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Preserving Professional Identity Through Networked Journalism at Elite News Media Technological University Dublin ARROW@TU Dublin Doctoral Applied Arts 2019 Working the News: Preserving Professional Identity Through Networked Journalism at Elite News Media Jenny Hauser Technological University Dublin Follow this and additional works at: https://arrow.tudublin.ie/appadoc Part of the Film and Media Studies Commons Recommended Citation Hauser, J. (2019) Working the News: Preserving Professional Identity Through Networked Journalism at Elite News Media, Doctoral Thesis, Technological University Dublin. DOI: 10.21427/12h3-z337 This Theses, Ph.D is brought to you for free and open access by the Applied Arts at ARROW@TU Dublin. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral by an authorized administrator of ARROW@TU Dublin. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 License Working the news: Preserving professional identity through networked journalism at elite news media Jenny Hauser Supervisors: Dr. Harry Browne, Dr. Charlie Cullen, Prof. Michael Foley School of Media, TU Dublin Abstract The concept of journalism as a profession has arguably been fraught and contested throughout its existence. Ideologically, it is founded on a claim to norms and a code of ethics, but in the past, news media also held material control over mass communication through broadcast and print which were largely inaccessible to most citizens. The Internet and social media has created a news environment where professional journalists and their work exist side-by-side with non-journalists. In this space, acts of journalism also can be and are carried out by non-journalists. Through the new news distribution channels offered by social media, non-journalists are potentially able to disseminate their texts to wide audiences. In practice this means that journalism is no longer exclusively the domain of the journalist, and has led to the adoption of collaboration as a journalistic convention that presents opportunities but also serious challenges and risks for the professional community. My research aims to contribute to the news discourse concerning emerging professional practices in networked journalism with a focus on how journalistic authority is reasserted within a collaborative news environment. Rather than looking at networked journalism as primarily participatory, this research explores collaborative newswork as a means to carry out professional boundary work and to articulate this to audiences. I argue that the act of collaboration in newswork at times becomes a quasi-ideological project to protect journalism as a profession that lays claim to ethics, norms and routines. The research comprises three case studies of news stories covered by the BBC World Service and the English-language services of France 24 and Al Jazeera. Using quantitative and qualitative analysis methods, they explore how social media was mobilised in the newswork. The aim was to explore how sourcing practices affected the power relationships between primary and secondary definers, and how journalists create and articulate professional boundaries in collaborative newswork. These research findings were triangulated with interviews with social media editors at the three news organisations. 2 Thank you I would like to thank my supervisors without whose dedication and commitment this research would have never been possible. In particular I thank Dr. Harry Browne for being there to bounce ideas off and the many hours and thought he put into helping me hone my arguments during the write-up stage, Dr. Charlie Cullen for his invaluable input on helping me apply the necessary rigour and structure to my research and thesis, and Prof. Michael Foley for his belief in the value of my research in this field in the initial stages and his commitment to helping me secure the funding. I also want to thank my grandmother Prof. Irene Hauser and friend Dorothy Burke for letting me know that they would never let me off the hook when it came to pulling through. They are not with us anymore but even in their last weeks these two good-humoured but incredibly determined and disciplined people left me in no doubt about what I had to do. Finally, thank you to a little girl called Maya, who my friend Sam reliably told me was keeping her up at least just as much at night. 3 1. Introduction 6 2. Literature Review 18 Drawing boundaries around journalism 20 The journalist 29 What is Twitter and how does it work? 38 Power law and Elite users 45 ‘Ambient’ journalism and ‘gatewatching’ 54 News media as public sphere 67 3. News organisations and their media models 78 BBC 81 France 24 85 Al Jazeera 87 Overview of social media strategies at BBC, France 24 and Al Jazeera 92 BBC 92 France 24 95 Al Jazeera 97 4. Methodology 100 Aims and Objectives 100 Case studies 102 Case study analysis 105 Interviews 115 Journalist as researcher 120 Summary 122 5. Gatekeeping the Greek financial crisis 123 Timeline 125 Sample of news texts 126 Quantitative Analysis 130 Twitter users and source power 130 Type of sources in user groups 136 Text analysis 140 Power relationships 140 Varoufakis’ resignation 148 Protest representation 153 Platforms 155 Summary 158 6. Migrant crisis: the pursuit of journalism’s ethics 163 4 Timeline 163 Sample of news texts 166 Quantitative Analysis 170 Twitter Sources 170 Twitter Source Power 173 Facebook Sources 175 YouTube Sources 178 Text analysis 184 Journalists as sources 184 Hungarian camera woman 189 Alan Kurdi 191 Palestinian pen seller 199 The Kempsons 204 Summary 206 7. Battle for Aleppo: sanctioning amateur journalists 208 Timeline 209 Sample of news texts 210 Quantitative Analysis 212 Source power and identities 212 Textual Analysis 222 16th of November 222 BBC 222 France 24 225 Al Jazeera 228 Claim to Impartiality 232 Objectivity 240 Summary 246 8. Interviews: making sense of networked journalism 249 Strategy 253 Agenda-setting 267 Platforms 278 Verification 281 Guidelines 287 Summary 294 9. Conclusion 297 Bibliography 311 Academic texts 311 Non-academic texts 332 5 1. Introduction The Internet has arguably thrown professional journalism into crisis not only by undermining its commercial business model, with dwindling revenue plaguing much of the industry, but by creating an environment that contests the notion of professionalism in journalism. Journalists as a professional community have had their exclusivity as news producers challenged in ways that have not only opened a space for non-professionals in newswork but that also in some ways come to rely on them. Collaborating with non-journalists has become an important part of almost all facets of journalism be it on breaking news, societal issues, or human rights abuses. A set of social newsgathering guidelines adopted by the members of the European Broadcasting Union illustrate the extent to which news organisations acknowledge the need to adapt to this deprofessionalisation of newswork. [It] is recognised that in order to provide a news service that is universal, relevant, and trusted the news content cannot just be restricted to that which is provided by professional news organisations and must include content from individuals, groups and entities who are witnessing and filming news events of interest. (EBU 2018) With the new interdependence with non-journalists in the production of newswork, journalists have had to find new ways to assert and demonstrate their authority. This authority may be asserted in the form that interaction and collaboration take or in the news texts produced from interactive newswork. Therefore, network journalism can arguably be viewed not only as a relatively new approach to newswork with the aim to include non-journalists in the process of news production, but, paradoxically, as a means by which journalists conduct professional boundary work. This research seeks to investigate how three elite mainstream news 6 organisations -- BBC World Service, France 24 English, and Al Jazeera English -- mobilise collaboration through social media, and the role that boundary work plays in collaborative newswork. In the early noughties, there was optimism about the democratic potential of what Jenkins dubbed “convergence culture” (2006, p. 2). Jenkins argues that barriers would be broken down between professionalism and amateurism in newswork, wresting control from power elites about who got to speak to a mass audience. An interconnected digital world was seen as blurring the lines between media production and consumption. As individuals participated in an electronic agora, they become “produsers” (Bruns 2006, p. 276) of news content of their own. Much was made of the supposed empowerment of news consumers, who were described by Jay Rosen (2006) as “the people formerly known as the audience” and Dan Gillmor (2004) simply as the “former audience”. As interconnectedness of news consumers became a prerequisite for the distribution of news products, news consumers were no longer reduced to the silent passive masses on the receiving end of a predominantly one-way mass media. Exploring how the professional identity of journalists fits with convergence culture, Deuze (2008) advocated for the opportunities that interactivity and hybridity could present in fostering participation, inclusion, and higher standards in journalism. And yet, already then he cautioned about “the tendency of institutions to adapt to innovation and change in ways to primarily reproduce that what came before” (ibid., p. 112). At the end of his paper he concluded that journalists were “likely to respond nostalgically and defensively to disruptive change” while “media management tend to interpret such changes primarily in terms of their potential to ‘depopulate’ the profession” (ibid., p. 118). It is fair to say that the early euphoria from a section of academics, who predicted a democratising effect on the news media, has 7 since been tempered. Research explored in the following chapter has pointed towards professionals normalising the way in which they mobilise social media for newsgathering and reporting.
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