Abstract
To this sociologist-outsider, contemporary journalism seems to be undergoing two collective traumas. One I would call survival panic; the other is a love-hate affair with digital news. The title of Ryfe’s book refers to the first trauma, but the book itself is a useful contribution to understanding both.
Ryfe worries mainly about the survival of the daily newspaper, especially – and rightly so – in small and medium-sized urban areas in which dailies are currently turning into tri-weeklies or websites. However, the heart of the book is a trio of newsroom ethnographies. While not quite ‘An Inside Look at American Newsrooms’, they repeat some findings of the longer ethnographies some of us published in the 1970s. However, Ryfe had a narrower, more targeted agenda; he was studying three newsrooms carrying out experiments to improve the likelihood of their survival. The daily circulations of the three papers ranged from 170,000 to 44,000. The first experiment asked the newsroom to turn the conventional event-centered stories of daily journalism into more context-filled stories framed to attract suburban readers. The second experiment was more conventional: to turn the paper into a multiplatform one, with television threatening to become the primary medium. The third experiment proposed to transform the journalists into ‘superbloggers’, producing a version of public journalism.
All three experiments failed, and Ryfe’s ethnographies admirably report the nitty gritty of the failures: how the journalists tried to make them work but resisted when drastic changes in their professional expertise were demanded. Ryfe also seeks to explain the failures. Poor leadership by the experimenting editors and budget pressures from higher up played a part. However, Ryfe emphasizes ‘cultural analysis’, pointing to journalists’ habits, their investments in professional training and career paths, and the long-standing ‘constitutive rules’ of journalism as major causes of what went wrong.
This reviewer would add that the journalists were saddled with a contradictory and thus impossible task: they had to put out a daily paper while also being asked to change it and themselves. Since the former task had priority over the latter, the journalists really had to resist, and foregrounding a cultural approach adds an undeserved touch of victim blaming to Ryfe’s narrative.
The rest of the book is a comprehensive analysis of the current state of what Ryfe calls networked news, which both admires the innovations in local, investigative and other kinds of digital journalism and worries what this plethora of variety and the accompanying fragmentation of the news will do to legacy journalism. However, the book has a happy ending; Ryfe suggests we are only at the beginning of a long process of change that may well end up positively. In short, journalism will survive.
Because the book’s last part reports on a constantly changing situation, an updated edition may soon be needed. If Ryfe produces such an edition, I hope he will add three sections.
The first would expand the point that journalism is only in an early stage of a dramatic change, and add a historical survey of other technological economic and cultural inventions in communications and other consumer goods and services. Such a survey should describe beginnings, middles and ends common to many or all, complete with how the institutions and workers in them fared. Thus, many dramatic changes begin with survival panics on the part of the legacy institutions, but when these have sufficient economic resources, political clout and the right survival skills, they may flourish even as they transform themselves. However, many institutions apparently do without survival panics. My own discipline is an example, even though adjuncts now teach about 40 percent of all sociology courses and the recent arrival of MOOC (massive open online courses) may lead to yet fewer professorial slots.
The second addition would bring in the news audience. Although often forgotten by journalists and researchers, it is nevertheless a major, if indirect shaper of the news. The audience is also a conservative influence, in part because it is usually older than the rest of the population, in part because, like other customers of consumer goods, it is less invested in the product than their suppliers.
While young people, and maybe older newsbuffs, may enjoy playing in what I think of as the digital playground, most of the audience uses the news to briefly report on that part of their physical and social environment they cannot monitor personally. Among other things, they particularly want breaking news, of disasters, scandals and other threats to that environment and to their daily lives, preferably framed to suggest that the threats are ultimately likely to be overcome. Network television’s evening news, which is almost never noticed in the survival panic, currently provides such news, and to an audience that still numbers 20 million. The morning TV news, cable and radio news adds further millions with somewhat different formulas, and so do newspapers, despite their travails.
I would guess that in the foreseeable future, much of the older audience will still want such an assemblage of legacy news. Digital news will replace it slowly but surely, and amateur reporters and ordinary people making videos at newsworthy locations may play a bigger role than today but professional journalists will still be in charge. Thus, even when the news is fragmented beyond even today’s level, audiences will find the digital sites fitting their needs, just as they now find the half dozen or so cable channels from among the hundreds available to them.
Most likely, the digital news sites will be owned and operated by large news corporations of the kind that now supply most of the news. Someone may also invent folding tablets that will feel like newspapers to old timers and that can be read, viewed and listened to at the breakfast table. This privilege may cost more than the several hundred dollars a year that we now pay for newspaper subscriptions, but keep in mind the trees that will now be allowed to survive.