A fundamental shift in the mode of news production

Changes in news production and journalistic employment are often simplistically explained as the results of technology, recent economic conditions, or changes in audience preferences. All these factors have played roles, but a more fundamental and consequential shift is altering the nature of news work and news production.

For more than a hundred years news production has been characterized by the industrial mode of production in which news factories mass produced news. They brought together the resources and equipment necessary for gathering and disseminating news and they relied on trained and professionalized news workers. The product became property exchanged in markets, with geographical, market, and economic factors constraining competition to provide news products.

Although some elements of that production mode remain in place, one can observe news provision splitting into two new production modes—a service mode and a craft production mode. These have enormous implications for the work of journalists and how news is provided in society.

The service mode is one in which news products (newspapers, broadcasts) are being transformed into services with news providers streaming news and information across a variety of platforms, such as print, computer terminals, tablets, and smartphones, and other screen-based devices. They are now focusing more on distributing news rather than gathering and producing it and are relying more on news and commentary produced by news services, content provided to them by the public, and links to other news providers than on their own production.

These news service providers are using pricing models that differ from those of the original product base, with varying prices for access to different bundles of platforms and different levels of access to premium and specialized news content. Pay systems such as those of Press+ and Piano Media are providing mechanism for paid access to multiple news providers—a new form of service. The shift to the service production mode follows that of the paid streaming audio and video services that have proliferated in the past decade.

The shift is making news service providers increasingly dependent on acquisition of news content produced by others, leading them to offer their content at relatively low prices, and inducing them to create better user experiences.  We will increasingly see such services offered at the national and international levels by larger news enterprises.

Concurrently, a different form of production is developing and gaining acceptance–the craft mode of news production. This is production by journalist entrepreneurs and small-scale journalistic cooperatives that are emphasizing the uniqueness and quality in their news. Those working in the craft mode are focusing on special topics such as climate or defense, employing specialized techniques such as investigative or data journalism, or serving smaller localities as general providers. Most are providing news directly to consumers, as well as providing materials to those practicing the service mode.

These new modes have important implications for how journalists work, the resources available to them, and how they organize their careers, compensation, insurance, and pensions. To date, little consideration has been given to how cooperative institutional support for news workers should be organized in this new environment. Journalists unions remain an artifact of the industrial mode of production and are changing very slowly and professional associations remain focused on issues other than work and labor. Something needs to change.

Media, communication and struggles over transparency

Issues of transparency are not new, but have been magnified in the information society—often because of the scale and scope of information available—and because news media are increasingly part of the story, not merely, the storytellers.

The roles played by leading newspapers worldwide—the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, Le Monde, O Globo, El Pais and others—in reviewing and publishing stories based on disclosures by Wikileaks and Edward Snowden’s NSA files have thrust them into the debate about how much transparency society needs. Arguments over information they published and whether disclosures serves public purposes have been animated. These debates highlight differences in views about transparency in security matters, but they also are forcing society to address more fundamental issues about transparency involving many other issues.

Transparency debates are not just a struggle over information and secrecy, but about the bases of human interaction and experience. Transparency is a philosophical and ideological concept based on the view that disclosure is good for society. From a philosophical standpoint, however, transparency is not good in itself—like serenity, beauty, or truth—because for thing to be good in itself it cannot produce harm. Transparency, however, can produce negative consequences by harming dignity and modesty, creating surveillance and means for coercion, endangering public safety, fuelling violence and conflict, and exposing proprietary information in ways that harm economic development.

Transparency does have functional value for achieving desirable outcomes, such as understanding the environment, exposing corruption and abuse of power, promoting trust, facilitating democratic decision making, and making price evaluations in markets.  Information must be available or effective choices cannot be made. But it is not exposure merely for the sake of exposure, so it must be balanced with concepts of privacy, solitude, and security—which lead to debates about when and how transparency is practiced.

The debates taking place today are part of a highly visible struggle over transparency in information age. Digital platforms and all media are playing central roles in debates about the proper extent of transparency involving government, business, banking, and our personal lives. Media themselves are also gathering and using data from their users for their private gain, just as are other companies.

Some of the debates are occurring because of the differing norms and mores of the material and digital world. The norms of the material world tend to involve structure, authority, control, hierarchy, and formality; whereas the norms of immaterial world involve amorphous arrangements, collaboration, empowerment, egalitarianism, and informality. These differing norms and the struggles over the norms have significant implications for government, business, and personal life. They are part of a fundamental struggle over the political economy of information and data.

Wikileaks, Anonymous, and other actors are active participants in the struggle and battling powerful commercial and governmental forces that wish to impose the norms of the material world into the digital, non-material world. It is not surprising they have brought major media into their campaigns, nor should not be surprising that they have fallen afoul of state power. Activists with libertarian and anarchistic tendencies have historically generated backlashes from the state and elites because threats to power typically result in the exercise of power—a very Machiavellian response.

The debates over transparency, the use of information and data, and who should be transparent about what will grow more heated in the coming years. Media and media businesses will play important parts in the debates, not merely as conveyors of information about others, but also about the extent to which they will become more transparent on their own.

The deinstitutionalization of journalism

The most important change in news production today is probably the deinstitutionalization of journalism—the separation of journalism from structural arrangements that significantly influenced its development in the twentieth century.

The practice of journalism was heavily influenced in the past century by regular employment in news enterprises, hierarchical arrangements and organized beats, trade unions and professional associations, and common values and training.

 

These created strong institutional influences on journalistic work from employing organizations and professional colleagues. They provided institutional support to journalistic practices, journalistic specialization, and expanded news and information provision. The arrangements provided the foundation on which better journalistic working conditions and compensation were built.

 

The newsroom was a construction of the institutional arrangements and became the focus of journalistic life. The newsroom developed in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century after telephony altered the need for journalists to be constantly roaming the city and it has undergone several conceptual changes since that time.

Ironically, it is the development of better communication technologies and the digital era that are markedly changing the centrality of the newsroom in journalistic work. The number of journalists physically located in newsrooms is diminishing because of the ability to work fully from other locations and because of the reductions in regular employment.

 

In the new environment, the number of independent journalists working as freelancers or journalistic entrepreneurs—or within small journalistic cooperatives—is growing. There is growing pressure to expand the boundaries of the definition of a journalist to include non-professionals who regularly create and disseminate news and informational content.

 

These developments are changing the context of journalism, its norms and practices, the organization and direction of journalistic labor, perceptions of journalists’ identity, and its reward systems and career paths—all of which are visible signs of the deinstitutionalization of provision of news and the profession and trade of journalism.

 

In the twentieth century journalism was provided by insular news organizations that rarely cooperated with other news organizations, detached themselves from the society they claimed to serve, and often relied on news and information clues from elites and official sources. New, more flexible means of obtaining and providing news are emerging in the deinstitutionalized environment that rely on public accounts and data previously unavailable to journalists. Where these are taking us remains to be seen.

 

The deinstitutionalization raises a host of questions: How are these changes altering journalism practice? What does deinstitutionalization means to news, information, and an informed public?  How can and does innovation takes place in non-institutional settings? How do the transformations underway benefit journalism? How does the declining importance of the newsroom affect the institutional nature of journalistic ethics and decision making?

 

These are fascinating questions in an intriguing transformational period.