Digital media and the diversification of professionalism: A US–German comparison of journalism cultures

Matthias Revers

doi:10.1017/CBO9781316050774.014

12 - Digital media and the diversification of professionalism: A US–German comparison of journalism cultures

from PART III - PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISM, CIVIL CODES, AND DIGITAL CULTURE

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2016

Matthias Revers

Edited by

Jeffrey C. Alexander ,

Elizabeth Butler Breese and

Marîa Luengo

Show author details

Matthias Revers: Affiliation:
University of Frankfurt
Jeffrey C. Alexander: Affiliation:
Yale University, Connecticut
Elizabeth Butler Breese: Affiliation:
Panorama Education
Marîa Luengo: Affiliation:
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

Book contents

Get access

Summary

INTRODUCTION

It is common sense in journalism studies that the most significant changes in news making today are connected to digital technologies. There is some disagreement, however, regarding how much journalism changes and stays the same. Most of the overtly universal claims about the state of journalism are based on research in the United States. Through a controlled comparison of a particular journalistic setting in the United States and Germany, this chapter finds different amalgamations of digital culture and professional journalism. It tells two interwoven stories, one that pluralizes common “future of journalism” scenarios, another about journalism in Germany and the United States.

Extensive qualitative field research at two state house press corps, one in Albany, New York, the other in Munich, Bavaria, has demonstrated that, although both groups of reporters have access to and use many of the same digital technologies, they had a much more profound impact on the practice and self-conception of journalists in the US case. The following two vignettes will illustrate this contrast:

A turning point in the professional lives of Albany reporters was when blogs became fixtures in state political news in 2006. Elizabeth Benjamin was at the center of this transition. When she changed positions from New York Daily News to news anchor and blogger for the Time Warner news channel YNN in 2010, she was portrayed by Columbia Journalism Review. The article was set up on the premise that Benjamin challenged the longstanding dominance of Fred Dicker (state editor of the New York Post at the time) within the state political news ecosystem. One important theme of the story was the conflict between traditional journalism and blogging. Before joining the Daily News, Benjamin had worked for the daily newspaper Albany Times Union (TU), where she launched a political blog in late 2005.

The portrait described the “modern local political blog” as “devotedly insider-ish, constantly updated, overseen by a hard-working obsessive, and very well-sourced.” A supervisor of hers at the TU, Bob Port, argued that Benjamin fits this profile: “She amassed such a huge audience in such a short time – there were about 10,000 uniques on the web reading her blog – it dwarfed anything else we were doing,” he says. It was the result of hard work. “She would feed stuff into it day and night.

Type: Chapter
Information: The Crisis of Journalism Reconsidered
Democratic Culture, Professional Codes, Digital Future
, pp. 228 - 246

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316050774.014 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2016

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abbott, Andrew Delano. 1988. The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2004. “Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance Between Ritual and Strategy.” Sociological Theory 22 (4): 527–573.Google Scholar

Bélair-Gagnon, Valérie. 2013. “Revisiting Impartiality: Social Media and Journalism at The BBC.” Symbolic Interaction 36 (4): 478–492.Google Scholar

Benson, Rodney. 2014. “Challenging the ‘New Descriptivism’ – Rod Benson's Talk from QualPolComm Preconference.” Qualitative Political Communication Research. Retrieved September 6, 2014 (http://qualpolicomm.wordpress.com/2014/06/05/challenging-the-new-descriptivism-rod-bensons-talk-from-qualpolcomm-preconference/).

Bishop, Ronald. 1999. “From Behind the Walls: Boundary Work by News Organizations in Their Coverage of Princess Diana's Death.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 23: 90–112.Google Scholar

Boczkowski, Pablo J. 2004. Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Carey, James W. 1986. “The Dark Continent of American Journalism.” in Reading the News: A Pantheon Guide to Popular Culture, edited by Manoff, Robert Karl and Schudson, Michael, pp. 146–196. New York, NY: Pantheon Books.

Carlson, Matt. 2013. “Gone, but Not Forgotten.” Journalism Studies 15 (1): 33–47.Google Scholar

Chadwick, Andrew. 2013. The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

Curran, James, Iyengar, Shanto, Lund, Anker Brink, and Salovaara-Moring, Inka. 2009. “Media System, Public Knowledge and Democracy: A Comparative Study.” European Journal of Communication 24 (1): 5–26.Google Scholar

Deuze, Mark. 2006. “Participation, Remediation, Bricolage: Considering Principal Components of a Digital Culture.” The Information Society 22 (2): 63–75.Google Scholar

Domingo, David. 2008. “Interactivity in the Daily Routines of Online Newsrooms: Dealing with an Uncomfortable Myth.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13 (3): 680–704.Google Scholar

Esser, Frank and Umbricht, Andrea. 2013. “Competing Models of Journalism? Political Affairs Coverage in US, British, German, Swiss, French and Italian Newspapers.” Journalism 14 (8): 989–1007.Google Scholar

Esser, Frank and Brüggemann, Michael. 2010. “The Strategic Crisis of German Newspapers.” in The Changing Business of Journalism and Its Implications for Democracy, edited by Levy, David A. L. and Nielsen, Rasmus Kleis, pp. 39–54. Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

Esser, Frank, Reinemann, Carsten, and Fan, David. 2001. “Spin Doctors in the United States, Great Britain, and Germany: Metacommunication about Media Manipulation.” Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 6 (1): 16–45.Google Scholar

Ferree, Myra M., Gamson, William A., Gerhards, Jürgen, and Rucht, Dieter. 2002. Shaping Abortion Discourse: Democracy and the Public Sphere in Germany and the United States. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Gieryn, Thomas F. 1983. “Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists.” American Sociological Review 48 (6): 781–795.Google Scholar

Hallin, Daniel C. and Mancini, Paolo. 2004. Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Hanitzsch, Thomas et al. 2011. “Mapping Journalism Cultures across Nations.” Journalism Studies 12 (3): 273–293.Google Scholar

Hellmueller, Lea, Vos, Tim P., and Poepsel, Mark A.. 2013. “Shifting Journalistic Capital? Transparency and Objectivity in the Twenty-First Century.” Journalism Studies 14 (3): 287–304.Google Scholar

Jacobs, Ronald N. and Townsley, Eleanor. 2011. The Space of Opinion: Media Intellectuals and the Public Sphere. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

Karlsson, Michael. 2010. “Rituals of Transparency: Evaluating Online News Outlets’ Uses of Transparency Rituals in the United States, United Kingdom and Sweden.” Journalism Studies 11: 535–545.Google Scholar

Lamont, Michèle. 1992. Money, Morals, and Manners: The Culture of the French and American Upper-Middle Class. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lasorsa, Dominic L., Lewis, Seth C., and Holton, Avery E.. 2012. “Normalizing Twitter: Journalism Practice in an Emerging Communication Space.” Journalism Studies 13 (1): 19–36.Google Scholar

Leonardi, Paul M. and Barley, Stephen R.. 2008. “Materiality and Change: Challenges to Building Better Theory about Technology and Organizing.” Information and Organization 18 (3): 159–176.Google Scholar

Lewis, Seth C. 2012. “The Tension between Professional Control and Open Participation: Journalism and Its Boundaries.” Information, Communication & Society 15 (6): 836–866.Google Scholar

Lewis, Seth C. and Usher, Nikki. 2013. “Open Source and Journalism: Toward New Frameworks for Imagining News Innovation.” Media, Culture & Society 35 (5): 602–619.Google Scholar

Marwick, Alice E. and Boyd, Danah. 2011. “I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience.” New Media & Society 13 (1): 114–133.Google Scholar

McDonnell, Terence E. 2010. “Cultural Objects as Objects: Materiality, Urban Space, and the Interpretation of AIDS Campaigns in Accra, Ghana1.” American Journal of Sociology 115 (6): 1800–1852.Google Scholar

Meyrowitz, Joshua. 1985. No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior. New York: Oxford University Press.

Meyrowitz, Joshua. 2009. “Medium Theory: An Alternative to the Dominant Paradigm of Media Effects.” in The Sage Handbook of Media Processes and Effects, edited by Nabi, Robin L. and Oliver, Mary Beth, pp. 517–530. Los Angeles: Sage.

Orlikowski, Wanda J. 2000. “Using Technology and Constituting Structures: A Practice Lens for Studying Technology in Organizations.” Organization Science 11 (4): 404–428.Google Scholar

Papacharissi, Zizi and de Fatima Oliveira, Maria. 2012. “Affective News and Networked Publics: The Rhythms of News Storytelling on #Egypt.” Journal of Communication 62 (2): 266–282.Google Scholar

Patterson, Thomas E. and Donsbach, Wolfgang. 1996. “News Decisions: Journalists as Partisan Actors.” Political Communication 13 (4): 455–468.Google Scholar

Pfetsch, Barbara. 2001. “Political Communication Culture in the United States and Germany.” Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 6 (1): 46–67.Google Scholar

Picard, Robert G. 2010. “A Business Perspective on Challenges Facing Journalism.” in The Changing Business of Journalism and Its Implications for Democracy, edited by Levy, David A. L. and Nielsen, Rasmus Kleis, pp. 17–36. Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

Quandt, Thorsten. 2008. “(No) News on the World Wide Web? A Comparative Content Analysis of Online News in Europe and the United States.” Journalism Studies 9 (5): 717–738.Google Scholar

Reed, Isaac. 2008. “Justifying Sociological Knowledge: From Realism to Interpretation.” Sociological Theory 26 (2): 101–129.Google Scholar

Revers, Matthias. 2014a. “The Twitterization of News Making: Transparency and Journalistic Professionalism.” Journal of Communication 64 (5): 806–826.Google Scholar

Revers, Matthias. 2014b. “The Augmented Newsbeat: Spatial Structuring in a Twitterized News Ecosystem.” Media, Culture & Society [advanced online publication]. doi: 10.1177/0163443714549085.

Revers, Matthias. 2014c. “Agents of Democratic Accountability? Professional Culture of Political Journalism in the US and Germany.” PhD Dissertation, Department of Sociology, University at Albany, State University of New York.

Robinson, Sue. 2011. “Convergence Crises: News Work and News Space in the Digitally Transforming Newsroom.” Journal of Communication 61 (6): 1122–1141.Google Scholar

Ryfe, David M. 2012. Can Journalism Survive: An Inside Look at American Newsrooms. Cambridge; Malden, MA: Polity Press.

Schmitz Weiss, Amy and Domingo, David. 2010. “Innovation Processes in Online Newsrooms as Actor-Networks and Communities of Practice.” New Media & Society 12 (7):1156–1171.Google Scholar

Schudson, Michael. 1978. Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers. New York: Basic Books.

Schudson, Michael. 1995. The Power of News. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Schudson, Michael. 2007. “The Anarchy of Events and the Anxiety of Story Telling.” Political Communication 24 (3): 253–257.Google Scholar

Singer, Jane. 2005. “The Political J-Blogger.” Journalism 6 (2): 173–198.Google Scholar

Strombäck, Jesper and Dimitrova, Daniela V.. 2006. “Political and Media Systems Matter: A Comparison of Election News Coverage in Sweden and the United States.” Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 11: 131–147.Google Scholar

WAN, World Association of Newspapers. 2010. World Press Trends 2010. Paris, France: World Association of Newspapers. Retrieved (http://library.princeton.edu/catalogs/restricted/worldpresstrends.php).

Weaver, David H. and Willnat, Lars. 2012. “Journalists in the 21st Century: Conclusions.” pp. 529–551 in The Global Journalist in the 21st Century. New York: Routledge.

Book contents

12 - Digital media and the diversification of professionalism: A US–German comparison of journalism cultures

Summary

Access options

References

Save book to Kindle

Save book to Dropbox

Save book to Google Drive