Our aim throughout is to tell new stories that open our concept of what journalism is (or should be), and what journalism is for. To further our aim to tell the stories from the heart of the startup journalists, we have added in-depth contextual narratives, inserted as boxes in the empirical chapters. For this, we are deeply indebted to Andrea Wagemans, who has – as she has done for all the quotes used in this book – mined the data. We hope these boxes engage the reader, and add yet another way of letting the startups speak for themselves. We also acknowledge the invaluable work of Sofie Willemsen (as well as the anonymous reviewers of our initial manuscript), who provided expert comments and feedback on the manuscript. Through telling stories of startups we hope to do justice to the variety of actors; the multitude of forms, content, and audiences of those startups; and the scope of their excitement, drive, struggle, and ambition to make for what they feel is a better journalism.
Notes
1 Source: https://www.svdj.nl/dutch-journalism-fund. 2 For other publications related to the Beyond Journalism project we refer to our names in the reference section of this book. 3 NWO-funded project “Understanding public participation: Journalism and democracy in a digital age” (236-45-005), participants of the Journalism Elsewhere project include: Laura Ahva, Chris Anderson, Stefan Baack, Florence Le Cam, Irene Costera Meijer, Mark Deuze, David Domingo, Wiebke Loosen, Julius Reimer, Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, Victor Wiard, Andy Williams, run by Tamara Witschge. 4 “Entrepreneurship at Work: Analysing practice, labour, and creativity in journalism” (funded by NWO, project number: 276-45-003, 2015–20); “Exploring Journalism’s Limits: Enacting and theorising the boundaries of the journalistic field” (funded by NWO, project number: 314-99-205, 2017–19).
Introduction: What Is Journalism (Studies)?
What is journalism for? The starting point of this book is that journalism holds great potential to further the imagination, and performs a variety of functions (beyond informing citizens) that are necessary for society to thrive. We see, however, that in realigning itself to fit the changing social, technological, and political landscape, journalism as a profession, as well as news as an industry, struggles to transform itself. This is where journalism studies should come in, as a scholarly endeavor that assists and inspires the field to self-assess, move forward, and innovate. It is our contention that journalism studies – even before it became an established field at the dawn of the twenty-first century – furthered a rather narrow picture of the profession and its performance and role in society, thereby reifying its internal (industrial) operations, and limiting its creative potential.
Beyond journalism (studies)
In its eagerness both to prepare students for jobs in the news industry and to understand and explain journalism’s functioning in (the service of) democratic societies (while consistently framing this function as being under threat, thereby collapsing concerns about news as an industry with journalism as a profession), journalism studies and education have constructed a theoretical framework that considers the profession in terms of its more or less consensual news values, dominant frames, routinized operations, gatekeeping functions, and industrial arrangements. This is not to say scholars of journalism have not studied nonmainstream, oppositional, grassroots, or any other kind of nontraditional form of journalism in the past. Such “journalisms,” however, were generally reined in and tamed in theoretical frameworks emphasizing inside/outside binaries – for example, between mainstream and alternative journalism, between hard versus soft news, or between information and entertainment functions of the press. In doing so, a certain way of doing (and thinking about) journalism has prevailed – providing a benchmark of sorts.
At the same time, when journalism educators, students, and researchers talk about journalism, they cannot help but recognize the enormous diversity of the field. Professionals, amateurs, and hybrid variations of such identities, many institutions, many technologies, are all involved in the production of journalism across diverse channels and platforms. With so many actors involved of so many types, our conceptualizations of journalism as a single (more or less consensual) entity are challenged. When we revert to the same old dualisms, we risk explaining this complexity away, reflexively suggesting there is a core to the profession that continually reflects on itself vis-à-vis the developments in and challenges of the periphery, in a continuous circling of the wagons to keep truly original, edgy, pioneering, creative, nonformulaic, nontraditional ways of newsgathering, storytelling, and audience engagement at the perimeter. In keeping with this center/periphery distinction, anything not fitting preconceived notions of coherence is labeled as diverse, complex, or hybridized. Such approach does not acknowledge the messiness intrinsic to the object of study, a messiness amplified and accelerated by changes in working conditions, in information and communication technologies, and challenges to established business models: “we need to be ready to see the conceptual mess that we made through neatly fitting everything in categories that never quite fit” (Witschge et al. 2019: 657).
The conceptual and theoretical building blocks of journalism studies, news values, framing and agenda setting, and occupational ideology can all be considered examples of routines, conventions, and formulas that developed (and continue to develop) – arising out of conversations in workplaces, debates in newsrooms, choices by individuals in a variety of circumstances. That is, these concepts and theories are continually contingent on practices. The ongoing and dynamic discursive construction of journalism as an idea as well as a praxis tends to be dictated by casuistry (rather than a strict principle-based approach) and everydayness. In Heideggerian (1927) terms, everydayness in journalism manifests in journalists’ generally pragmatic way of engaging the daily challenges of newswork. Lefebvre’s (1987) use of the concept of everydayness is relevant as well: how those engagements over time have a tendency to become repetitive, routinized, even monotonous – quite possibly soon to be replaced by automation and robot (or algorithmic) journalism (Carlson 2015).
Although this would suggest that one could equate “journalism” with the sum of routines, conventions, and formulas emerging from the newsroom-centric construction of the profession, we want to pinpoint and highlight all the other ways of understanding and doing journalism, being a journalist, that aren’t necessarily “peripheral” or even exceptional but simply also make up the essence of the profession. It can be argued that well-established patterned behaviors are what students and scholars may have focused on, and they may be what journalism education is structured around. Such behaviors may be what the major news institutions use to standardize work. In everyday practices, though, there is always what Robert Chia and Robin Holt call “wayfinding,” which they characterize “not as a plotted sequence of static positions but as the coming-into-sight and passing-out-of-sight of various contoured and textured aspects of the environment” (2009: 163). We run the risk of ignoring the many opportunistic, unplanned, improvised, intimate, and curious acts that make up journalism if we consistently attempt to solidify these into the well-worn concepts of our handbooks and canonical works (Chia and Holt label the models, maps, and classifications as the “navigational” behavior of professionals in organizations). Accessing practices through the lens of wayfinding underscores how institutional journalism is becoming a different place. Internally these institutions are reshuffling, being repopulated by a wide variety of new actors – often with only temporary assignments, working on a per-project basis. Journalism is increasingly practiced outside of such institutions. It is crucial to expand upon the exclusivity of journalism studies and education, to move beyond binaries, and seek out the stories and conversations of journalists elsewhere.
The navigational (Chia and Holt 2009) ties that bind journalism are the ones most efficiently theorized by the field of journalism studies, and consist of what journalists (and academics) know and understand to be the cornerstones of the profession: role perceptions and news values, ways of framing information that assist audiences to make sense of (particularly) the world