Temporal reflexivity in journalism studies: Making sense of change in a more timely fashion

Introduction

Journalism is inextricably linked to social constructions of time. Indeed, journalism serves to ‘arrest the ordinary and the unusual in various forms of texts that create feelings of simultaneity, help define the contemporary, outline possible futures, and shape our understanding and memories of the past’ (Bødker and Sonnevend, 2017: 3). News products are often associated with and defined by their perceived timeliness (e.g. ‘live coverage’ or ‘yesterday’s news’). However, as Bødker and Sonnevend note in their introduction to a Journalism special issue on shifting temporalities, ‘apart from recent work on journalism and memory, as well as ongoing discussions of speeded-up news cycles, an explicit focus on temporality has largely been missing from journalism studies’. Zelizer (2017: 111) sums up the problem in her epilogue to the same issue: ‘Given the degree to which the idea of time distinguishes journalism as a mode of public address, it is peculiar that more journalism scholars have not focused on temporality as an inroad to understanding the news’. Even as earlier ethnographic studies of news production foregrounded issues of time, its neglect in later studies of journalism has resulted in ‘an impoverished accommodation of temporality in the news’ (p.112).

Despite evident shortcomings – notably a presentist bias in studies of digital news production – fresh attention is being directed to matters of journalism and time, clearing new ground in journalism studies to acknowledge the centrality of temporality (e.g. Le Masurier, 2015; Neiger and Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2016). But what remains missing is a broader reflection about how issues of time also complicate the academic study of journalism – that is, how temporal dynamics inherent both to the research process and to the thing being researched are influencing the assessments we make in journalism studies and the conclusions we draw. Put in spatial terms, for journalism studies to make valid claims about news work as it exists out there, scholars first need to consult conditions as they exist in here: from pressures to publish, to blind spots about case-study selection, and to misunderstood notions of ‘change’ that cloud our judgment. These and other time-related factors, too often overlooked in (a perhaps ironic) rush to ‘keep up’ with changing conditions in the industry and the academy, may circumscribe what and how we study in ways counterproductive to the very purpose of research. By failing to reconcile crucial dynamics of time, we may squander research efforts in the short run – for example, by focusing on trends and fads without sufficient critical reflection – and thereby undermine the larger project of journalism studies in the long run.

In this essay, we propose that adopting a perspective of ‘temporal reflexivity’ in our work can help to bring forward embedded elements of time in journalism studies. In scholarly research, particularly in qualitative methods, reflexivity is about taking account of oneself in the research process, thereby assuming ‘responsibility for one’s own situatedness within the research and the effect that it may have on the setting and people being studied, questions being asked, data being collected and its interpretation’ (Berger, 2015: 220). Reflexivity refers to thoughtful, self-aware, critical reflection about oneself, drawing on lessons from the past to adapt to changes in the present and future. But, more fundamentally, it raises epistemological issues concerning the situatedness of data analysis (Mauthner and Doucet, 2003). Research findings are never an objective recitation of external facts, but the product of choices stemming from the position of the researcher. Such reflexivity, as Zelizer (2013) contends, has too often been missing among journalism’s three key sub-communities: practitioners, educators, and scholars. ‘[J]ournalism has been grasped in an almost ahistoric fashion, which has neither reflected life on the ground nor elucidated how journalism worked – or not – at different points of time’ (p. 145). We add to this the need for scholars to recognize their own inescapable embeddedness in a particular temporality.

Building on Zelizer’s (2013) call for reflexivity in journalism’s interpretive communities, we propose temporal reflexivity as an intervention for journalism studies – a lens through which to critically evaluate the implications of time. When applied outwardly to the study of journalism, temporal reflexivity fosters critical judgment about whether some phenomenon is indeed a break from what came before, a continuation of what has existed, or some middle-ground mutation. When applied inwardly to examine our own academic field and pedagogy, temporal reflexivity brings to the fore temporal dynamics that may incentivize certain types of research and teaching relative to others. Temporal reflexivity also reinforces the subjectivity of the researcher’s experience, which recognizes our own role within the process of change and stasis, challenging our stance as neutral observers to instead suggest that our decisions affect the discourses through which journalism is understood and the social construction of particular time frames. Altogether, temporal reflexivity is about responding to and becoming more fully aware of where time fits in journalism practice and journalism studies and understanding the epistemological consequences of choices that get made.

We proceed by developing the concept of temporal reflexivity in connection with three key priorities for journalism studies’ development, which are the following: (1) the need for an analytical approach that balances change and stasis, (2) the need to address issues of scale in which it is difficult to discern passing fads from deeper shifts that may lead to new institutional forms, and (3) the need to understand the complicated and circular role of journalism education, both in reinforcing discourses of ‘crisis’ and ‘innovation’ and in lending stability to the boundaries of journalism as professionalized practice.

Between stasis and change

Two core facts about the relationship between time and journalism need to be stated upfront. First, it is undeniable that journalism is changing. Digital media have disrupted journalistic practices, upended economic models, introduced new voices, challenged normative commitments, and offered novel ways of accessing news. These changes are reflected in the studies that populate journals like this one. Second, it is undeniable that much of news is not changing. News organizations continue to create news, and the form that this news takes and the practices for putting it together are familiar and persistent. This statement is not meant to dismiss the reality of change within the news industry. Things are changing in meaningful ways as journalism becomes increasingly technologically interpolated and dependent (Lewis and Westlund, 2015, 2016), and they deserve attention. But we also need to attend to the aspects of journalism that endure amid change (Reich, 2014). There are many recognizable facets of journalism that continue to define what the news looks like and how it works – for example, a reliance on elite sources, enduring story structures, and visual conventions.

A more fully formed concept of temporal reflexivity helps address the challenges of the change/stasis dynamic by recognizing a bias toward change. Scholars are naturally drawn to the new and the different while we tend to neglect what stands still. The null hypothesis rarely garners attention. How can this be avoided?

For the analyst, change needs to be examined in concert with stasis. Recent work by those looking inside newsrooms, including David Ryfe (2012), Zvi Reich (2013), and Nikki Usher (2014), has shown an incredible amount of resilience even as the headlines around news accentuate change. For example, Ryfe’s book Can Journalism Survive? – a title that certainly suggests change – demonstrates the strength of entrenched ideas of what journalism should look like. An approach to stasis and change steeped in temporal reflexivity recognizes that asking ‘what is new here?’ should be paired with the question of ‘what is not new here?’ This is not about negation but about making visible assumptions or processes that, by their entrenchment, escape proper scrutiny. A related question is the process by which phenomena shift from being new or innovate or disruptive to accepted conventions, as in the case of blogging – once novel in journalism practice and research, and now mundane and taken for granted.

One domain where the stasis/change dynamic comes to light is the study of journalism’s boundaries (Carlson and Lewis, 2015). Boundary work appears spatial in suggesting the mapping of social space, but the question of why to study boundaries at all presupposes their temporality. Social boundaries are not fixed but enacted. For journalism, an emphasis on boundaries carries within it the suggestion that present shifts are underway. It provides a conceptual intervention insisting that the perspectives of boundaries and boundary work are useful for understanding and organizing processes of journalistic change. Yet the resilience of boundaries in the face of technological and economic shifts also deserves recognition. At times, actors vociferously promote stasis by defending the status quo as valuable and worthy of protection. At other times, stasis is bound up in unchallenged assumptions that are harder to see. Either way, what does not move or shift is as important as what does. At the same time, however, to accurately assess stasis and change requires being clear about our objects of study and their association with boundaries. For example, certain journalistic practices, technologies or discourses – things that people may casually subsume under the umbrella concept of ‘journalism’ – may well be changing rapidly even as journalism, in the much larger institutional sense of the term, evolves more slowly or not at all, as the case may be. Ultimately, it matters to understand why something changes or stays the same – or, in this case, why the boundaries of journalism may be revised or reinforced.

Temporal reflexivity, applied to the challenge of assessing stasis versus change, can help scholars recognize, as Zelizer (2013: 147) notes, that ‘change in journalism … is almost always accompanied by change outside of journalism’, as in the case of journalism adopting objectivity amid the development of the telegraph, realism in fiction, and the scientific method. Ahistoricism, she contends, ‘short-circuits journalism’s necessary reach for self-knowledge from the past’. Moreover, a perspective of temporal reflexivity can elucidate not only varying degrees and drivers of change but also the normative dimensions, over time, that may influence patterns of change: in whose interests, toward what purposes, and with what implications are changes pursued (or resisted)? With temporal reflexivity in mind, future research can more deftly link the past and the present, improving both the validity of journalism studies’ grasp of stasis and change as well as answering the call to more carefully integrate media history and new media studies (Peters, 2009).

The problem of scale

A second issue for journalism studies is what may be called ‘the problem of scale’, or the challenge of using any specific example to say something larger about journalism. There is a historical precedent to this. The 20th century saw the consolidation of news media under the banner of ‘mass communication’ defined by a small number of senders and a whole lot of receivers. Newspaper forms standardized, as did network television news in the United States and public service broadcasting in many other countries. In this world of journalistic isomorphism, arguments for the generalizability of news were easier to make. Legacy news institutions have certainly pushed their brands online, but digital media also have fostered a sense of experimentation and growth. New developments, such as mobile technology and social media, present new affordances for what news could look like, and a healthy, if not ludicrously confident, startup culture provides sources of funding so long as one is willing to position a product as revolutionary (Carlson and Usher, 2016).

All of this leads us back to the problem of scale. The argument here is that the diversification of digital journalism in recent years has led to a plethora of news sites, from hyperlocal citizen journalism-based sites to large-scale digital news organizations. Journalism studies research tends to target particular cases as telling us something about how journalism works, or how it might work in the future. The challenge within journalism studies is to identify whether any particular site or model is an idiosyncratic case or the precursor of a paradigmatic shift. Which ones will become the next New York Times? And which will become Patch, Prismatic, or Friendster?

Journalism studies scholars, perhaps increasingly attuned to industry conversations and the latest buzz in the social media era, tend to study phenomena in the moment and then build around them a rhetoric championing particular ideas. As phenomena change, so does our attention. For example, journalism studies has grown as a distinct field of study alongside the growth of Twitter as a platform. We might ask what the long-term contribution of this will be. ¹ There is nothing wrong with being in the business of predicting change. We just have to be careful how we draw conclusions from small-scale sites. This is really a matter of how we define journalism as something coherent, given all its variations. When do we let smaller pieces stand in for the whole?

Another issue is that we often study successes, in which case it looks like everything works. This raises the question of what to do about failure? Digital news may be innovative, but it is also prone to over-hyping and under-delivering. Failure happens both to established brands, such as Rupert Murdoch’s iPad news product The Daily, as well as to up-and-coming startups, such as the highly touted mobile news app Circa. Wahl-Jorgensen (2017) helpfully suggests that we augment studies of success with the need to take failure seriously and recognize its inevitability. Such a focus on failure, she argues, is not merely about moving beyond biases for new technology over old, or for cutting-edge over conservative – it is also about recognizing power relations within and across organizations, by which ‘less privileged’ and ‘marginal and unfashionable’ news practices may be more likely to fail (p. 251). The problem of scale points to the dual need for capturing the scope and impact of failure as well as underlying reasons why something new does not stick or something old fades away.

In all, temporal reflexivity casts new light on the enduring problem of scale, tempering the rather natural temptation to extrapolate into the future based on small-scale analyses. Such an approach is not easy to adopt: As researchers, we spend months and years studying particular sites and stakeholders precisely because we are convinced that they matter for larger interpretations of journalism – and, in many cases, they well might. Amid the pressures to publish, and to do so in time for tenure and promotion, acknowledging that one’s findings may have limited transferability is hardly a satisfying conclusion. But temporal reflexivity, if applied to the problem of scale, may at least remind researchers that today’s successes may become tomorrow’s failures, and that the sustainability of any particular app, venture, genre, or trend may be at the mercy of power dynamics, economic forces, and social preferences that are both hard to detect at any given moment and even more challenging to predict.

The temporality of journalism education

A third point involves the proximity between journalism research and the education of future practitioners. Historically, in-house apprenticeship gave way to university degrees as the source of capital required for a journalism career. Journalism education became a vocational appendage to the larger news industry with the mission of training tomorrow’s news professionals. However, journalism education has always done something more. It plays a key part in maintaining the institutional identity for the whole apparatus of journalism. From the stasis perspective, journalism programs continue to propagate the idea that there is a recognizable thing called journalism (cf. Deuze and Witschge, 2017). Indoctrination may be too strong of a word, but certainly we recognize that students both hone their skills and learn a way of thinking journalistically that is central to the ongoing journalistic enterprise.

At the same time, journalism education is becoming ground zero for future-oriented thinking. Educators are forced to anticipate the changing demands their students will face while simultaneously confronting a precarious labor situation. Journalism programs struggle to update their curricula while also differentiating themselves from other programs. For example, in May 2017, the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University controversially announced it would forgo the accreditation process for journalism programs because it was seen as imposing requirements counter to the creation of an innovative curriculum.

From the standpoint of temporal reflexivity, how journalism education programs react to industry change shapes what this change looks like and how it is thought about – and thus, developments in one area cannot be understood apart from developments in the other. Journalism curricula are interpretations that prioritize certain skills and ways of thinking while downplaying others. One trend has been toward accentuating digital skills while ignoring deeper issues involving news economics and market pressures (Creech and Mendelson, 2015). Journalism education programs trumpet initiatives that promote the latest technology or skill but shortsightedness about long-term change in favor of chasing trends hampers the ability of journalism education to grapple with conditions of journalism in a deservedly nuanced manner. Just as temporal reflexivity can help to clarify lasting shifts from passing fads, the same approach can help journalism educators scrutinize both their own embedded role in shaping journalistic change and how to develop curricula that put long-run priorities ahead of short-run novelties.

Conclusion

Time is a vexing issue for journalism scholars. As we take time to craft our research, and then wait for publication, journalism marches on – and we nervously hope our findings still hold. This essay argues for an active engagement with how time affects journalism research with the recommendation of temporal reflexivity. Moving time to the forefront helps clarify the assumptions behind what we choose to study and what we choose to say about what we study. As researchers, when we contribute to the rhetoric of ‘change’, we may, in fact, be missing a more nuanced picture of how forces of stasis and change affect various actors and activities in the news process. Part of temporal reflexivity is to ask whether our emphasis on rapid change clashes with how practitioners understand their day-to-day work. The focus on newness in discrete practices – such as how journalists use social media or virtual reality – risks overlooking the structures that most squarely dictate what the news looks like.

At an institutional level, we need to think about temporality as part of the identity of the relatively young field of journalism studies. The rapid growth of journalism research has occurred next to the rise of digital media to the point where they are closely intertwined. Discourses on change are naturally to be expected. We may be a field with a unique sense of temporality and a penchant for future-oriented thinking, and an emphasis on temporal reflexivity entails a critical perspective regarding how journalism research is incentivized. Do we overly reward a focus on the new as a marker of being innovative? Conversely, do we overly shun efforts to examine stasis? Or, more critically, do we unknowingly mirror the cycles of optimism and future-orientation expressed by the subjects we examine? There are many questions here, with far fewer clear answers. But ignoring these nagging questions is not sustainable in the long run if we are to build the kind of theoretically and empirically rich studies to which this field aspires.