AR; A new(s) sort of democracy?

I started to read Ewan Crawford’s article on the opinion pages in the Scottish quailty dailies in the hope that it would supply some more tips on how to understand, conceptualize and operationalize deliberation – but in this regard I wasn’t really satisfied.

The paper recounts results of a content analysis of two Scottish “broadsheet” daily newspapers, trying to answer the question – to what extent do these contribute deliberative democracy.

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AR; On international news and the internet

Guy Berger writes about how the internet affects (or at least proposes to affect) the concept, idea, practice and flow of international news (the article is about to be published in the International Communication Gazette).

“This article shows that while some First World media [...] are chanting the mantra of becoming ‘hyperlocal’, it is much of the first world that is experiencing the Internet as an international medium, albeit from a subordinate cultural and linguistic position.”

I wasn’t entirely convinced with the the paper; there were a bit too many connections only briefly pointed at, neglected or presented somewhat hazily, so that it all did not come together as a coherent argument. That said, it has some good and interesting points.

We are all journalists now!

…argues Jan Servaes in a recently published short essay on the changing role and tasks of journalism education (in the US and in Europe). We’re all journalists insofar as, once the lack of information no longer poses a problem, the emphasis is on making knowledge out of it – that is, to interpret the information with reference to one’s personal needs and circumstances -, and this “knowledge-making” process is as much the task of the journalist as it is that of the ordinary citizen.

For both journalists and citizens the capacity and speed to access, retrieve, select and reproduce information and turn it into knowledge will determine power and facilitate change in the 21st century.

Servaes, Jan (2009). We are all journalists now! Journalism 10(3), 371-374.

The million dollar question for the next decade

One need not idealize the newspaper press to recognize that to this day television, radio, and online news feed off the basic reporting that to an overwhelming extent comes from organizations whose economic survival no one knows how to guarantee. There are many questions about journalism in the next 10 years, none more important than that one.

Michael Schudson, on the future of journalism.

Schudson, Michael (2009): Ten years backwards and forwards. Journalism, 10(3), 368 – 370.

Why does alternative journalism matter?

 

Because professional journalism can learn from it – mostly given the fact that alternative journalism, whether online or of the more traditional sorts, relies on a firmer social basis, on a firmer connectedness between writer and audience, than professional journalism.

This is how Chris Atton answers the question in the title, according to an article published in the most recent issue of Sage’s Journalism. The 10th anniversary special issue is dedicated to an overview of what prominent scholars think about the future – of journalism. I plan to present here the abstract of some of the most interesting papers.

Atton, Chris (2009): “Why alternative journalism matters”, Journalism 10 (3), 283 – 285.

Hyperlocal citizen journalism

Here you can find an interesting paper from Bruns, Wilson and Saunders, exploring the roles that citizen journalism might assume in a networked media system. It is less revolutionary as Bruns’ article on the networked ideal model of deliberative democracy. It is more focused too: it takes as a starting to point the claim that “online citizen journalism is unable to conduct investigative and first-hand reporting” – which I guess I often seem to agree with.

(I do. Well, with some reserves.)

The article on the other hand formulates a much more articulate argument, giving examples how, in what context could “first-hand reporting” be a function of citizen journalists. However, it also reaches the conclusion that the professional side cannot be taken out of the equation (for me the most interesting point was the finding that on a semi-professional news site pros articles attracted most of the attention, but amateur journalists’ posts generated more comments and discussion).

I commented on the article on Bruns’ blog, hopefully my comment won’t be lost in one of the spam filters.

AR; The Future of Newspapers

To find out about the future, let’s look into the past.

Conboy and Steel’s article is a sobering reminder for internet revolutionaries and pessimists alike – I found the piece both interesting and well-written. Referencing Carey’s “ritual model of communication” (as opposed to the more widely used transmission model), the authors put the current developments in media into historical perspective, claiming that these developments are rather reconfigurations of traditional articulations of readership than redefinitions of the role and function of the news media as such.

AR: Online journalism and the war in cyberspace: a comparison between U.S. and international newspapers

It tells a lot about the overloaded publication schedule of quality journals that today’s article by Daniela Dimitrova and Matt Neznanski only appeared in vol. 12. of the JCMC in 2006, although it analyzes the state of online journalism through the case study of the first 3 months of the 2003 Iraq war.

But even if it is likely that a snapshot taken today would be quite different to that of 2003, the study is still quite interesting, and comes with a model can accommodate further research too.

Building on previous literature, the authors create a three-plus-one-stage conceptual model of online news reporting, classifying online media organs into one of the stages based on the technologies they use in conveying information. Stage 1 is “shovelware” – recycling previously released textual news items. Stage 2 is adding pictures and hyperlinks to the text. Stage 3 is the stage of convergence: news items are enhanced by streaming audio and video, and users are offered various ways to give feedback. (Stage “plus one” incorporates all the future stages.)

Surveying 26 online newspapers from 17 countries, the study found that online journalism at that time (again, 2003) had not yet reached the stage of “convergence”, but clearly surpassed the stage of shovelware. As for the differences between U.S. and international online media organs, the former were more likely to include photos, audio and interactive elements, but no significant differences were found between the two groups as for the use of hyperlinks and digital video.

The future of newspapers

Here’s a recent article from The Economist about difficulties traditional American newspapers have to face. In a nutshell: both circulation figures and advertising revenues continue to fall.

Much of [the] decline is being blamed on the rise of the internet, which offers free, round-the-clock coverage, and which has provided a new, better home for classified advertising, once the bedrock of most newspapers’ revenue. But some of the fall in revenues is actually due to the economic slowdown in America, and especially in the housing market, which contributes a large slice of classified advertising.

All is not gloom and doom, though – the Wall Street Journal and the Philadelphia Inquirer are just two examples that it is possible to find a way by adapting to the new business environment.