so painstakingly assembled by the muckrakers their significance’ (p. 53). Stone learned his craft, in the 1930s, in newspapers which were the inheritors of that tradition. In his own weekly newsletter, free from the format and genre constraints of newspaper journalism, Stone married the muckrakers’ document-driven methods to an annotative style of presentation. What the following analysis of the Weekly will show is how a critical politics affords uncommon latitude in working with texts. Stone’s approach yielded a precursor of the transparent, fragmentary, and relentlessly intertextual style of news which has come into flower on the Internet.

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Method and literature This article illustrates annotative journalism through close study of two cases separated by a half-century. Both stand out in hindsight as major investigative coups, though neither relied on the tools we associate with that kind of journalism: anonymous sources, secret documents, ‘shoe-leather’ reporting, and so on. Instead, each investigation drew mainly on published reports in other news outlets. The first case is Stone’s exposure of a government conspiracy to misrepresent the results of a 1957 nuclear test in order to discredit opponents of such testing. (Another story Stone worked on, the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incidents, will be reviewed briefly.) The second major case is the award-winning work done by the blog Talking Points Memo (TPM) to uncover a ‘purge’ of federal prosecutors at the Justice Department in 2007. These two cases stand out, it has to be acknowledged. The news analysis and media criticism on news-related blogs do not usually lead to major investigative breakthroughs. Similarly, I.F. Stone’s newsletter (modeled on George Seldes’ In Fact of the 1940s, ‘an Antidote for Falsehood in the Daily Press’) mostly reacted to headlines and rarely broke news. At the same time, some of the reporting work described below would be familiar to any investigative journalist. This is why annotative journalism, in its complex, ecological relationship to traditional news, deserves closer attention. These cases highlight annotative techniques which have a long history outside of the journalistic mainstream and which are increasingly basic to the vocabulary of media production today – on blogs, in professional newsrooms, and across a wider news landscape that includes venues from Fox News to The Daily Show and Democracy Now!. This raises an important point: Not all blogs are the same. The boundaries of ‘blogging’, always contested, have only become murkier as traditional news organizations embrace the genre and as prominent blogs have professionalized and been incorporated into elite media-political networks. (This is one good reason for scholars to focus instead on categories of practice, such as annotative journalism.) This study takes TPM as emblematic of that class of news-and-politics blogs which has most interested journalism studies, for their practice as well as their critique of journalism. The site has been involved in several of blogging’s signature ‘scoops’ over the last decade and figures prominently in academic literature. The defining feature of this class of blogs for scholars has been their oppositional stance toward traditional news outlets, yielding a news discourse organized ‘around the idea of challenging mainstream journalism’ (Matheson, 2004: 452; Park, 2009). Many studies read this antagonism as an ideological challenge to journalism’s always-tenuous professional project (Lewis, 2012; Schudson and Anderson, 2009). In the same vein, scholars have seen traditional news outlets responding with efforts to ‘domesticate’ the new medium in a way that preserves professional norms and status (Domingo et al., 2008; Robinson, 2006; Singer, 2005). Blogging’s critique of journalism has invited an ecological approach to understanding its role in a wider news environment. Any number of studies point out that blogs engage in little primary reporting and instead rely on the work of other (especially elite) news outlets (e.g. Reese et al., 2007; Reich, 2008). Blogs have been assigned a downstream role in established models of political communication, engaging in ‘second-level

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at Cairo University on December 27, 2014 102 Journalism 16(1) agenda-setting’ which tells readers how to interpret the issues which journalists report on (Meraz, 2009; Murley and Roberts, 2006). They may operate not as gatekeepers but instead as ‘gatewatchers’ who publicize and prioritize stories from the body of news produced every day (Bruns, 2005: 17–23). At the same time, top bloggers can set the wider news agenda because ‘opinion-makers within the media’ take them seriously (Drezner and Farrell, 2008: 29–30). Anderson (2010) complicates the distinction between reporters, bloggers, and activists with his notion of ‘fact entrepreneurs’ who promote and shape a developing story in a local news ecosystem. Annotative journalism as conceived here fits squarely within this broader ecological understanding of newswork. In an early report on ‘participatory’ media, Bowman and Willis (2003) identified ‘annotative reporting’ that supplements a news account with a ‘point of view, angle or piece of information … missing from coverage in the mainstream media’ (pp. 34–35). However, annotation can do more than ‘supplement’ the news; as practiced over time, in the context of an unfolding story, annotative techniques may yield vital new information even in the absence of original reporting. As I argue elsewhere, news-related blogs have advanced major stories through a kind of ‘distributed news analysis’: Collectively they can act ‘as an engine for distilling and dissecting news accounts, testing them against one another and against established facts to solidify … the real, factual context for future news accounts’ (Graves, 2007). This study seeks to draw our attention to the material, textual practice of annotation as a kind of newswork. An annotation acts upon another text. It opens up a critical distance between two or more texts and constructs meaning by exploiting that distance. This textual awareness affords a particular economy of communication, visible in various annotative genres which have emerged historically. Thus, for instance, in medieval florilegia – collections of excerpts meant to serve as guides to a work, an author, or a topic – the mere fact of a passage’s selection, or its position within an anthology, conveys valuable information. Moss (1996) writes that florilegia ‘compose a signifying universe which is wholly literary, in which texts illuminate texts in a self-sufficient environment where dialectical inference and extra textual reference are only minimally necessary’ (p. 106). In the same way, annotation may structure an argument from news texts with the simple juxtaposition of clashing accounts or by adding an ironic headline to a copied passage – a favorite tactic of bloggers (and of programs like The Daily Show) also applied in Stone’s Weekly. Annotation runs counter to the narrative logic of conventional reporting. Emile Benveniste writes that ‘the objectivity of narrative is defined by the absence of all reference to the narrator … Here no one speaks. The events seem to tell themselves’ (quoted in White, 1980: 7). This sense of narrativity underlies Tuchman’s (1978) notion of the self-validating ‘webs of facticity’ produced in objective news accounts. In contrast, annotative journalism is critical, evaluating and assessing news texts within a larger normative framework. It thus challenges traditional journalism’s constantly reinforced distinction between original reporting and opinion or comment. The cases reviewed below will illustrate how annotative reporting, by juxtaposing and dissecting news texts, may unearth new facts, drive a story forward, and even yield decisive scoops. Both cases highlight an intertextuality that is deeply unsettling to objective news accounts in which the facts seem to speak for themselves.

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I.F. Stone and the nuclear testing controversy Two episodes from Stone’s career will illustrate how the Weekly married document- driven muckraking to the newsletter format in a way that anticipated the annotative journalism practiced online today. The first, which Stone would call ‘the biggest scoop I ever got’ and the best illustration of his reporting style, was the Weekly’s unmasking of an official campaign to discredit the nuclear test-ban movement – and to forestall a resump- tion of US–Soviet talks over a ban – with misleading seismic data. (Accounts of this episode are in Alterman, 1988; Bruck, 1973; Guttenplan, 2009; Patner, 1988.) Opponents of banning nuclear tests, led by Dr Edward Teller, had argued that the Soviets would be able to cheat by testing weapons in secret, underground. On 6 March 1958, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) gave ammunition to those arguments by publishing the results of the first US underground nuclear test, carried out in Nevada the previous September. The AEC report claimed seismologists had not been able to detect the blast beyond a radius of about 250 miles – far less than the roughly 600 miles between ‘seismic listening posts’ that Moscow had tentatively agreed to. In a matter of days, however, Stone’s reporting would force the AEC to retract its claim. The most remarkable feature of this reporting coup is that Stone accomplished it using only public documents and news reports. National reporters had been invited to Nevada to cover the underground test in September 1957. The New York Times reported from Las Vegas that the test ‘seemed to have conformed with predictions of A. E. C. scientists that the explosion would not be detectable more than a few hundred miles away’ (Hill, 1957). As Stone would later explain, however, his edition of the Times included a tiny ‘shirt-tail’ reporting a claim that the blast had been detected in Toronto; later editions had similar bulletins from Rome and Tokyo (see Figure 1). The Times did not acknowledge the con- tradiction or follow up in the months to come. But it caught Stone’s eye. Lacking even the resources to cable those cities for more information, Stone filed the clippings away (Guttenplan, 2009: 337, 442–445). When the AEC report on the underground test finally came out 6 months later, national reporters enjoyed a tour of the blast site and reported on the peacetime nuclear applications to be yielded by this safe new testing regime (e.g. Herbert, 1958). Stone, however, saw the report as an obvious effort to bolster the case against disarmament. The cover story of the 10 March Weekly took aim at Dr Teller’s ‘hint-and-run’ campaign against nuclear disarmament (Stone, 1958a). To undercut pro-nuclear arguments, Stone relied on an annotative technique he used often in the Weekly: quote boxes, freestanding textual excerpts offered with no editorial comment beyond a provocative title or a jarring juxtaposition. (The first issues of the Weekly, from 1953, featured a straightforward layout with no text boxes or lengthy excerpts. By the late 1960s, the newsletter included at least one quote box, and usually two, on every page.) Thus, a quote box on the front page, titled ‘Dr. Teller’s Point of View’, united the scientist’s claim that because of cheating ‘disarmament is a lost cause’, from a recent appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, to a more disturbing argument he had advanced in a 1957 magazine article: ‘We must overcome the popular notion that nuclear weapons are more immoral than conventional weapons’. The subtext was clear: However prag- matic he sounds now, Teller’s opposition to a test ban is ideological. A quote box on the

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Figure 1. I.F. Stone clipped ‘shirt-tails’ from the Times indicating the 1957 US nuclear test was detected far more widely than officials claimed. Source: New York Times, 20 September 1957.

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Figure 2. The Weekly used boxed quotes with ironic headlines or jarring juxtapositions to make editorial points. Source: I.F. Stone’s Weekly, 7 March 1958. last page asked, ‘Is Fallout as Negligible as Dr. Teller Says?’ over a quote from the scientist likening nuclear fallout to smoking a cigarette every 2 months – followed by a contradictory passage from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (see Figure 2). Fully half of the four-page newsletter was excerpted from the Congressional Record; Stone

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at Cairo University on December 27, 2014 106 Journalism 16(1) carefully selected passages of recent testimony from a prominent test-ban advocate, using boxed quotes and boldface subheads to guide the reader and reinforce the argument. Stone’s own words fill just a third of the issue, though his voice is everywhere. That 10 March Weekly also noted the New York Times ‘shirt-tails’, from September, that seemed to contradict the new AEC report, though Stone still had not confirmed the bulletins. As the issue went to press, he lodged a request for information with the Coast and Geodetic Survey in the Commerce Department, which, as he later reported, ‘seemed to be unaware of the AEC release’ (Stone, 1958b). Within days, the government scientists gave Stone a list of 19 seismic stations across the United States and Canada that had recorded the nuclear test. He confronted the AEC with the new information. By the time the 17 March Weekly came out, the AEC had issued a ‘note to editors and correspondents’ amending its earlier report to say ‘earth waves’ from the blast had in fact been detected more than 2000 miles away. Stone’s (1958b) cover story provided a blow-by-blow account of his own reporting under the headline, ‘Why the AEC Retracted that Falsehood on Nuclear Testing’. Stone thus produced a remarkable piece of investigative journalism about a vital area of national security policy without any inside or anonymous sources. However, it is crucial to understand that Stone supported nuclear disarmament and had often used his newsletter to argue for the cause. In July 1957, Stone dedicated an entire issue of the Weekly to reprinting official statements from a meeting of top scientists convened by Bertrand Russell to discuss the nuclear threat. Stone inserted provocative subheads – ‘War Would Leave No Country Unscathed’ – to organize the scientists’ message. (He also faithfully highlighted conclusions that complicated the anti-nuclear argument, for example, ‘Medical X-Ray Worse Than Fallout’.) ‘The Scientists Warn Mankind’, the cover bellowed, followed by a brief editor’s note that took direct aim at establishment journalism:

As we went to press on July 18 not a single newspaper in the United States had been sufficiently interested to publish the text of the warning issued by twenty world famous scientists of the Soviet and Western blocks after a historic meeting in the little Nova Scotian fishing village of Pugwash the week before. (Stone, 1957a)

Stone was also already suspicious of the AEC and its ‘Madison Avenue Techniques’, in the words of an October 1957 headline in the Weekly. That article used Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders, then newly released, to frame an analysis of government efforts to downplay nuclear risks – most dramatically in choosing the name ‘Project Sunshine’ for a study of nuclear fallout. ‘It is as if from the very start the intent was to make us assume that the radioactivity let loose by nuclear testing was something like sunshine and natural radiation’, Stone (1957b) wrote. The story went on to dissect Senate questioning of a top AEC scientist, annotating the exchanges with notes on the motives of the lawmakers. The result reads like a pre-digital blog post, with boldface doing the work of indentation to move between textual registers (see Figure 3). In this way, Stone’s opposition to nuclear testing and his critical view of the news media informed the annotative, document-driven approach that yielded his big scoop. He filed away the suspicious ‘shirt-tails’ because he put little faith in either the AEC or

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Figure 3. Stone often annotated published texts. Here, his editorial remarks guide readers through a congressional hearing about ‘clean’ nuclear weapons. Source: I.F. Stone’s Weekly, 21 October 1957. the New York Times. Stone’s progressivism provided the analytical context in which a discrepancy between documents becomes a ‘story’ worth reporting. This approach demands that documents be treated explicitly as such – as texts to be labeled and analyzed. Throughout these issues of the Weekly, Stone referred directly to news articles,

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at Cairo University on December 27, 2014 108 Journalism 16(1) government reports, congressional transcripts, and even press releases, rather than weaving their contents into a narrative whose material seams and sources are hidden from the reader. The coherence of this annotative approach assumed as much about the Weekly’s readers as about its author. A shared critique of the political and media establishment permit- ted reporting and presentation to be fragmentary and unfinished. Stone did not have to wait until he had the whole story. He could present inconclusive but suggestive bits of evidence – like his first mention of the ‘shirt-tails’, or in the same issue, the point that an above-ground Soviet test had been detected and thoroughly analyzed by the United States in a matter of hours (Stone, 1958a) – because his readers shared an interpretive framework and understood where the story might lead. Likewise, a few sentences from either friend or enemy could stand alone in a quote box, with only an ironic headline to add context, because annotator and reader would see it the same way. It is worth briefly reviewing a case that shows the same annotative techniques at work in a much larger controversy. Stone played a decisive role in uncovering the truth behind the Gulf of Tonkin incidents of 2 and 4 August 1964, and more generally behind the escalation of US involvement in Vietnam. His reports quickly cast doubt on the circumstances of the first Tonkin incident, suggesting that it may have been provoked, and on whether the second incident had occurred at all. In this case, however, no official retrac- tion was forthcoming; although Stone pursued the issue doggedly in the Weekly and elsewhere, his suspicions would not be confirmed until the release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. (In the 2003 documentary ‘The Fog of War’, Robert McNamara admitted that the second incident never took place.) Still, Stone had the contours of the story within weeks of the incidents – again, relying entirely on public documents and news reports. As one historian has observed,

It was one of the most remarkable accomplishments in history of investigative journalism, I think you could say, given his physical condition. He was practically stone deaf at this point in his life, so he couldn’t go to cocktail parties, he couldn’t chat it up with inside dopesters. He could only look in the public record. But, at the same time, he did have a larger critique in mind, and that is that the Vietnam War was sparked by anti-colonial nationalism and not by Moscow. (Jackson Lears interviewed by On the Media, 2009)

As in the nuclear testing stories, that larger critique made Stone suspicious of official accounts and sensitive to contradictory data. One source of such data was the overseas press. In the 10 August Weekly, which went to press just 2 days after the first Tonkin incident, Stone (1964a) cited North Vietnamese radio reports suggesting it was a response to shelling by US and South Vietnamese warships. The 24 August issue featured a boxed quote from Le Monde, reporting on the secret history of US operations against North Vietnam (Stone, 1964b). The front page of the 28 September Weekly excerpted a skeptical analysis of the Tonkin incidents from the Peking Review, an organ of the Chinese Communist party (Stone, 1964c). However, Stone’s main source of information was again the elite US press. The first issue after the incidents cited three New York Times reports and one from the Washington Post to make a point the papers themselves had not: that the Pentagon had been ‘carrying

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at Cairo University on December 27, 2014 Graves 109 on war behind our backs’ (Stone, 1964a). As in the test-ban controversy, Stone’s annotative analysis was framed by a deep skepticism about the elite news media and its cozy relationship with official Washington. The 24 August edition opened by flatly asserting that the ‘American government and the American press have kept the full truth about the Tonkin Bay incidents from the American public’ (Stone, 1964b). Building his case from congressional testimony and various press accounts, he concluded,

The process of brain-washing the public starts with off-the-record briefings for newspapermen in which all sorts of far-fetched theories are suggested to explain why the tiny North Vietnamese navy would be mad enough to venture an attack on the Seventh fleet, one of the world’s most powerful. Everything is discussed except the possibility that the attack might have been provoked. (Stone, 1964b)

The piece cast doubt on whether the second confrontation had occurred at all:

It is strange that though we claim three boats sunk, we picked up no flotsam and jetsam as proof from the wreckage. Nor have any pictures been provided. Whatever the true story, the second incident seems to have triggered a long planned attack of our own.

Once again, the Weekly’s annotative layout reinforced its critical stance. ‘Prize Explanation’, announced one quote box, over Sen. McCarthy speculating on CBS’s Face the Nation that the North Vietnamese attacked the US Navy because ‘they were bored’ (Stone, 1964b). In the 28 September Weekly, Stone contrasted the language in a New York Times report with a more skeptical Associated Press (AP) account, calling the former an example of ‘phony news stories’ that advance the cause of war. He took particular exception to the use of anonymous sources to advance the White House line (Stone, 1964c). Several years later, in a series of articles in the New York Review of Books (NYRB), Stone would build a decisive case that the United States had begun a major escalation in Vietnam well before the Tonkin incidents. He could not take the same liberties of style and format in the NYRB, but Stone’s reporting in these articles reads like forensic document analysis, parsing phrases and comparing dates to find the gaps in official accounts (e.g. Stone, 1968). Once again, news stories, press releases, and congressional testimony were not just sources of information but texts to be deconstructed. Any good reporter reads between the lines. But Stone’s politics allowed, and his annotative methods demanded, that he make those readings explicit for readers.

TPM and the ‘running massacre’ of federal prosecutors Perhaps the best illustration of annotative journalism online is the work of the news blog TPM, launched in 2000 by Joshua Marshall. TPM has been compared in its idio- syncrasy to I.F. Stone’s Weekly, and the similarities are unmistakable. Marshall’s handful of major reporting successes have all come by focusing on stories or on angles which, as his posts often point out, are being neglected in mainstream coverage. When one of these stories does break into national headlines, due in part to TPM’s persistent focus, the blog appears in hindsight to have been ahead of traditional news outlets.

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(The Trent Lott affair of 2002 is a much-studied example; see Glenn, 2007; Rosenberg, 2009; Scott, 2004.) And, like Stone, Marshall has been open about his progressive political views as well as his criticism of conventional journalism. TPM found its voice as part of a network of progressive blogs focusing on scandal and corruption in the White House of George W. Bush. More important here, TPM also bears a strong material resemblance to the Weekly. Like other news-related blogs, TPM excerpts heavily from published sources. Quotes from public figures are almost always borrowed from a newspaper or broadcast outlet. Marshall has explained that he tries not to draw a bright line between original reporting and this kind of news ‘aggregation’. The bloggers at TPM also develop their evidence over a period of weeks or even months, in full view of (and with assistance from) their readers, rather than amassing it for a single, airtight exposé. ‘We have kind of broken free of the model of discrete articles that have a beginning and end’, Marshall has said. ‘Instead there are an ongoing series of dispatches’ (Cohen, 2008). The effect has been likened to reading an investigative reporter’s private notebook (Apple, 2007). Journalistic encomiums to TPM have recognized its challenge to the traditional division of labor in newswork, in mixing ‘liberal opinion with original reporting’ (Apple, 2007) and in ‘synthesizing the work of other news outlets with original reporting and tips from a highly connected readership’ (Cohen, 2008). What has been difficult to recognize is that the site’s reporting successes come not in spite but because of a wider political critique that frames its annotative journalism. This was clearly illustrated in TPM’s most celebrated work, covering a scandal that enveloped the Justice Department in 2007. That work earned a Polk Award for Marshall and his staff, the first time a blog had received the honor. The award citation noted that TPM had ‘connected the dots and found a pattern of federal prosecutors being fired for failing to do the Bush administration’s bid- ding’, and that its ‘tenacious investigative reporting sparked interest by the traditional news media and led to the resignation of Attorney General Albert Gonzales’ (cited in Cohen, 2008; see also McDermott, 2007; McLeary, 2007). TPM’s bloggers ‘connected the dots’, as usual, by reading the news – in this case, local press accounts of federal prosecutors being dismissed in early 2007. ‘What’s the White House Doing to Prosecutors?’ asked the headline of the first post to establish a suspicious pattern, in mid-January, linking to local reports of seven firings in six states (Rood, 2007). Soon TPM was offering line-by-line analysis of reported speech, official statements, legal documents, and other texts that emerged in the widening scandal. Typical of TPM’s reporting was its campaign, in early March, to identify a pair of Republican lawmakers who had pressured a federal prosecutor in New Mexico to announce indictments against state Democrats. TPM meticulously compared evidence from multiple news outlets – one brief post cites McClatchy, radio station KQRE, National Public Radio (NPR), the AP, the Washington Post, and the Seattle Times – in order to highlight discrepancies and assemble the most comprehensive picture of the incident. On the basis of these comparisons, the site could identify errors in news reports, endorse those that were on the right track, and establish what would be at stake in upcom- ing congressional hearings (e.g. Kiel, 2007a, 2007b). TPM also maintained a master timeline of the affair which indexed all of the relevant documents and events, reaching back to the start of the Bush Administration (TPM,

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2007). This remarkable document grew to more than 11 pages spanning hundreds of bul- leted entries, linking to scores of news items and other sources. Called simply the ‘TPM Canned US Attorney Scandal Timeline’, it offered a guide to journalists and others interested in the story. But it also acted as an indictment – an annotated argument that the events deserved the label TPM had given them. Relying on news accounts as evidence demanded critique of those accounts. It meant assessing them for accuracy and completeness and also reading between the lines to determine who their sources were and what interests they served. On TPM (as on other news-related blogs), criticism of the mainstream media (‘MSM’) offers a ready framing device for analysis that runs counter to conventional news narratives. An irony-laden post by Marshall (2007) in March 2007 opened this way alongside an excerpt from the Washington Post and a headshot of its reporter:

So there you have it: the White House’s side of the canned US attorney story provided by the Post’s John Solomon. … It turns out the whole thing is just one of those unfortunate misunderstandings the Bush White House now and again finds itself in.

More than a scathing review, though, the critique offered the clearest formulation Marshall had yet given of why the ‘canned US attorney story’ mattered – a scaffold for his argument that the firings amounted to a political purge. He analyzed anonymous leaks to the Post for what they revealed about the Administration’s strategy for handling the crisis: ‘when a White House tries to get out ahead of a story like this it’s key to note the admissions of salient facts that come along with the larger bamboozlement’ (Marshall, 2007). Like Stone, Marshall offered readers an account of what insiders, including reporters, were saying or thinking in private. As he had explained several years earlier, ‘If all the journalists in Washington kind of know something and no-one’s talking about it, I’m enough of a populist to think more people should know that, let’s get it out there’ (Marshall, 2003). The scandal came to a head in March of 2007, as TPM’s persistent attention drew other reporters to the story. Congressional hearings and a trove of Justice Department emails added fuel to the fire. Several glowing profiles that month focused on the site’s role in driving coverage of the affair. In an interview, Marshall resorted to ecological language to explain his site’s impact: ‘This is sort of the nature of our role in the journalistic ecosystem … Once a story catches fire, the big players are going to start getting the big scoops’ (quoted in McLeary, 2007; see also Niles, 2007). But that understates the resistance TPM’s narrative encountered at first from its better-established peers. Two months earlier, when the site was all but alone in covering the ‘running massacre’ of federal prosecutors, Time magazine’s Washington bureau chief took issue with that framing. ‘It’s all very suspicious-sounding’, Jay Carney wrote on Swampland, the magazine’s political blog. ‘Of course! It all makes perfect conspiratorial sense! Except for one thing: in this case some liberals are seeing broad partisan conspira- cies where none likely exist’ (Carney, 2007b). Later the reporter reversed course, declar- ing that Marshall ‘and everyone else out there whose instincts told them there was something deeply wrong and even sinister about the firings’ had been right. He explained why he had believed there was less to the affair than met the eye:

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When this story first surfaced, I thought the Bush White House and Justice Department were guilty of poorly executed acts of crass political patronage. I called some Democrats on the Hill; they were ‘concerned’, but this was not a priority. The blogosphere was the engine on this story, pulling the Hill and the MSM along. As the document dump proves, what happened was much worse than I’d first thought. I was wrong. (Carney, 2007c)

Critics read the fact that Carney’s reporting amounted to calling ‘some Democrats on the Hill’ as further proof of mainstream journalism’s subservience to political interests. Just as illuminating, however, is the un-self-conscious way the reporter, describing his own journalism, applied the evidentiary language of ‘facts’ and ‘proof’ to the prosaic reality of sourcing a piece of political news. Carney had objected earlier that TPM’s analysis ‘was purely speculative. Suspicions aren’t facts’ (Carney, 2007a). But he didn’t say what kind of facts his own calls to Capitol Hill might have turned up – a Democrat willing to supply evidence that the affair was a conspiracy, or one willing to supply a quote calling it a conspiracy? Everyday news practices can elide the distinction between facts in a statement and the fact of a statement. Similarly, Carney didn’t specify what evidence in the ‘document dump’ now made it objectively factual to speak of a broad conspiracy. What is clear is that by mid-March, it was becoming uncontroversial to use the language of scandal and conspiracy. This was due not only to new evidence, but also to changing political circumstances: the fact of growing media attention, the fact of the congressional hearings, the fact that Justice Department officials began to resign, the fact that President Bush distanced himself from Attorney General Gonzales, and the fact that political leaders, including some Republicans, were calling for Gonzales to resign. In one sense, then, Marshall won a prestigious reporting award for the triumph of an argument about how the affair should be read, an argument subsequently borne out by events which TPM itself helped to set in motion. The site’s reporting through the scandal consisted mainly in gathering public texts and arraying them in damning fashion; even today, the clearest evidence of a ‘conspiracy’ or ‘purge’ at the Justice Department remains the simple pattern of sudden firings TPM identified at the outset. Of course, that a consensus would emerge so quickly around TPM’s version of events was not inevitable. I.F. Stone, moved by similar distrust of the White House, had sketched the outlines of a grave conspiracy to lead the nation into war within weeks of the Gulf of Tonkin incidents. But it would be decades before his account was completely ratified.

Discussion: Objectivity and intertextuality The decades of the Weekly’s publication coincide with what Hallin has called the ‘high modern’ period in American journalism. Dominated by the Cold War political consensus, this was an era ‘when the historically troubled role of the journalist seemed fully ration- alized, when it seemed possible for the journalist to be powerful and prosperous and at the same time independent, disinterested, public-spirited, and trusted and beloved by everyone’ (Hallin, 1992: 16). The doctrine of journalistic objectivity which took shape after World War I was, by the 1950s and 1960s, deeply entrenched (Schudson, 1978). Stone’s politics made the Weekly an outlier, a bridge of sorts between Progressive-Era

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at Cairo University on December 27, 2014 Graves 113 muckrakers and the advocacy journalism and investigative reporting that would thrive again in the 1970s. The Weekly was part of the long parallel tradition we now call ‘alternative’ journalism, so named precisely for rejecting the profession’s reigning orthodoxy (Atton, 2002; Schudson and Anderson, 2009). But to focus on advocacy or partisanship is to miss half of the story. A faithful mid- century reader of the New York Times or the Washington Post who came across the Weekly would have been struck by any number of jarring textual practices, practices common on news-related blogs today. Newspapers occasionally excerpt official documents or other print sources; the Weekly did this every issue and often at great length. (In this respect, Stone’s newsletter might have been more familiar to readers in previous centuries.)3 Professional reporters almost never cite one another’s work; the Weekly was filled with direct references to other news outlets. News reports often fail to specify the documentary source of a claim or a quote, especially when that is a press release; Stone invariably gave his readers this material context. Most striking is what’s missing from the Weekly: human sources. Stone rarely quoted from personal interviews and did not rely on anonymous sources. The muckraking newsletter and the pioneering blog both exhibit a promiscuous intertextuality that objective reporting generally abhors. Hallin (1992) writes of the ‘whole- ness and seamlessness’ that characterized the high-modern self-understanding of professional journalists (p. 14). The same adjectives apply to stories produced under the objectivity norm, which guides reporters to obscure not only their politics but also their reporting practices and their position in a political economy of information. The textual isolation of conventional news is so common that its strangeness eludes notice: the fact that news organizations, so interdependent in their daily work (Reinemann, 2004; Reese and Danielian, 1989) and so overlapping in the texts they produce, are nevertheless so reluctant to acknowledge one another within those texts. Some of the frankest statements of the routine copying and cue-taking in the news business have come in court. For instance, an amicus brief by Google Inc. and Twitter, Inc. (2010) declares that ‘for decades, television and radio news stations have broadcast information obtained from newspapers. And newspapers and Internet news organizations learn and write about events originally reported on television’ (or see the 1930s ‘press-radio war’; Jackaway, 1994). It is important not to overstate the case. Newspapers do sometimes carry lengthy excerpts from reports or speeches, in extraordinary instances – the Pentagon Papers or the WikiLeaks diplomatic cables – as well as more routine ones. Zelizer (1995) has remarked on the latitude reporters enjoy in choosing between ‘text’ and ‘talk’. But textual excerpts are vastly outnumbered by reported speech in conventional news accounts, and they are often deployed in the same fashion as reported speech: to buttress the narrative of the story (e.g. the key findings of a report) rather than to sustain a critical analysis. Journalists increase their own authority, Zelizer argues, by using quotes to emphasize proximity to events or to powerful individuals and ‘to make claims without the accom- panying responsibility’ (1995: 35). Elsewhere, she has written that ‘reporters use quoting practices to create the illusion of a whole’, in a way meant not to clarify discourse but to ‘blur its spatial and temporal parameters’ (Zelizer, 1989: 372–373). In other words, traditional journalistic quoting practices are narratival rather than critical. The use of irony offers a revealing lens. In the cases above Stone and Marshall

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at Cairo University on December 27, 2014 114 Journalism 16(1) both employed irony liberally in critiquing textual excerpts or arraying them against each other. Conventional reporting by contrast adopts the ironic voice warily and only when moral circumstances permit – for instance, Ettema and Glasser argue, to subvert the claims of an official who has been revealed to be corrupt. In such cases, an ironic juxtaposition ‘transfigures the conventions of journalistic objectivity so that the very textual devices intended to assure the differentiation of fact and value become the means to express their fundamental unity’ (Ettema and Glasser, 1994: 5). The investigative reports that permit such ‘condemnation’ cut against the grain of conventional objectivity in the news, invoking an evidentiary rather than detached and neutral basis for the reporter’s authority. More than one factor accounts for the aversion to intertextuality in traditional journalism. One durable explanation is competitive pressure, both professional and commercial, that makes reporters reluctant to credit other news outlets or to send audiences their way. But the counterexample of annotative journalism underscores how intertextuality also violates objective reporting’s standard of internal completeness and coherence (touched on in Gans, 2004 [1979]: 162, 172). It reminds us that other versions of the story exist, and in this way, it draws attention to the behind-the-scenes work of story construction.4 Intertextuality invites scrutiny of the choices different reporters make. A large tradition in journalism research has focused on techniques of story construction designed to efface the reporter’s role and make it seem, in Tuchman’s (1972) phrase, as if ‘the facts speak for themselves’. The reporting studied here also seeks to make the facts speak, but in a way that does not obscure the journalist’s role in giving them voice. Annotative journalism lacks the seamless narrative coherence of news reports carefully grounded in a place and time – the ‘dateline’ – but not in the web of documents and sources from which they are built. Its intertextual style of newswork breaks down the cardinal distinction between original reporting and opinion, yielding news reports grounded in a political and media critique. In this way, it highlights the interlinked material and ideological dimensions of journalism – the relationship between political com- mitments (including the commitment to ‘neutrality’) and reporting strategies, textual practice, and the affordances of a communications medium.

Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes 1. The phrase appears to have been first used by Nora Paul (1995), a specialist in computer- assisted reporting, to suggest a novel online story format in which reporters would annotate a political text (such as a presidential speech) with explanatory or analytical captions. 2. Garvey (2013) finds an early example in the annotation and recontextualization of ads for runaway slaves by the abolitionist press, which she calls ‘a close ancestor of those forms of muckraking’, like I.F. Stone’s, ‘that have depended … on sifting public documents and putting their information into new juxtapositions’ (p. 91). 3. Colonial and early American newspapers featured bulletins copied, often verbatim, from other (often European) newspapers. Early papers also dedicated a great deal of space to

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printing official transcripts, public announcements, laws, and so on. (Clark and Wetherell, 1989; Schudson, 1995). 4. One thinks of Didion’s (1988) account of the collaborative staging of campaign press events, with television cameras all oriented to hide the backstage throng of reporters and technicians and equipment – and thus to reinforce the naturalness of a candidate’s seemingly impromptu game of catch on an airport tarmac.

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Author biography Lucas Graves is an Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research focuses on new organizations and practices in the emerging news ecosystem.

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Article

Journalism 2015, Vol. 16(1) 119–133 The late great International © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: Herald Tribune and The New sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1464884914545743 York Times: Global media, jou.sagepub.com space, time, print, and online coordination in a 24/7 networked world

Nikki Usher The George Washington University, USA

Abstract This article provides an empirical, field-based study of the production processes of transnational media outlet, the International Herald Tribune, as it negotiates and coordinates workflow and content with The New York Times. Using Manuel Castells’ concept of the space of flows, the article provides additional nuance to understand the relationship between material constructs and networked information. Time zones and geolocation remain important; the biggest node in the network does direct information; and the coordinated capacity for 24/7 content is more difficult that perhaps imagined by networked scholars. Both people and product are considered here in an effort to bring added nuance to the tension between materiality and networks in the production of information. While the International Herald Tribune has now been rebranded as the International New York Times, the same considerations and questions remain.

Keywords Online journalism, news ethnography, news production, networks, castells

In October 2013, The New York Times Company rebranded the storied International Herald Tribune (IHT) as the International New York Times. The newspaper’s own coverage described the move as part of a strategy to slim down but raise influence, stating that

Corresponding author: Nikki Usher, School of Media and Public Affairs, The George Washington University, 805 21st Street NW, Washington, DC 20052, USA. Email: [email protected]

Downloaded Downloadedfrom http://www.elearnica.ir from jou.sagepub.com at UNIV FED DO RIO DE JANEIRO on December 27, 2014 120 Journalism 16(1) the move was a ‘central component of a stepped-up global growth strategy’ (Haughney, 2013). For the first time, IHT editors would be able to explicitly direct The Times correspondents in both Europe and Asia (Greenslade, 2013). Yet the organization would face the same slate of questions as it had before, name change notwithstanding: how to coordinate a material product across three geographic zones and five products, namely, nytimes.com, the global online site (global.nytimes.com), a print Asia edition, a print Europe edition, and a print US edition. Whether transnational means a ‘single version to the world’ or not (Reese, 2010: 346) is contested among global communication scholars – The Times global approach is nonetheless exemplary of a cross-boundary approach to news production and dissemination – and its products ultimately reach people in 130 different countries. There are not many news organizations of this ‘transnational’ stature, though more are emerging. The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times are daily newspapers with three region-specific print products, The Guardian has recently created a US edition, and the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, and Sky offer good broadcast examples; Time and The Economist magazine offerings – and these all – have in common products that are created as intentionally cross-border with some differentiation. Certainly, wire news has flowed across the globe for decades (Boyd-Barrett and Rantanen, 1998), but as a wholesale product, this has generally been intended as raw content for a geo-located artifact – either physical or online. However, there are an increasing number of transnational news outlets, and the influence and reach of these existing institutions make inquiry into their production practices significant for understanding the global flow of news with changes in the density, speed, and technology of this information (cf. Chalaby, 2005, 2009; Thussu, 2006). This specific case study investigates the global news production routines of The Times and the IHT before its rebranding in order to explore how news and information move across the networked society – bringing to light the tensions between coordinated global flows of information through the creation of material and online products and the effect upon work. Using ethnographic data gathered from The Times, the IHT-Europe in Paris, and IHT-Asia in Hong Kong, I examine the impact of physical location, product goals, human labor, and specific time and space orientation in a global, instant, and networked world. On one hand, it is easy to assume an uninterrupted flow of information via 24/7 news from around the globe. However, we need to consider the implications of what it takes to create this news. This article poses the following major questions: What are the practices behind transnational news production? What does it mean to have different geographically specific sites responsible for this content? What is the impact of different time zones on information creation? There is generally wide agreement that we have indeed entered a distinct era of global, digital information exchange enabled by networked communication. For example, Castells (2001, 2008) argues that we have fundamentally entered a new era of information distribution; the new capacity to share knowledge in near instant time has created fundamental social changes. Thussu (2006) has written about the rise in new communication technologies whereby Western and non-Western media offers us content that is both global and local at the same time. Sassen (2001) has theorized extensively about the linked and node structures of global flows, with communication networks enabling the production and distribution of new information and capital from centralized and emerging

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at UNIV FED DO RIO DE JANEIRO on December 27, 2014 Usher 121 nodes. While these theorists offer examples, a more specific, nuanced, and detailed portrait of how information is produced and created to support this networked information society is needed. This article is not about the definitional arguments that all too often plague global journalism studies (Reese, 2008, 2010). Rather, I seek to interrogate a much broader question about the relationship between space, place time, and material production in the creation of information in the networked society. I rely on Castells (2001) because his work crystallizes some core questions about how to create information in a global environment – with animating questions such as whether place and time matter and how information flows across networks. After outlining the methods and the case, I showcase three core aspects of global information production: shaping the print paper across three time zones, content adjustment in the expat and American world, and online coordination and dissonance. I also offer a microstudy of a single breaking story written for the IHT-Hong Kong (IHT-HK) and The New York Times (NYT). Ultimately, I conclude that we need more nuance to our understanding of the networked flow of information, that production practices and contexts still matter, and more simply, that there is also a human cost to creating a 24/7 flow of information.

Global networked flows of information The undergirding argument Castells (2001, 2008) makes across a variety of books and articles is that we have entered the ‘networked society’, which consists of interconnected hubs, nodes, networks, and spaces that facilitate the rapid exchange and dissemination of information and means a fundamental reconfiguration of state, public, media, governance, economics, and urbanization. Castells (2001) specifically addresses the nature of physical space in the networked society through his conception of the ‘space of flows’ or the ‘transformation of location patterns of core economic activities under the new technological system’ (p. 408). This is opposed to what we more commonly understand as ‘space of places’. Castells acknowledges, of course, that space is distinctly material – and includes people, social relationships, practices, and social action. However, the space of flows is enabled by electronic exchange built on information technologies, and a common logic organizes various sectors of production thanks to this enhanced communication technology. Time and place in a networked society are less relevant: ‘places do not disappear, but their logic and meaning become absorbed in the network’ (Castells, 2001: 48). This is not to say that cities don’t matter, but that they marshal resources into a larger information ecology. For example, the material concentration of resources is absolutely essential to create information across the globe. As Castells maintains, in this new society, knowledge is centered around these information flows that do not rely on physical contiguity. Perhaps, then, the importance of geo-located time does not matter anymore – instead, we engage in ‘time-sharing social practices that work through flows’ (p. 442). In practice, though, this may be more difficult than it seems. Others have recognized how this theoretical background may be helpful to understanding global news, but there have been notably fewer production studies. For instance,

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Gasher and Klein (2008) use Castells’ framework to analyze the flow of information across The Times of London, Liberation Paris, and Haaretz, arguing that place still defines information in a global world, while Heinrich (2008, 2011, 2012) looked at global rise of new nodes and networks for journalism. Significantly, Reese (2010) argues for the importance of production-based research, using Castells as an imperfect theoretical background, noting, ‘Underlying these circuits of global flows are structures of people in professional and institutional roles. In more concrete terms, these are the agents who form the infrastructure of the global in specific local settings’ (p. 348). This leads to the question of how professionals work in these global and specific settings to construct these information flows. Thus, not only are we interested here in the dynamics of information production as content but also the actors engaged in its creation. The empirical research generally does not focus on actual work production and process, though it does offer important insights into global information work. An important caveat is that this work makes clear that the very words globalization, glocalization, transnational, international, cross-border, flow, contra-flow, and beyond inspire spirited debate (Berglez, 2008; Reese, 2008, 2010). One key question has been to ask ‘what is global’ and whether ‘global’ news/media is actually possible (Hafez, 2007; Reese, 2008, 2010; Sparks, 2005). As if to echo Reese empirically, Cottle and Rai’s (2008) analysis of CNN International (CNNI), BBC World, and for-profit Fox News and Sky News’ frames suggests that global news production does not simply fit under the two labels as either ‘global dominance’ or ‘global public sphere’. Other work probes cross-border power relations, political systems, and normative relations through media (Beck, 2005; De Beer and Merrill, 2008; McPhail, 2010). Still other scholars are intrigued by the emergence of the global public sphere in journalism (Hjarvard, 2001; Volkmer, 1999), or more critically, point to signs of media imperialism (Boyd-Barrett and Xie, 2008). Clausen’s (2003) work looks at a series of public broadcasts and framing to think about the homogenization of international news through news agencies and found that news is locally produced and locally created, with the exception of foreign news stories. Thurman (2007) has looked at the global audience’s use of news Web sites, pointing to the extension of the global in the 24/7 Web era. Scholars argue that international news services like the BBC can provide a sorely needed alternative news consciousness to a locally situated public (Bicket and Wall, 2009), and locally produced media may be strengthened by exposure to more global information flows (Rao, 2009). Others, like Volkmer (1999), argue that there was a possibility for a global public and regional specificity. With this empirical and theoretical research in mind, this study seeks to build on the theoretical backbone of ‘space of flows’ contrasted with ‘space of places’ and empirical research that investigates how transnational news moves across global networks.

The case The case presented here looks at the material and the online construction processes of networked news production at the IHT and The Times through their two online and three print products. The Times is a significant site of inquiry as a key influencer in setting the US agenda (Walgrave and Van Aelst, 2006) and reaches policy-makers, corporate

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at UNIV FED DO RIO DE JANEIRO on December 27, 2014 Usher 123 executives, and an audience with an average household income of more than USD90,000 (Media Kit: New York Times, n.d.). Despite struggles with the general ‘newspaper crisis’, The Times has introduced an aggressive paywall model that CEO Mark Thompson has called the ‘most successful decision in years’ (Roberts, 2013); nytimes.com still remains among the 10 most read news sites in the world and gets over 29 million unique visitors a month. The staff of The Times itself is about 1000 strong. The IHT also had a storied history; it was founded in 1887 as The Paris Herald by James Gordon Bennett, Jr, and was intended as the European edition of the New York Herald. At the time, it reached an audience much like it did prior to rebranding: rich expatriates hoping for an international view of the world but with a slice of news from the United States (Alison Smale, executive editor, the IHT, 26 April 2010, personal communication). The Washington Post and The Times became joint owners in 1967, an agreement that unraveled in 2003, with The Times assuming complete control. In 2005, The Times created an Asian-specific edition of the IHT and opened an office in Hong Kong. Circulation is currently split 60/40 between Europe and Asia (Media Kit: New York Times Global, n.d.). Within The Times Company, there was indeed a sense in which the IHT is the ‘B-team’ for New York; however, I was less interested here in internal cultural politics and more interested in the impact of physical place, space, and time on news production, though this subtext was of course at work. At the time, the IHT had approximately 80 people in Paris and 60 in Hong Kong. From New York, The Times is responsible for the print imprimatur, and 24 hours a day, New York-based Web producers put up content from around the globe on nytimes.com and global.nytimes.com. The Times also supplemented its print and Web coverage with IHT coverage, especially in the business section. The origin of new content for the Web depended on what time it is: at 9 p.m. in New York, it is 3 p.m. in Paris, and 9 a.m. in Hong Kong, but there was a felt urgency at The Times for ‘fresh’ content (Usher, 2014) that motivated continuous, round-the-globe demand for news. The Times and the IHT ran on different content management systems, and as a result, The Times, which had a bigger site, controls the ultimate version of a story because it must be posted to the Web from its Web site. This has broader significance as we will see.

Method This article emerges from a larger ethnographic project on the NYT. I spent a total of 5 months at the newspaper between January and June 2010 conducting ethnographic field work. I spent over 700 hours in this newsroom and conducted over 80 interviews. I observed workflow, both print and online, attended Page One and business desk meetings, and ‘shadowed’ 32 journalists across newsroom hierarchy, watching them work throughout the day. My principal site of research was the business desk of The Times. I visited the IHT-Europe (Paris) in April 2010, midway through my time at the NYT, as it had become clear to me that the IHT and NYT business desks had a close relationship worth exploring. To understand this coordination, I spent 6 days in the Paris newsroom and 4 days in Hong Kong. In Paris, I attended daily news meetings, observed general newsroom workflow, and conducted a total of 20 interviews lasting between 30 minutes to 1 hour with

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at UNIV FED DO RIO DE JANEIRO on December 27, 2014 124 Journalism 16(1) people across the newsroom hierarchy, selected based on a convenience sample based on who was available in a busy newsroom. This included IHT-Asia and IHT-Europe editor- in-chief, the managing editor, reporters, editors, and copy editors. In June 2010, I visited the IHT-Asia (Hong Kong). I followed a similar research schedule and interviewed 13 journalists, most of whom were editors and print and online production focused. At the time, there were only three official IHT-Asia reporters. The questions were asked about news production between New York, Paris, and Hong Kong and were incrementally adapted building upon new data. Across all research sites, some journalists requested anonymity, but my agreement with these journalists and the Institutional Review Board (IRB) was that I could use their names unless they requested otherwise. I kept jottings (down to the level of specific verbatim quotes in meetings) in a notebook throughout the day of conversation and took notes verbatim for interviews on my laptop. My work was guided by Glaser and Strauss’ (1967) constant comparative method. This method informed my ability to recognize and code themes based on their prominence and evaluate them in terms existing the theory and literature. I had previously coded my Times data for ‘Times interaction with IHT’. For this project, I coded for a variety of categories related to this interaction, from 24/7 Web operations, to print perspective, audience perception, and reporter workflow. I then collapsed these categories into broader themes regarding global news production: audience difference, print production, online coordination, and online/print coordination.

Shaping the print paper On one hand, Castells suggests that specific locations are significant because they are sites of production that are responsible for generating information for a larger information ecosystem. On the other hand, though, physical contiguity should matter less because in a networked society, as time-sharing makes place less important. Arguably, if information production is concentrated, this has less to do with geography because these cities are engaged in process rather than product. What we see in the case of the three Times Co. news outlets is that information does not flow easily from place to place because time still matters in shaping physical production. Similarly, there is an uneasy relationship between process and product. In New York, there is little consideration for The Times paper’s existence outside of the United States. However, the creation of the print paper in New York has significant consequences for the IHT’s print paper. New York is the dominant point for all information distribution. The Times has two Page One meetings: one at 10 a.m. to set the day’s agenda and another at 4:30 p.m. intended to finalize the front page. New York sets the tone for what will be the most important print coverage, choosing from an array of enterprise stories with a longer shelf life and breaking news stories. Enterprise stories are like a game of cat and mouse: the story will be offered to the top New York editors for 2 or 3 days, as editors don’t want to lose their chance at having a Page One story, but when they will run is unclear. But when Paris calls in for the 10 a.m. New York meeting – which is 4 p.m. Paris time – Paris needs to be able to plan for its 9 p.m. print deadline. This means hoping that New York will have a good sense of what stories it can use, so Paris can begin creating a plan

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at UNIV FED DO RIO DE JANEIRO on December 27, 2014 Usher 125 for its front page. A number of examples illuminate the difficulty in coordinating the material news production for Paris based simply on time. On 26 April 2010, business editor Larry Ingrassia presented a story slugged WIND to the morning Page One meeting. He said, ‘There’s a story about a wind farm off Cape Cod. It’s contentious because rich people don’t want it in their backyard. It’s a test case for wind power if the administration says yes or no’. It met with almost no feedback or interest. Ingrassia tried to push his story with more urgency and said, ‘They are going to decide in a day or two’. As the last person to pipe in over the teleconference, Smale from Paris noted, ‘We would really like WIND’, and after the Page One meeting, she conferred to her col- leagues, ‘This will be nice for our readers, how America is behind in wind’. (This comment also reflects the Europe-focused sentiment, in this case, about the wind industry). Smale had to know the following: Would New York use WIND that day? Would it be on the front page? That day, she got lucky, and Ingrassia told her she could have it, as saving it for Page One seemed to be a lost cause and he wanted to run the story. The following day illustrated more dramatically the difficulty of having something from New York meet the Paris print deadlines. Goldman Sachs was defending itself against mounting evidence that it had purposely shorted the housing market. The situation was developing in New York, but whether there would be an analytical story in time for Paris was unclear. ‘We have [two reporters] blogging …’ Ingrassia added. Assistant Managing Editor Jim Roberts told Smale, ‘We’ll try to have something for you’ (Field notes, 27 April 2010). Paris made the best out of an early draft. The situation is peculiar for Hong Kong, which prints a paper with news from the United States, that is, as Asia Editor Philip McClellan noted, ‘30 hours behind New York’ (14 June 2010, personal communication), or as another editor noted, ‘We publish a day- old newspaper’. The conundrum is that The Times produces the bulk of material for the IHT-Asia, but most of the stories that Hong Kong can run in its newspaper will have already been up on the Web page. The saving grace is the Reuters business news supplement that adds to print content, according to Tom Sims, business news editor in Paris. The conundrum for Hong Kong is particularly difficult when it comes to choosing photos. ‘There is not a lot of art that moves from Asia’, in part because there are fewer Times and wire agency photographers located there. Sims continued, ‘There’s only so many times you can put rioting Bangladeshis on the front page … and you don’t want an American photo that is a day old …’ So the editors resort to finding photos from wire services when possible, but are left with few options. In an age of networked information, it would seem like it makes little sense to even bother with a print product. All these headaches would be erased. Yet the reliance on the print product reveals that we have not completely moved to a world where information exchange is indeed reduced to networked global information flows. There is a reason still for creating material, physical information: it sells and funds The Times Co. The IHT, while costly to produce, offers a high-income audience and, as a result, high advertise- ment rates (USD240,000 per home; front-page advertisements for USD110,000), and will for now remain in print. Similarly, despite circulation declines, The Times makes most of its money from its print product.

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The coordination of whose content belongs where and when belies the easy transfer of information suggested by Castells. On one hand, we are still dealing with a material information exchange. For Castells, however, even manufacturing can fit into this networked flow; physical production in turn may be facilitated through information exchange. However, in this case, what makes coordination complicated is that one site of information production, The Times, has most of the control over what information is available to the IHT. A significant portion of intellectual resources and labor come from New York; Paris and Hong Kong can’t alone fill their newspapers without The Times. This would point to the importance of a single place marshaling the resources of the material concentration of information exchange and sharing it, suggesting more difficulties than predicted between material and networked coordination. The IHT is not freed from the space of places, time zones, and physical contiguity.

Content adjustment in the expat and American world The larger debates about global journalism, and globalization more generally, have pitted whether it is possible to actually have global content. Castells’ work suggests that content can be locally produced but have global ramifications, offering other nodes of the network greater insight. One example is the case of the Mayo Clinic’s capacity to have top doctors working in Rochester, Minnesota, but through teleconferencing and other means, this knowledge can be shared and locally integrated into other medical communities. One of the most difficult aspects to rectify within the networked society is this conflation of local and global experience, and what we can see through The Times and the IHT is that information does require local interpretation. Nonetheless, he argues that information can come from any point in the network and be reinterpreted by any other point in the network in an exchange that was previously far more difficult. Geographical perspective colors content creation. In New York, business news editors were concerned with global issues, but their approach belied an American understanding of global dynamics. For example, Times journalists were often critical of the European social welfare state, with editors asserting that it was ‘unsustainable’ (Field notes, 3 March 2010). In another case, a reporter offered a story about the Greek origin of the debt crisis – tax evasion. Business editor Larry Ingrassia noted, ‘The Greeks need to stop living beyond their means’ (Field notes, 7 March 2010). ‘Greeks just don’t pay their taxes. They have swimming pool[s], and then they say they don’t have any money’, as one editor expounded, ‘It’s ridiculous the kinds of claims that are made. It’s like cultur- ally no one pays taxes’ (Field notes, 14 March 2010). On the other hand, The Times also looked for IHT stories to inform New York about the European debt crisis because these writers had more intimate knowledge of the Eurozone finance conditions, suggesting that information could come from other nodes in the network. Yet that European Union (EU) story was different for The Times than it was for Paris. One IHT business writer noted,

There’s a European edition for the IHT, which you really want a smart lede which you want may have global ramifications and ramification for Europe and you need to think with a big voice … If it is a really important story you are going to be working … another version to file

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for The Times – you write [for example]: a lot of this affected the American market … (21 April 2010, personal communication)

The personal technology page offers a good example of the tension between creating content for a global marketplace and serving three distinct audiences. In New York, the personal technology page was a Thursday section that previewed the latest and greatest apps, the gizmos perceived as up and coming in the world of technology, tech writer David Pogue’s column, and other tidbits. Because both Paris and Hong Kong do not produce enough of their own original content to fill the business pages, they rely on the personal technology content for the print paper. For Paris, two problems emerged with this section: availability of the gadgets and European mindsets about technology. ‘They do a lot more consumer friendly stuff, with the latest gadget and they have the bodies. But they did a lot on the iPad and it will be a day and forever until it comes out [here]’, said John-Paul Rofe, tech editor at the time (Field notes, 26 April 2010). Similarly, what if an app wasn’t available on a European Smartphone? And as IHT-Europe media and tech writer Eric Pfanner noted, ‘This content doesn’t always work for us. People in Europe have much more concerns about privacy than in the United States. We aren’t so utopian’ (Field notes, 26 April 2010). In Asia, the opposite problem emerged. As editor Mike Wolengarter noted to me, ‘People here already have the latest stuff. We’re ahead of the U.S. We know what’s going on before they do. We just don’t have the bodies that The Times has to cover it’ (Field notes, 16 June 2010). So the content was not appropriate to the audience, and there was specific geo-located information. In this instance, we can see signs that Castells’ broader explication of information flows as dehierarchial and disembedded from physical contiguity does not quite make sense. But other parts of his assessment do make sense: that The Times, as a central node, offers information to other parts of the network, which then take up this information – knowledge is distributed in this sense rather than centrally held. And the IHT, then, provides additional information back into this globally dispersed information ecosystem. Nonetheless, The Times is the source of information; it offers a product that must be further disaggregated. The American perspective of technology must be adjusted for more global needs. This suggests the importance of recognizing more uneven balance of global information flows.

Online coordination (and dissonance) in the networked public sphere So far, we have examined material production and content creation, but have not addressed perhaps the richest site of inquiry into global flows of information: the transfer and exchange of networked, online news across the three Times outlets. The data offer compelling support for the potential for Castells’ theorization of a global information distribution through a 24/7 networked information environment. But what we have less insight into is the actual coordination and human costs required to create this global coordination; from our desks or our phones, it is easy to imagine information coming to us at any time when we want it, but the process is far from simple, as this production process suggests. The case of the markets story and breaking news out of China help elucidate this nuance.

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On one hand, time is an absolute requirement for organizing the transfer of global information; without clear coordination between time zones, the quest for the 24/7 nytimes.com would be impossible. On the other hand, the space of flows is perhaps best represented through online production as ‘time-sharing social practices’ (Castells, 2001); access to information is not bound by any one material time zone; and work processes themselves create global flows. Gerry Mullany, the night Web news editor expressed this sentiment: ‘The New York Times never sleeps. Somewhere it is always morning’ (5 April 2010, personal communication). But making the site ‘always morning’ requires careful handoffs for this globally accessible online product. Similarly, some information does actually vanish because of the networked efforts, and more significantly, there is a human cost to this 24/7 operation. The markets story – the chart of the rise and fall of markets across the world – offers insight into the kind of global handoff required for information to flow from node to node. Each day, the markets story begins in Hong Kong. But the Hong Kong reporter must be focused on New York. ‘I check my Blackberry while still in bed …’, she explained. She continued to detail the continuous updating process:

I write about how New York finished [indicates] how Asia will do … literally I’ll do that as my first thing – I’ll keep readers informed about the market sentiment and as the day progresses I’ll make updates, and the Asian markets all close at different times.

During this time, she and her editor are in touch with New York, where it is the middle of the night. Yet even online, information loses currency as it moves across the globe – and across time. The reporter explained, ‘For European editions it needs to be more Europe focused, and by the time we progress to the US markets whatever Asia has done has been rendered irrelevant’ (14 June 2010, personal communication). Then in Paris, journalist David Jolly picks up the markets story that the Asia reporter has been working on all day. He begins again constant Web updates, filling the nytimes. com Web site with news of the latest jitters in the European marketplace in pre-trading hours. Jolly explained his mandate: ‘There is a constant appetite from New York for us to produce whatever we can produce …’ This process then continues in New York, with reporter Javier Hernandez taking over the story for premarket trading. But even before he gets to work, his editor, Mark Getzfred, prepares for the New York day deleting most of the Asian markets information and topping the Europe markets information with new paragraphs about US premarket trading. In an effort to keep up with the global flow of finance, older information is dropped from the story in favor of updated information focused on each trading sphere. Because this information is edited online, it also dies online. If a New Yorker wanted to look online in the afternoon about how the Asian markets performed that day, that information simply wouldn’t exist on nytimes.com – even though it had been there just hours ago. The handoffs are well coordinated but require considerable communication, with editors from two time zones always in touch with each other during the few hours they overlap. The Asia editor touches base with the Europe editor who touches base with New York editors who then prepare to be in touch with the Asia editor again. For the periods of overlap, the editors chatter back and forth about reporters on duty, where stories are in

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at UNIV FED DO RIO DE JANEIRO on December 27, 2014 Usher 129 the system and what each has been able to catch about the next opening market to help that editor and reporter start their day. At the end of the US day, Hernandez is responsible for providing an overall recap for what has happened across the markets. The goal, according to Getzfred, is to provide a thorough, more analytical look at what happened rather than the moment by moment – a take-out story. But Hernandez’ story is a US markets story, with nary a mention of Europe or Asia, and this, ultimately is the story that lives online. But this means that Jolly and the Hong Kong reporter rarely see a byline. As Jolly puts it, The Times ultimately treated his Europe story as ‘wire copy … they can do whatever they want to it’. And for him, that meant real consequences. ‘I will be working on a story all day and sometimes not even receive a contributing line for it … and that kind of stuff happens with depressing frequency’ (Field notes, 27 April 2010). From the perspective of journalists working on the story, those attached to the information they have gathered and created, this disjuncture of information and ownership over the story means something to them. For Hernandez, the byline remains his. But for the Hong Kong writer and for Jolly, their efforts are lost to the global exchange. This is an illustration of perhaps something forgotten about global information exchange: through information churn, people whose work has intellectual value to them may get lost in the global shuffle for the desire for fast, efficient information. The human cost goes beyond just bylines and disconnect from intellectual effort, though. Answering to a 24/7 operation that can be focused across entirely different global zones is simply physically exhausting for a journalist. The online and print coordination of the NYT and IHT for a breaking story illustrated this difficulty – made especially more demanding by the need to also meet hard physical deadlines. NYT reporter Keith Bradsher consults with the IHT and NYT Shanghai bureau chief for direction on stories. He shared with me the process of working on a breaking story of a rare protest march of Chinese workers striking at a Honda plant in Zhongshan, China. On 10 June 2010, Bradsher arrived in the evening at the site of the strike and sent an email ‘revised Bradsher whereabouts’ and told his editors at 8:33 p.m. Zhongshan time that he planned to file for the IHT late print deadlines. He got an email back 20 minutes later from New York, with an editor asking him to file as soon as possible. Bradsher replied, ‘Yes, my plan is to file in one hour from now. I have a lot of writing to do to hit that goal, however’. He then began filing the story for New York, updating the story after finding out new information about an independent union (rare in China). Bradsher noted,

This additional information meant that I kept rewriting and expanding the story in my laptop. New York waited a couple hours for me to refile before deciding to go ahead and putting the IHT version up on the web without waiting for me any longer.

Although Bradsher was pleased to have the story go up, the pace of the process illustrates the intensity of his work. The NYT posted the story at 10 p.m. Zhongshan time. Bradsher updated the story again at 11 p.m. his time. He gave more information in to New York at 12:00 a.m., or roughly 12:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (EST). He told me about the process:

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I finally went to sleep at 3:40 a.m., then got up at 6 a.m. to go through New York’s edited version and have breakfast. The web had posted my full story with the 8 a.m. protest march at about 4:45 a.m. That was too late for other reporters in Hong Kong to make it to Zhongshan in time for the march. I went back out to the strike around 7 and called in to New York with updates from the protest march and brief confrontation with riot police. I was the only reporter at the march who was on deadline.

The email traffic he shared with me showed a conversation between him and the New York copy desk at 5:24 a.m. and 6:00 a.m. Zhongshan time, respectively. Bradsher was covering a breaking story with many moving parts: a big protest out China. But he was coordinating between filing for a print deadline before the IHT-Asia deadline and then working with NYT editors after the IHT finished up for the evening. He focused on the IHT version of the story for the Web version at first and then put up a full version later on the next morning. This meant he slept just over 2 hours to keep this constant flow of information going. The global flow of information was coming 24/7 from a single person, not from multiple nodes in the network. And this was not even an A-1 story for New York. So here is the cost that seems especially trenchant: for the global flow of information to proceed smoothly, something material must be sacrificed. It may not be a product like content, but human capital. In this case, the global flow of information would not have been possible without one reporter sleeping 2 hours to make sure the story had the most updated information for both sides of the world. The demand for content made Bradsher a central node in the network offering a constant flow of news. But Bradsher is just one person – up for 24 hours. Someone could always be working with him, and he always had a way to distribute information to a global audience. This human toll of labor asked of the ‘flexible worker’ (Harvey, 1991) is something we may miss if we focus too much on the information itself rather than the process. Global flows (or microflows) of information through a single person are more likely when the person has a continued and coordinated potential for the distribution of his or her news content. But 24-hour coverage seems unreasonable even if it is possible. The desire for the news organizations to be constantly updated creates physical wear and tear on the people producing the content, whether it be tired night editors in Hong Kong making sure that the early morning New York markets editor really has a clear sense of the wrap-up or the reporter on the scene filing for multiple Web and print deadlines. In this way, global flows are deeply rooted to the material; people create the content for instant information access, and the networked society may require a mental and physical sacri- fice from workers whose organizations make money from offering this information.

Space, time, and global information flows of information in news production This article has aspired to shed light beyond the language of global flows to explore more specifically the production processes and people behind the information society and to explore the relationship between their local situation and their place in the global information ecology. Castells offers an important starting point to begin this inquiry because he aptly provides a framework to understand the transfer of information across the globe

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at UNIV FED DO RIO DE JANEIRO on December 27, 2014 Usher 131 in near instant time through the networked society as a series of flows that displace the importance of physical space in favor of process, larger and smaller nodes, and the deem- phasis of time bound by space as a way to experience the information society. From the perspective of an information-seeker, the existence of 24/7 readily available news from all over the world seems to embody the reality of these global information flows. And while Castells has applied his analysis equally to finance and to manufacturing, what we know less about is the experience of the actual production that enables this information ecology. The case of The Times and the IHT underscores the complicated relationship between production and global demands for information; time, and time zones, in particular, play a significant role in the physical coordination of material production. Content creation across the United States, Europe, and Asia underscores the importance of making information locally relevant and reveals that particular nodes in the information environment may take on possibly more hegemonic positions due to their capacity to create content. And while online coordination across a 24/7 global news landscape is facilitated by the networked society, this may mean the actual loss of information. More significantly, there is a real human cost to this 24/7 production. Castells suggests that global flows render time as disembodied from space. Yet when it comes to journalism – a critically important source of information in, well, the information age – time does matter. The news cycles still follow a diurnal process that begin and end according to when the day begin and ends in a particular time zone. The Times produces content that can fill its global offshoots, but the centrality of New York as the key source of information means that both the IHT-Europe and IHT-Asia must follow its lead. The size and power of this node as a key producer of information means that it dominates the resulting physical transfer of information to the Paris and Hong Kong newsrooms. This suggests a more hegemonic perspective of global information transfer: one node can dictate the availability of news to another node in the network. The exchange of information is not so easily facilitated. Content creation, too, raises larger issues about the relationship between global and local. Other scholars (perhaps most notably Appadurai, 1996) – notes that global hegemonic constructions become deeply imbedded in the local imaginary, adapted for consist- ency but nonetheless bearing the stamp of the point of origin. In a networked society, Castells does suggest that certain centers will become the central source for information, but that this information will be easily shared across and through networks, enabling greater connections where location is less important than the knowledge itself. Yet content, as we see here, is not disembodied from location. New York has an American audience; the content it offers must be recreated for European and Asian audiences – and at times, the original content may make little sense when distributed across global nodes. The markets stories reveal the actual disappearance of locally created information from Europe and Asia in favor of the end-of-day New York story. Ultimately, the existence of a content management system organized and based in New York that dictates the presentation of the Web and the final archiving of the stories means that global information available to the world through networked space is ultimately processed through one information hub. This suggests the need to understand content creation in a more nuanced way that addresses where information comes from and how it is distributed rather than looking at the process through which people are able to access this information. Finally, what has been under-explored and needs further consideration are the consequences of the networked society on individual workers. Harvey’s (1991) assessment of

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at UNIV FED DO RIO DE JANEIRO on December 27, 2014 132 Journalism 16(1) flexible workers begins to address some of the demands placed on workers in a post- Fordist world, displaced from traditional institutions and organized, time-bound workflow. But this article offers some insight into just how difficult it is for workers to be actually bound to the demand for constant information in a 24/7 information cycle; Bradsher’s work on China illustrates that the worker is expected to be divorced from time and location in order to respond to the demand for global information flow from multiple nodes in The Times and the IHT online and print networks. And psychic demands for credit and ownership over content creation are subsumed across the larger information environment. Some have addressed the constant 24/7 multiplatform demands of journalists (Deuze, 2007); this global demand for information may go one step beyond. When thinking broadly about global information flows, the networked society offers rich potential for information exchange that can, indeed, be widely dispersed and disaggregated from place and time. But this does not mean that the actors themselves engaged in this information creation are also swept up by the ease of global information flows; for them, as we see in the case of news production, material considerations matter, physical space matters, and time matters. This complicates what we know about the people and processes behind information distribution and begs additional study.

Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

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Glaser BG and Strauss AL (1967) The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Greenslade R (2013) Why The New York Times is moving on from the Herald Tribune. The Guardian, 29 July. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2013/jul/29/ new-york-times-digital-media Hafez K (2007) The Myth of Media Globalization. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Harvey D (1991) The Conditions of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. London: Wiley-Blackwell. Haughney C (2013) A leaner Times aims for global growth. The New York Times, 14 October. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/business/media/a-leaner-times-aims-for- global-growth.html?_r=0&;pagewanted=all Heinrich A (2008) Network journalism: Moving towards a global journalism culture. Paper delivered to the RIPE conference in Mainz, 9–11 October. Heinrich A (2011) Network Journalism: Journalistic Practice in Interactive Spheres. New York: Routledge. Heinrich A (2012) Foreign reporting in the sphere of network journalism. Journalism Practice 6(5): 766–775. Hjarvard S (2001) News Media and the Globalization of the Public Sphere: News Media in a Globalized Society. Goteborg: Nordicom, pp. 17–40. McPhail T (2010) Global Communication: Theories, Stakeholders and Trends. London: Wiley- Blackwell. Media Kit: New York Times Global (n.d.) http://www.nytimesglobal.com/online/destination- sections.aspx Media Kit: New York Times (n.d.) http://nytmediakit.com/newspaper Rao S (2009) Glocalization of Indian journalism. Journalism Studies 10(4): 474–488. Reese SD (2008) Theorizing a globalized journalism. In: Loeffelholz M and Weaver D (eds) Global Journalism Research: Theories, Methods, Findings, Future. London: Blackwell, pp. 240–252. Reese SD (2010) Journalism and globalisation. Sociology Compass 4: 344–353. Roberts JJ (2013) New York Times CEO calls digital pay model ‘most successful’ decision in years. Paid Content, 2 May. Available at: http://paidcontent.org/2013/05/20/new-york-times- ceo-calls-digital-pay-model-most-successful-decision-in-years/ Sassen S (2001) The Global City. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sparks C (2005) Media and the (global) public sphere: An evaluative approach. In: de John W, Shaw M and Stammer N (eds) Global Activism, Global Media. London: Pluto Press, pp. 34–39. Thurman N (2007) The globalisation of journalism online: A transatlantic study of news websites and their international readers. Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism 8(3): 285–307. Thussu D (ed.) (2006) Media on the Move: Global Flow and Contra-Flow. New York: Routledge. Usher N (2014) Making News at The New York Times. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Volkmer I (1999) News in the Global Sphere: A Study of CNN and Its Impact on Global Communication. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Walgrave S and Van Aelst P (2006) The contingency of the mass media’s political agenda setting power: Toward a preliminary theory. Journal of Communication 56(1): 88–109.

Author biography Nikki Usher, PhD, is an assistant professor at The George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs. She is most recently an author of the book Making News at the New York Times, the first in-depth ethnographic portrait of the newspaper in the digital age. She received her PhD and MA from the Annenberg School of Communication, University of Southern California.

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Article

Journalism 2015, Vol. 16(1) 134–152 Photographs of newsrooms: © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: From the printing house to sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1464884914558347 open space offices. Analyzing jou.sagepub.com the transformation of workspaces and information production

Florence Le Cam Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium

Abstract Evolving from a small room at the heart of the printing house to a large, mobile open office, the newsroom is a concept that allows us to contemplate the changes that have transformed journalism over the past century. This article proposes a preliminary analysis of a corpus of photographs of media newsrooms in France, Canada, and Belgium at various points in history (from the end of the 19th century up to today). The analysis of newsroom photographs is necessarily multidimensional. It allows us to conduct a socio-historical study of how workplaces are created and structured and how information is produced. It paves the way for an analysis of the media’s modes of representation within the logic of external communication (to establish and promote its brand image through videos or pictures). It also permits us to make inferences while analyzing the organizational and managerial aspects of a company, and reveals the value of examining the objects used by journalists in their trade. Our goal is to clarify the various indicators and avenues for research that emerge from this corpus. This step will allow us to defend a specific approach to analyzing the material dimension of journalism.

Keywords Material traces, methodology, newsrooms, photographs, socio-historical perspective, Western media

Corresponding author: Florence Le Cam, Université libre de Bruxelles, CP 123, 50 av. F. D. Roosevelt, 1050 Bruxelles, Belgium. Email: [email protected]

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The newsroom is a symbol, but also the physical space that gives birth to the production of information. Evolving from a small room at the heart of the printing house to a large, mobile open office, the newsroom is an important notion that allows scholars to contemplate the changes that have transformed journalism over the last century. Concentrating on the ‘newsroom’ can enable us to analyze the history of at least three shifting elements: the location of the newsroom, the spatial organization of the newsroom, and the objects within the newsroom. The first element refers to the advent of the very notion of a ‘newsroom’ and its location (Lévrier, 2011). The emphasis placed on the installation of newsrooms by media owners allows us to consider not only their placement next to the printing workshop, above the rotary presses or in a media center, but also their address, their position in the city, in what kind of buildings they can be found. The location of newsrooms is informative as it reveals the successive economic and editorial strategies of media entrepreneurs. Our second focus is on spatial organization, which allows us to observe how the workplace of journalists (Monjaret, 2002) has evolved over the years, bringing with it a shift in professional and hierarchical relationships. As Tuchman (1978) showed, physical space is more important in organizing networks of journalists than dividing them into topical areas. We must thus focus our attention on how workspaces are organized, where editors-in-chief are located within these configurations, where meetings take place, and so on. Finally, the third dimension of our analysis examines all the objects present in the newsroom (the typewriters, pens, computers, telephones, and smartphones). Changes in the presence of these tools in newsrooms can teach us about the material conditions of media production, but also about the more or less rapid transformation of journalists’ daily use of tools. The approach defended here begins from socio-historical perspective and studies the visual representations of the workplaces of journalism, defined as a collective place belonging to a media company. Visual representations include photographs of newsrooms and buildings, architectural plans, birthday albums of the media companies, drawing of the newsroom made by journalists or researchers themselves. Methodologically, the article draws from a corpus of photographs of media newsrooms in France, Canada, and Belgium at various points in history (from the end of the 19th century up to today). Pictures are both sources and histories in themselves (Osmond, 2008). Here we are in keeping with the perspective adopted by Brennen and Hardt (2002), who argued that ‘photographs representing aspects of newswork may offer especially appropriate insights into the understanding of the professional self under specific social and institutional circumstances within media organisations’ (p. 12). This article explains how the organization of physical workspace, called the newsroom,1 is important to an understanding of the constraints and flexibilities that journalists had been forced to live with during their daily work lives, as well as how the spatial environment of journalism has been imagined by others and contains ideological underpinnings. A few researchers have examined the newsroom as an object in its own right. Recently, Akhteruz Zaman (2013) has interviewed journalists about how they, as news workers, describe the newsroom, opening up the possibility of thinking about the newsroom as a real and at the same time an ideal space. By reintegrating (in the first part of the article) this perspective into the tradition of studies on industrial photography, and in the tradition of ‘historiophoty’ (White, 1988),

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at Cairo University on December 27, 2014 136 Journalism 16(1) we seek to explain, in a second part, the heuristic scope of this approach and elaborate upon the methodological difficulties encountered in both assembling and analyzing the required corpus. Finally, the third part of this article will present the results of the cross- case analysis of the photographs as a whole. Our goal is to clarify the various indicators and avenues for research that emerge from this corpus. This step will allow us to defend a specific approach to analyzing the material dimension of journalism.

A new approach: Analyzing media companies through photography The study of changes in the world of journalism has often taken the form of analyses of contemporary transformations (multi-platform production, the use of social networks, evolving media coverage, new relationships with the public, etc.), or of historical evolution (the transformation of professional identities, the development of production and media coverage processes, shifts in the labor market, relationships to the public or original sources). This article takes a different look at the dialectics of continuity and change within journalism (Le Cam and Ruellan, 2014), thanks to the analysis of newsrooms photographs. This perspective has rarely been adopted in studies of media and journalism. Brennen and Hardt used a newsroom photograph from the 1930s to illustrate the value of photographic analyses of workplaces. And yet, journalism studies have rarely considered the visual representation of how work is organized, as evidence of this world’s transformations, both material and symbolic. Where they are taken into account, photographs of newsrooms appear as ‘visual facts’, ‘apparently bearing no relation to the written word and bundled together at the center of a book for what seems to be purposes of light relief’ as noted about photographs in sport history (Bale, 1998, quoted by Osmond, 2008). Our work is not directly rooted in visual anthropology or visual analysis. Instead, we have attempted to establish a connection with the more limited domain of the analysis of industrial photography and what White (1988) has called historiophoty, as the ‘representation of history and our thought about it in visual images and filmic discourse’ (p. 1193). We consider then pictures as the material vestige of their subject (Sontag, 1982, quoted by Osmond, 2008). Imagistic helps to understand

the way things may have appeared to the agents acting on a given historical scene. Imagistic (and especially photographic and cinematic) evidence provides a basis for a reproduction of the scenes and atmosphere of past events much more accurate than any derived from verbal testimony alone. (White, 1988: 1194)

Studies in industrial photography have used pictures to gain access to a type of reality relating to the organization of workspaces. Through analysis, studies of industrial photography have managed to describe and examine working conditions, organizational configurations, and the role of ‘objects’, ‘machines’, and people in professional environments. These studies have been useful for our work, as images of newsrooms share many traits with industrial photographs. In large part, they illustrate the ‘machinery’ of journalism that defines individuals as part of an industrial process (Brennen and Hardt, 2002: 26). Following in the footsteps of Dewerpe’s (1987) work on industrial photography at the beginning of the 20th century in Italy’s Ansaldo engineering company, here we

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at Cairo University on December 27, 2014 Le Cam 137 have chosen to consider photographic documents as primary sources for our research. We collect these pictures as traces of the history of the media. It is only during a second stage that these images are connected with a number of explanatory texts. These photographs are considered as the nodal point of our research, in order to save them from being solely archival resources or the mere ‘residue’ of written texts (Dewerpe, 1987: 1079). The debate still rages about the following question: ‘Can photography or film be at the heart of an investigation, or will they always be relegated to a marginal, secondary function as mere illustration?’ (Rémy, 2007: 89). Lurking behind this question is also an ethno-methodological approach that uses photography as a means for analysis: a researcher takes photographs himself, which he then uses as his raw material. In writings on industrial photography, authors do not generally adopt this perspective. They use images as the trace of a certain reality, albeit an imperfect and biased one, and these images constitute the source documents of their work. These still images, created in factories, industries, and the business world, grant us access to a representation fixed in time and consequently reveal the tangible configuration of work, locations, tools, and often anonymous individuals. Assembled into a historical corpus, such images allow us to measure the scope of changes within a given company and consequently, to analyze the material and symbolic transformations of physical workspaces, organizational configurations, the objects used, and so on. Photographs have been widely used in cultural history, where they succeeded in revealing entire swathes of society (the world of agriculture, representations of immigration, etc.) to the public at large. However, they have to a large extent overlooked by media studies (Brennen and Hardt, 2002). Nonetheless, photography is not a technique that merely represents the real. Studies on photography of workplaces have adopted a two-fold perspective: on the one hand, photographs give us access to the tangible, material organization of sites of production, but on the other, they are also simultaneously the images offered up by a company, its attempt at presenting and representing itself to the outside world. Dewerpe (1987) also reminds us of the duality of the system of representation conveyed by photographs, which connects the constructed image (the manifest image – which is a strategy of self- representation, in particular for companies), and the proffered image of industrial work portraying the representation of labor, and thus processes in the making (p. 1080). In visual representations of factories from the beginning of the 20th century, photography seems to function as a form of ‘cultural coherence’. ‘For industrial and financial tycoons, these representations simultaneously ratified their visionary talent and the validity of their economic beliefs […] They reassured citizens with regard to the social, sanitary and moral quality of their society’ (Aubert, 2001: 38). As is the case in studies of the automobile industry, photographs can also symbolically represent an entire nation and depict this industrial sector as one of its ‘vital and venerable organs’ (Lannoy, 2010: 115). In the world of media, some photographs are also used to this end: to portray the media’s power, its productivity, and its importance for society. Such photographs are especially potent when they are assembled into albums2 or special issues commemorating media events. Nevertheless, not all photographs are disseminated to the public. Many images, especially those involving the editorial process, are conserved internally. In such cases, these images are thus perhaps indicative of a desire to follow the news organization’s evolution, to depict organizational changes (a new office, a new technical object), or to con- serve an internal record of media history. These pictures are official, as they have been

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at Cairo University on December 27, 2014 138 Journalism 16(1) taken by someone ‘from’ the news organization, and archived as traces of the evolution of the news organization. We don’t know if the photograph had a permission or not, if he was the official photographer or not. With regard to the corpus assembled, our hypothesis here opens up photographic representation to something other than a mere depiction of businesses, brands, and reputations. We argue that photographs also attest to production processes and the organization of labor, which possess as many repeatable levels in the image. The messages conveyed by photographs reveal the different ways in which industrial labor is codified, thus also illustrating the specific discourse that an industry uses with regard to itself and its environment. According to Dewerpe (1987), there are three different types of discourses (p. 1080). First of all, photographs reveal technical processes: the machines, the stages of production, and the production cycle. They also illustrate factory landscapes and the environment’s topogra- phy: the surrounding areas, how much the factory stands out, the fencing off of the factory’s perimeter, the buildings’ morphology and aesthetics, the visibility of the name, and so on. Finally, photographs also allude to the social reality of labor (Dewerpe, 1987), as they expose the specific levels of discourse and representation involved. Certain formal traits are specific to particular work environments and their representation. A work environment may be ‘visible’ (in which case it serves as a pretext for something else), contingent (it appears in a photograph but is not the main subject of representation), or real (the photograph represents it in a direct fashion; Rouillé, 1984: 32). Scholars like those mentioned above worked off a series of photographs, which allowed them to classify the representation of workplace environments. In our study on newsrooms, photographs are first used as evidence of the organization of the workplace and organizational changes in the world of journalism. Our cross-case analysis of all the photographs in our corpus tries to identify the indicators of change and continuity, as revealed by the material traces the photographs allow to shine through. Examining these photographs naturally requires us to address several traditional aspects of visual analysis, which is a matter of describing techniques, styles, and themes. Photography can be viewed as a form of historical recontextualization, and interpreting it must take into account its dual meaning, both as conveyed by the photographer and as contained in our ultimate interpretation. However, due to the very nature of newsroom photographs, we are dealing with a specific kind of photographical discursivity (Véron, 1994). These images are not fine art photographs, family snapshots, or personal artifacts. They belong to a particular ‘social discursivity’ that seeks to show the process of labor, a company, its organization, and its employees. Consequently, they constitute a serial discourse (composed of specific entities) which must be linked in our analysis, and which permits a cross-case study of the discourses portrayed by photography. This research into newsrooms thus does not attempt to conduct a visual analysis of photographic composition, but rather to examine the social discursivities of journalists, journalism, and the news organization as revealed by photographs.

Composing a corpus of newsroom photographs One could compose a corpus of newsroom photographs in a variety of ways. First of all, one could gather together photographs of buildings, which would allow for an analysis of the outside appearance of media companies, their place in the city landscape, and their

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at Cairo University on December 27, 2014 Le Cam 139 architectural and physical integration into neighborhoods. The façade of buildings can be seen as the public image that a media company wishes to portray, an expression of the place it hopes to occupy within the urban landscape. Moving office buildings, renovating the outside and changing configurations are all instances of a media establishment trying to alter its public brand image and to integrate in its own territory. A second possibility would be to compose a corpus of photographs of all the workspaces of a given newspaper company: editorial offices, advertising and marketing departments, production studios (rotary presses, assembly sites, sound stages), documentation units, studios, newsrooms, and so on. This perspective would allow for an understanding of the general organization of the media world, the successive configurations of production spaces, media diffusion, and marketing. Analyzing how floors, offices, partitions, departments, and units are divided or grouped together tells us about how the media perceives and structures its general organization and about the strategies it wishes to implement. Finally, the third possibility is the one we have adopted in this study: focusing on a collection of photographs depicting the particularly meaningful space of newsrooms. Here we share the same perspective as Brennen and Hardt (2002), who stated that

although [the photograph of a newsroom] projects the presence of a variety of discernible individuals and objects and their physical relations as a ‘slice of time,’ it also produces a specific worldview. The photograph is not a conventional image of an editorial staff but rather a distinct visual statement about the newsroom as a symbolic space of human labor. (pp. 25–26)

Starting with an analysis of newsrooms gives us access to the depiction of the materiality of labor organization, production processes, and working conditions. The snapshot of a single instant is thus fixed in time. Multiplying these static images and not concentrating on a single photograph, but considering them instead as part of a series, allows us to conceive of the newsroom as the material ‘object’ in which journalism is produced, practiced, and experienced. In this sense, composing a corpus means elaborating a kind of photo-ethnographical narrative, presented as a series of ‘photographs, in relationship with each other and which compose a sequence of visual information’ (Achutti, 2007: 112). The first step of the research is constituting a corpus. With regard to photographs of newsrooms, this is not always an easy task. Not all media companies have systematically archived internal photographs such as these. Some images were meticulously conserved because they were used in supplements or commemorative issues. Others are still subject to copyright. The scattering of photographs across time and space presents an obstacle toward assembling a corpus. We must negotiate access to the full corpus of photographs, not simply those pre-selected by the company in question. Some pictures are not captioned; others do not even mention the date of the shooting or the name of the photographer. At this stage, the first phase of on-going research, the corpus of photographs collected comprises a patchwork of photographs of newsrooms, mainly from three territories: France, Canada, and Belgium. This collection is based in the research in databases (Gallica, for example, for France), on the search engines and contacts with journalists or managers of newsrooms. The latter entrance is very promising, because the images of workplaces may also have been taken by the employees themselves on various occasions. Asking for photographs of individual journalists opens a new avenue: the collection of memorial traces taken all along the path of the journalist, who can comment the shot and the context.

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Our research used three different types of images. On the one hand, photographs can represent a media company, on a given day, at a particular time. They may belong to a group of images dating from a specific era, offering a sort of panoramic view (this is the case below with the Journal de Roubaix, a daily French newspaper). These collections illustrate a time, T, within a given company, featuring its various components and units in a synchronic way. On the other hand, our corpus was also assembled thanks to a more systematic organization of historical series. We conducted our work in collaboration with media staff, in particular company documentation services. The goal here is to establish a sizeable historical corpus of newsroom photographs, in order to obtain the most complete archive possible, as is the case with the on-going assembly of corpuses for the daily Belgian newspaper Le Soir, the Belgian press agency Belga, the regional French newspaper Le Télégramme, and Radio-Canada, a French-speaking Canadian television and radio broadcasting company. For example, 41 photographs dating from 1897 to 2013 thus comprise the historical series of photographs of the daily Le Soir. This approach corresponds to two methodological needs: in order to analyze the historical vestiges of change, our corpus must be presented as a diachronic series (a historical study of the media), but it may also be composed as a number of synchronic series (an in-depth analysis of media photography at a given point in history). As an example of the nature of the corpus – these images will be analyzed in Part 3 of the article – these three photographs from the Journal de Roubaix (see Figures 1 to 3), a regional daily paper in France, allow us to develop a synchronic series. The eight images gathered together show all the production spaces of the newspaper in 1910: the engrav- ing, folding and binding studios, the linotype machines, the newsroom, and so on. This series is highly valuable, as it gives us detail about the newspaper’s production and creation, just as Dewerpe’s industrial images showed us the tangible configuration of work in Italy’s Ansalmo factory. It is the synchronic vestige of the materiality of newspaper production during that era. A second example of the nature of the corpus refers back to the development of diachronic series. These series require the collaboration of media documentation services. They allow as large a historical corpus as possible to be assembled which can visually represent newsrooms. The diachronic series is the manifest illustration of the material transformations that occurred in the workspace over the years. Thanks to these images, both transformations and consistencies may become evident to the researcher. The next four pictures below (Figures 4 to 7) belong to the corpus analyzing the Belgian daily paper Le Soir, and range from the end of the 19th century to 2013. They show how the physical workplace has changed from a small but collective office to an organized newsroom with structured sections. They also illustrate the continuous appropriation of technologies and tools by the media. Using both diachronic and synchronic series, as well as isolated photographs, we can not only analyze the evolution of the media, but also establish comparisons between different series. To this end, addressing continuities and changes must not only rely on longitudinal studies (the analysis of a single media company), but also on the study of the convergences between labor organization configurations and the physical and organizational changes occurring in newsrooms. Comparing photographs from different newsrooms, taken at the same time, offers a view on the circulation of organizational models and their uses by media companies.

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Figure 1. Journal de Roubaix, bindery (1910), Mairie de Rouaix, site des archives municipales.

Figure 2. Journal de Roubaix, workshop (1910) Mairie de Rouaix, site des archives municipales.

Figure 3. Journal de Roubaix, linotype room (1910) Mairie de Rouaix, site des archives municipales.

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Figure 4. Le Soir 1902, Le Soir archives.

Figure 5. Le Soir 1958, Le Soir archives.

Evidently, the difficulties associated with such an analysis are numerous. It is not easy to infer the intentions of a photographer during his or her shoot. Was the photographer commissioned by the company to portray a specific image of the newsroom’s organization? Was the space rearranged for the photo shoot? Moreover, it is difficult to analyze photographs without any context or explanation. Where did that door in the back left- hand side lead to? What about that stairwell on the right-hand side? Two tools can be quite useful to address such questions. On the one hand, analyses should concentrate on series (and not insist on any one detail); on the other, the study of photographs should simultaneously rely on a collection of historical documents that were contemporary with the media enterprise itself. By contrasting texts about newsrooms (which are very rare) with journalists’ scattered descriptions of their workplaces (more frequent) and historical media studies (somewhat random in frequency, depending on the company and research interests), our study can become more precise and open up new possibilities for compre- hending the material vestiges revealed by these visual documents.

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Figure 6. Le Soir 1959, Le Soir archives.

Figure 7. Le Soir 2007, Le Soir archives.

Gathering together this corpus inevitably involved a complete analysis of all the photographs. This cross-case approach allows us to propose new avenues for research and also, to nuance a number of sub-problems. What can we see in newsroom photographs that can help us to analyze the evolution of their material nature?

The visibility of journalism’s organization: What should we see in these photographs? The study of the whole corpus is the indispensable first step for an analysis of a photographic series. The cross-case analysis of the photographs produced several avenues for research. Consequently, newsroom photographs allow us: (a) to examine the emergence of the newsroom; (b) to consider the representation of itself that the media seeks to portray; (c) to contemplate the space of the newsroom, its structural and managerial organization; and finally (d) to study the objects used by journalists.

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The emergence of the newsroom in French-speaking countries The 19th century photographs, drawings, and engravings show a highly specific organization of workplaces. It is very difficult to ascertain the date when the workplace called a ‘newsroom’ appeared. It seems that this word (‘salle de rédaction’ in French) did not appear in French texts during the 18th century. At that time, many newspapers were still edited by a single individual. Those in charge of newspapers even sometimes went so far as to erase all traces of the editorial process and production, especially when the latter was collective (Lévrier, 2011). Collective editorial and production spaces took a very long time to arise. Prior to these, the senior editor would work with the publisher or printer. Sometimes, he would even correct the galley proofs onsite in the production space (usually the printing studio); other editors would also occasionally contribute to the corrections. When journalism became a professional occupation during the 19th century, working conditions and changes in the frequency of diffusion made collective work necessary (Ruellan, 1993). But for a significant period of time, the newsroom still remained ‘a dark place’ (Pinson, 2013: 26). For example, the oldest photographs in our corpus show the workplace of the daily paper Le Soir, located at 42 rue d’Isabelle, in Brussels. The newspaper’s owner, Emile Rossel, is leaning against the doorframe of the case room; he seems to be checking the proofs. This scene depicting how the newspaper gets made is thus clearly associated with the concrete, physical space of its production. Historical texts about Le Soir discussed the first few years following its creation. On rue d’Isabelle, a

printer rented several rooms to draft and compose a new paper. […] Le Soir’s first offices were incredibly humble. The typographers worked in the attic and the plate-makers in the cellar […]. As for the two editors, they each had a table and a telephone. This attested to a certain attempt at modernity, once we realize that at the time, there were only 4,674 phone lines in all of Belgium. (Hereng, 2003: 11–12)

A photograph of Le Soir’s offices from 1902 already shows transformations in the newspaper’s representation and practical organization (Figure 8). This photograph is markedly different from the previous one representing Emile Rossel leaning against the doorframe. It shows the implementation of collective editorial (and not just layout or composition) workspaces. It is not the owner who stands out, but the editor-in- chief. In the background, we can see the other editors, all working on a communal table. This first line of investigation paves the way for an analysis, via visual representations, of the historical structuring of newspaper production spaces. When did ‘newspaper offices’ (Pinson, 2013) become collective rooms full of ‘professionals’? How were these workspaces pragmatically organized? What kind of spatial representation can we observe?

The image of itself that the media seeks to convey Many photographs stand out because of their static, frozen appearance. As Dewerpe (1987: 1098) has stressed, photographs communicate ideologies and perform a sort of doubling of the company’s strategies of presence. Factories have their name splashed on every wall, both inside and out. On the other hand, this trend is much less visible with

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Figure 8. Le Soir, 1902, Le Soir archives. media companies, where the company name may appear on the exterior of the building, but is largely absent from the newsroom itself. The only obvious traces can be found indirectly, thanks to the newspaper issues left behind on desks, or perhaps the backdrops of television sets. Nonetheless, what we do find in photographs of newsrooms is not only a picture of the productive tools the company seeks to emphasize (the presence of rotary presses, innovative tools – many photographs show the first computers available in newsrooms, for example), as a form of functional order. The other order, which stems from the representation system inferred by the photograph, reveals the company’s stated aesthetic (Dewerpe, 1987: 1099). The next two photographs (from L’Auto, a specialized French newspaper, and Belga, the Belgium Press Agency – Figures 9 and 10) illustrate such ideological expressions. The choice of perspective, angle, luminosity, and subject (the editor-in-chief and the reception area) belong to a functional – and especially aesthetic – order. The locations are elegant and rather uncanny; in each different era, a certain air of modernity and control pervades the space and informs the aesthetic. This second approach would orient our research toward an aesthetic analysis of the media company’s staging, examining the values that emanate from its organization within the city and neighborhood, from its buildings and office. How do the buildings belonging to a media company represent its role in society and its relationship with the outside world?

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Figure 9. L’auto 1914, Free of rights.

Figure 10. At Belga, the Belgian press agency, this photograph stages the agency’s new offices.

Contemplating the space of the newsroom, its structural and managerial organization These photographs give us information about the size of the editorial staff (and possibly the total number of journalists), its socio-demographic distribution (thanks to the presence of certain profiles, the staging of social genres, and generations), its hierarchical structure (where the editor-in-chief’s desk is located, how the offices are arranged), and its place within the entire organization (proximity to printing studios, specialized offices, in a circle around a central desk …).

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Some of these photographs are also extremely helpful for understanding the collective nature of the editorial staff. For example, the picture of L’Illustration Nouvelle’s staff from 1938 to 1939 (Figure 11) tells the story of a collaborative and collective endeavor, looking much like a portrait taken during a family reunion. The photograph shows the presence of two women (were they the editors’ wives? journalists themselves? secretaries?) and the intermingling of different generations; its staging around the dinner table likewise suggests the existence of social interactions that went beyond the merely professional.

Figure 11. L’Illustration Nouvelle, editorial staff, 1938–1939. Free of rights.

Figure 12. L’Illustration, Montreal 1934–1935, Free of rights. These images are also meaningful with regard to the position of the editor/journalist/ reporter within the workspace. The practical organization of desks and offices (in the offices of Montreal’s L’Illustration in 1934–1935 – Figure 12) shows us how the desks were arranged in rows, one behind another, all facing a central desk. The desks themselves (they appear to be made of wood, though that would soon change), the posture of the editors, the presence of an attendant who seems to be distributing the news, are all helpful details for our analysis. Visual representations such as these also allow us to infer distinctions between the various statuses and roles in the company. The various paths of travel between offices are visible and can sometimes even be mapped out. These paths can illustrate the social relations within the company, the breaking off of smaller collective groups, and the thematic

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at Cairo University on December 27, 2014 148 Journalism 16(1) divisions inherent to information production, as well as the creation of new departments and the disappearance of others. The room for circulation between desks is also particularly important: It points to the ‘paths’ or ‘routes’ embedded in the workspace. Some images represent the spaces allotted for sociability, where journalists would gather around the newspaper or television set, or share a cup of coffee. This tells us about the daily life of these employees. These pictures also show how the places belonging to individuals become internal- ized territories. One’s worktable or desk could be personalized (books and personal effects could illustrate the fact that the desk was not only a place for work – Monjaret, 2002), but it could also remain impersonal, at times perhaps exhibiting the fleeting traces of various individuals sharing a desk. Some types of workspaces seem to have been favored during specific eras. Meeting rooms are visible. Some photographs let us see the spaces where employees work together, but also how these spaces can be almost entirely controlled. This control stems from the physical arrangement of the space: open space offices, present very early only in some editorial environments, mean that everyone can see each other’s professional activity and productivity. Open space arrangements also give managers and supervisors a panoptic view of the entire staff. Various photographs show the editor-in-chief’s desk outside of the newsroom properly speaking (journalists can access it via a little staircase and must open a closed door). Others show the editor-in-chief sitting in a specific section of the newsroom from where she/he can observe the entire newsroom. Finally, a number of other images show the editor-in-chief sitting in a glass office cell, from which she/he can see and be seen. Despite their silent nature, photographs paradoxically tell us about the sounds present in the newsroom. Visually, they sometimes insist on typewriters, computers, telex machines, telephones – at times displaying the movements of various employees coming and going on television screens, and so on. These images evoke the soundscape of the newsroom and tell us about the evolution of noise within this environment. Evolving from the cacophony of typewriters and printing presses in the basement, the newsroom seems to have become increasingly silent, now simply home to the vibrations of cell phones and the soft clicking of computer keys.

Examining the objects used by journalists Our corpus very clearly portrays the objects used by journalists in their work and their evolution: paper, uploading tools, scissors, computers, telex machines, the Internet, phone booths, and smartphones. This global view of objects allows us to study the practical circumstances behind information production (paper scattered across the top of a desk, two computers being used simultaneously …), and to evaluate the material changes that have affected the practice of journalism, consequently requiring those employed in its service to constantly adapt. Analyzing these objects also paves the way for an investigation into how journalists relate to their sources: The places where information is acquired and exchanged have been transformed (for example, telephones used to be in booths) and the timeframe of source gathering has also been radically altered, as we can tell from these photographs.

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Hypotheses regarding these objects are numerous. One theory leads us to consider the importance that the company grants to the staging of its work tools. Demonstrating a sort of technological quasi-determinism, the photographs contained in our diachronic series all emphasize the acquisition of ‘innovative’ tools and materials (innovative for the era, naturally). Consequently, these two photographs (one from Belga, the other from Le Soir – Figures 13 and 14) illustrate the technical organization and thus the strength of the company with regard to information technology. The processes of information production and branding are thus strengthened by the air of modernity that these images evoke. But the most interesting hypothesis with regard to journalism’s objects such as they are represented in photography refers to the object’s role within its environment (by sociologizing Paveau’s (2012) perspective). The journalist also acts via the object she/he uses, the latter offering him or her a discursive framework in which to operate. Identifying the objects in the daily life of journalists (as photographed) lets us glimpse

Figure 13. Belga archives.

Figure 14. Le Soir, Le Soir archives.

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at Cairo University on December 27, 2014 150 Journalism 16(1) the traces of concrete materialization. This materialization allows us to reconstruct a kind of ‘dialogue’ (Bakhtin, via Todorov, 1981) between the different media eras and among different media by era. These forms of dialogism emphasize the fact that all practices and all objects carry within them the trace of previous uses, and of the practical and ideological configurations which caused them to emerge and thanks to which they were appropriated. These photographs embody the relationship that the media and journalists have developed – and continue to develop – with regard to their environment and the objects that ‘populate’ their work. Materiality as it is presented in these images thus becomes the space of mediation paving the way for an analysis of the changes and continuities of the processes of information production, journalists’ working conditions, and the structural organization of media companies. Once photographed, the object itself tells a story, and it can be used as the tangible mark of a discourse of and about journalism.

Conclusion This article is only the first phase of on-going research. It seeks to emphasize not only the importance of visual analysis in the domain of research on journalism and journalists, but also put forward a few different possibilities for future research, based on this photographic source material. The analysis of newsroom photographs is necessarily multidimensional. It allows us to conduct a socio-historical study of how workplaces are created and structured and how information is produced. It paves the way for an analysis of the media’s modes of representation within the logic of external communication (to establish and promote its brand image through videos or pictures). It also permits us to make inferences while analyzing the organizational and managerial aspects of a company, and reveals the value of examining the objects used by journalists in their trade. We could think about how this visual analysis could be part of a more general study of a spatial ethnography of labor (Chari and Gidwani, 2005) in journalism. Trying to appropriate all these methodological issues, the next step will focus on a corpus made up of a series of photographs from the prestige newspaper Le Soir from the end of the 19th century up to today, and also of various successive architectural plans of the building and the newsroom that have drawn the spatial territory of the media organization, Le Soir. These visual representations are crossed with an analysis of discourses from the media itself and its journalists (through books about the media, articles, or biographies of journalists). Our next phase or research will narrow, in other words. Nevertheless, working with a corpus of photographs could also lead us to broaden our scope. Incorporating the short films of media communication campaigns, proposing comparisons between different workplaces (for example, how has rhetoric on industrialization and the organizational changes in the industry influenced the physical configuration of work in media companies?), analyzing fictional representations of newsrooms (films about journalism, television series, comic books, literature, painting …): These are all possibilities which would allow us to address the concept of the newsroom as a potentially rich subject that has until now been overlooked by studies on journalism.

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Acknowledgements The author wishes to thank Anne Thomaes from Le Soir and Philippe De Camps from Belga for making available the photographs of their newsrooms.

Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes 1. In the main project, the newsroom can also be defined as every place of work production: a desk in an hostel, a car during a journey, a train, and so on. News are often produced out of the doors of traditional newsrooms. 2. The elaboration of our corpus will subsequently broaden research into the ‘albums’ produced by companies to commemorate their anniversaries. These albums will permit an investigation of the images of themselves that media companies produce over time. To this end, videos and short company films could also become part of the corpus.

References Achutti L (2007) ‘Photoethnographie’: dans les coulisses de la bnf. Ethnologie française 37: 111–116. Aubert D (2001) Photographie et utopie industrielle: Pittsburgh au début du xxe siècle. Revue française d’études américaines 3(89): 33–42. Brennen B and Hardt H (2002) Travail de l’information, histoire et matériau photographique: Analyse visuelle d’une salle de rédaction dans les années 30 (traduction de Gilles Bastin). Terrains & travaux 1(3): 92–120. Chari S and Gidwani V (2005) Introduction: Grounds for a spatial ethnography of labor. Ethnography 6(3): 267–281. Dewerpe A (1987) Miroirs d’usines: photographies industrielles et organisation du travail à l’Ansaldo (1900–1920). Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 42(5): 1079–1114. Hereng J (2003) Le Soir dans l’Histoire. Bruxelles: Editions Luc Pire. Lannoy P (2010) L’usine, La photographie et la nation. L’entreprise automobile fordiste et la production des photographes industriels. Genèses 3(80): 114–135. Le Cam F and Ruellan D (2014) Changements et permanences du journalisme. Paris: Ed. L’Hamattan. Lévrier A (2011) La ‘société’ du ‘Journal Littéraire’, ou l’avènement d’une pratique collégiale du journalisme. In: Colloque GIS-Journalisme. Available at: http://gisjournalisme.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/levrier-gis-j-2011.pdf Monjaret A (2002) Les bureaux ne sont pas seulement des espaces de travail. Communication et organisation 21: 75–90. Osmond G (2008) Reflecting materiality: Reading sport history through the lens. Rethinking History 12(3): 339–360. Paveau MH (2012) Ce que disent les objets. Sens, affordance, cognition. Synergies pays de la Baltique 9. Available at: http://ressources-cla.univ-fcomte.fr/gerflint/Baltique9/baltique9.html Pinson G (2013) L’Imaginaire médiatique. Histoire et fiction du journal au XIXème siècle. Paris: Classiques Garnier. Rémy C (2007) Ni cliché, ni séquence: s’arrêter sur l’image. Ethnologie française 37(1): 89–95. Rouillé A (1984) Les images photographiques du monde du travail sous le Second Empire. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 54: 31–43.

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Ruellan D (1993) Le professionnalisme du flou. Identité et savoir-faire des journalistes français. Grenoble: Presses universitaires de Grenoble. Todorov T (1981) Mikhaïl Bakhtine. Le principe dialogique. Suivi de Ecrits du Cercle de Bakhtine. Paris: Seuil. Tuchman G (1978) Making news: a study in the construction of reality. Michigan: Free Press. Véron E (1994) De l’image sémiologique aux discursivités. Le temps d’une photo. Hermès 13(14): 45–64. White H (1988) Historiography and Historiophoty. The American Historical Review 93(5): 1193–1199. Zaman A (2013) Newsroom as Battleground. Journalist’s description of their workspaces. Journalism Studies 14(6): 819–834.

Author biography Florence Le Cam is chair of Journalism at the Department of Information and Communication Sciences at Université Libre de Bruxelles (Brussels). Her research interests are the professional identities of journalists and the historical construction of the profession. She is the co-author of Changements et permanences du journalisme (2014) and co-editor of the multilingual scientific journal Sur le journalisme/About journalism/Sobre jornalismo.

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Journalism 2015, Vol. 16(1) 153–156 Afterword © The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1464884914545744 jou.sagepub.com Daniel Kreiss University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA

John Dewey (1925 [1958]) described ‘objects’ as ‘things with a meaning’ (p. 166). For Dewey, objects are at the foundation of communication and, ultimately, social life. Once named, objects are thought about, invested and reinvested with meaning, reinterpreted, and acted upon. Objects ‘acquire representatives, surrogates, signs and implicates, which are infinitely more amenable to management, more permanent, and more accommodat- ing, than events in their first estate’ (p. 167). Analytically, the articles in this volume all variously, and in varying ways, make a Dewey-ian ‘object’ of the material ‘objects of journalism’. Empirically, these articles reveal the presence and consequences of material objects of journalism as they are at work in the world. In their focus on distinctly material objects, these papers all extend a broader ‘material’ turn in contemporary social science (see Bennett and Joyce, 2013; Marres, 2012). There is something gained in this narrow focus on the material object, instead of the more expansive sense of ‘object’ sketched by Dewey, the idea of cultural objects discussed by Michael Schudson (1989), or the knowledge objects that sociologist Karin Knorr-Cetina (1997) has placed at the foundation of an ‘object-oriented sociality’. The narrow framing of the material ‘object’ at play here helps these authors disclose a more expansive world of journalistic practice. These authors show how often taken-for-granted objects such as content management systems, websites, and even desks shape the organizations, work, and products of journalism through their material and symbolic properties and affordances. As this volume demonstrates, a focus on materiality creates a rich, new set of objects of analysis for journalism researchers. Most broadly, this volume expands the range of things that can be said to matter when we seek explanations for what we observe and think about in relation to journalism. I sketch here some concluding, summary thoughts, considering broadly the theme that I see uniting the papers in this volume. Namely, these authors all ask how and when do

Corresponding author: Daniel Kreiss, Assistant Professor, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA. Email: [email protected]

Downloaded fromDownloaded http://www.elearnica.ir from jou.sagepub.com at Cairo University on December 27, 2014 154 Journalism 16(1) the material objects of journalism matter, and in what ways? At this point, there are reams of studies of materiality and organization (see Leonardi et al., 2012), but this volume’s particular contribution lies in bringing a focus on things to an institution expressly concerned with the production and dissemination of cultural objects. Indeed, these articles’ collective concern in this volume recall Schudson’s (1989) posing of very similar questions of ‘cultural objects’ nearly two decades ago. The parallels between ‘material’ and ‘cultural’ objects are striking. In one sense, material objects, like culture, always matter. Material objects are always present with us. They shape the very ways we have of being in the world, and provide the background contexts, stages, and raw materials for social action. And yet, we know that material objects, like culture, provide both constraints and resources and do not wholly determine human actions. Extending Schudson’s analysis of culture, it is as unsatisfying to say that material objects are simply inert, as it is to declare that they are just flexible and malleable resources easily enlisted into different programs of action, as the unyielding presence of Latour’s (1999) speed bumps reminds us. In other words, the strength of the volume lies in the answers these articles provide to the middle-range concerns that Schudson posed with respect to culture: why do material objects seem to matter in particularly consequential ways at particular moments? What are the conditions when material objects matter? And, following Dewey, what are the material and symbolic associations these objects acquire, and ultimately help to shape? What is striking is that across the articles in this volume, there is a general lack of any shared theoretical framework. The authors draw on a number of diverse conceptual resources, from Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT), Castell’s network theory, and Appadurai’s global and local imaginaries, to Law’s idea of heterogeneous engineering, White’s historiophoty, Star’s emphasis on infrastructure, and the various interpretative approaches grouped under the rubric of ‘software studies’. The authors in this volume join these works with a range of conceptual and empirical works by scholars such as Anderson, Boczkowski, Czarniawska, Domingo, Hemmingway, Lewis, and Usher who represent a ‘home grown’ and now well-established contemporary tradition of studying materiality in journalism research. In sum, the pieces in this volume utilize a broad set of interdisciplinary concepts as tools for inquiry in close-to-the-ground empirical work, both field and archival. Instead of a shared theoretical approach, these works share a common orientation towards empirical inquiry. And, finally, they share a substantive interest in journalism. As a result, these works provide context-rich accounts of when, why, and how material objects matter in journalistic practice that are contextual and contingent, embedded in time and space. A few pieces illustrate the strength of this empirical approach at revealing when material objects become consequential and when we should take account of them. In his detailed field study of the MSNBC Digital Network, Josh Braun shows that ‘sociotechnical’ systems are reliant upon both the ‘socio’ and the ‘technical’. The Newsvine discussion tool ‘worked’ when it supported a stand-alone, citizen journalism community with defined social norms. But, it quickly ceased to function properly with the influx of new, un-acculturated users, who often had radically different goals and expectations for the site, when it was acquired by MSNBC. As a result, Newsvine ceased to be a stable infrastructural platform that supported and worked in concert with a community. It

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at Cairo University on December 27, 2014 Kreiss 155 became a contested and problematic artifact – an object of concern – that convened a host of community members, staffers, developers, and others around it to engage in re- conceptions of the platform and the role of people in it, technical modifications, and redesigns. In sum, a once unheralded and background platform rather quickly became an object of shared concern, which revealed both the work that it routinely performed in supporting an extant community and the limits of the sociotechnical context it could function in. In other contexts, we can see a certain obstinate durability among journalistic objects and their role in shaping human practice. In an exceptional study, Rodgers argues that material objects have certain degrees of autonomy – an ability of objects to resist the intentions of human users. Even more, Scott Rodgers shows how a particular journalism content management system shaped human practices in particular ways according to its design and the associations it brings to news work. As a result, Rodgers provocatively suggests that we need to consider that material objects can carry particular values and institutional relationships in their design that stand separate and apart from, and shape, news organizations and journalistic practice. Other contributors show that material objects facilitate the routine functioning of journalistic work in ways that are both very particular and are highly consequential in shaping the production of knowledge. In Heather Ford’s rich analysis of Wikipedia, she shows how a set of digital objects – infoboxes, tables, and warning tags – both carry symbolic meaning and have symbolic consequences, as well as facilitate collaboration among Wikipedia’s varied and far-flung users. These journalistic objects shape the production of knowledge in a hybrid format that blends the genres of breaking news and encyclopedias. The objects Ford traces work in deeply political ways. They are employed strategically by editors to guide the representation of breaking news events, and the objects themselves have a force in shaping the work of symbolic production, the categorization of political events, and ultimately what is visible during the debate over political controversies. These articles make clear that scholars seeking to explain journalistic practices and products must take account of the work of material objects in shaping social action. Indeed, although the articles cited above focus on objects that pervade contemporary journalism, such as content management systems and Internet applications, other contributions in this volume look historically at the role of objects in shaping journalistic practice. Susan Keith’s richly detailed historical account reveals that material objects are ‘tools of newsroom power’ and have both material and symbolic dimensions. Tracing the evolution of material configurations provides clues onto the historical development of news work (which Florence Le Cam wonderfully shows in her use of photographs to trace the material constitution of the newsrooms of the 1800s through today). Even more, as Keith demonstrates, the analog objects that were commonplace through much of the 20th century, such as copy desks and pica rulers, empowered particular actors over others, afforded certain forms of work, and shaped the organizational workings of the newsroom. Taken together, the works in this volume show that journalism was, is, and will continue to be a deeply material practice. These articles show that explaining the practices and products of journalism means taking account of material objects. As an analytical emphasis, the idea of materiality helps scholars disclose new aspects of journalistic

Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at Cairo University on December 27, 2014 156 Journalism 16(1) practices and interrogate them normatively. And ultimately, the usefulness of analytical approaches to materiality must be judged on the grounds of whether they help us ask better questions about social life. Indeed, I think the pieces in this volume leave us with many more questions than they answer, and this is what will make them enormously useful as the starting points for future inquiries.

References Bennett T and Joyce P (2013) Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn. New York: Routledge. Cetina KK (1997) Sociality with objects: Social relations in postsocial knowledge societies. Theory, Culture & Society 14(4): 1–30. Dewey J (1925 [1958]) Experience and Nature. New York City: Dover. Latour B (1999) Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Harvard University Press. Leonardi PM, Nardi BA and Kallinikos J (2012) Materiality and Organizing: Social Interaction in a Technological World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marres N (2012) Material Participation: Technology, the Environment and Everyday Publics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Schudson M (1989) How culture works. Theory and Society 18(2): 153–180.

Author biography Daniel Kreiss is Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Daniel’s research explores the impact of technological change on the public sphere and political practice and he is the author of Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama (2012).

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