Journalism Re-examined: Digital Challenges and Professional Orientations (Lessons from Northern Europe)

Chapter 1

Journalism as an Institution

Martin Eide & Helle Sjøvaag

Introduction

This book provides analyses, case studies and empirical data within an institutional theoretical framework; analysing how the journalistic institution responds to profound changes in its social and professional practices, norms and values. This challenge can be fruitfully addressed not only through detailed and specific case studies, but also by mobilizing insights from recent thinking on institutions and institutionalism. By connecting established institutional perspectives to new institutionalism, this volume aims to illustrate how this theoretical framework can be mobilized in analysing how the journalistic institution responds to the challenges that economic, technological and professional structural changes entail for journalistic endeavours.

Starting from a mainly Scandinavian, and primarily hereunder Norwegian, vantage point – with contributing perspectives from the Anglo-American setting – this volume addresses the general questions facing journalism across the world regarding its framework conditions, its ideals and practices, its business models and its audience interactions. The relevance of the Nordic perspective not only adds to a field largely dominated by Anglo-American case studies, it also presents research on journalistic challenges from within a media system characterized by strong journalistic professionalism. Indirectly, we thereby enter the debate over ‘media systems’, locating journalistic changes mainly in the Democratic Corporatist Model (Hallin & Mancini 2004), while current developments within the Liberal Model serve to illustrate how structural challenges are common across systems.

When asking how journalism as an institution encounters the current destabilising factors facing the news industries, investigating reorientations inside a robust institutional framework such as the Scandinavian provides valuable insight into how the institutional features of journalism function in its encounter with the digital era. In this introduction, we summarize the theoretical basis for these investigations – outlining how new institutionalism adds to the institutional perspective on news and journalism, illustrated by the various contributions to the volume.

Why New Institutionalism Now?

New institutionalism is a useful perspective for discussing journalism as an institution, as this theoretical position accounts for the agency perspective to a greater extent than the ‘old’ or established institutional perspectives. As such, it has a better grasp of the negotiation between agency and structure within the institutional setting (March & Olsen 1984). According to Giddens, institutions are the enduring features of social life – their durability described by how contexts condition action, and how this condition is reproduced by the motivations of individuals to engage in regularized social practices. As agents interact with the institution, they invoke the institutional order. Through this interaction they also make it meaningful, thereby contributing to reproducing it. Hence, institutions remain structurally stable, says Giddens, because agents accept them as such in their practical consciousness (Giddens 1984). Central questions in new institutionalism therefore concern the relationship between individuals and structure – a central and recurring theme in this book. When we ask questions about the impact of ownership and regulation, when we investigate genres and their functions, look at the impact of digital technologies and analyse how audiences interact with the news institution, we essentially ask questions of a new institutional nature (see Jepperson 1991).

We are, of course, not alone in promoting this perspective within the field of journalism studies. Efforts have been made in recent years to properly introduce new institutionalism to the study of journalism, most notably through special issues of the journals Political Communication (2006, 23: 2) and Journalism Studies (2011, 12: 1). As editor of both editions, David M. Ryfe argues that new institutionalism can contribute vital insights to news research. According to him, ‘part of [new institutionalism’s] appeal lies in the way it builds a conception of meso-level organizational environments out of a micro-theory of rules’ (Ryfe 2006b: 204). From this perspective, Ryfe questions which is the stronger influence on news production – the struggle for economic gain or the struggle for political legitimacy. This debate is a recurring theme among institutional approaches to journalism, as are questions concerning the macro-forces affecting journalism, the competition for financial means among news outlets and the role of journalism as a political institution (cf. Kaplan 2006: 176−183). As such, new institutionalism can help media studies establish how the journalistic institution is sustained (Ryfe 2006a: 137). In our view, the new institutional perspective can also be fruitful with regard to how we may account for essential journalistic reorientations.

The theme of this book is digital challenges and professional reorientations. The inferred inquiry here is how the digitalization of journalism impacts the profession – whether digitalization profoundly changes journalism. We argue that such profound changes to journalism cannot be inferred from the empirical findings presented in this volume – essentially because of the institutional nature of the profession. Simultaneously, we argue, digital challenges and professional reorientations should not be underestimated. Responses to challenges can lead to institutional changes. Consequently, it is crucial to pay close attention to the challenges facing journalism, and to accompanying adjustments and reorientations within the profession.

Journalism is a largely norm-dependent institution, as it fails to adhere to standards of licensing in sociological definitions of professionalism. As such, the journalistic institution is in constant need of boundary maintenance (Gieryn 1983) by its members. Such border patrol behaviour works continuously, regardless of structural changes, and transforms the norms and myths of the profession to an orthodoxy that ensures stability within the field. Hence, while we see changes, they do not profoundly change the institutional nature of journalism. With this book, we aim to further the claim that new institutionalism, as a theoretical tool, helps direct our attention to the function that rules, myths and norms have for the maintenance of the (boundaries of the) institution.

There is, however, an ambiguity and flexibility to the current situation, as journalistic boundary maintenance also implies a challenging and questioning of the borders of the profession. The participatory turn to some extent entails an opening of borders, when audience members are invited to contribute in journalistic practices and take part in dialogues and conversations (see Eide chapter 2). Anderson (2006) here points to an intriguing paradox at the core of the journalistic professionalization project. While professionalization is about drawing lines of demarcation against other professions and agents, a journalist’s professional identity also consists of keeping the professional borders open. In short, Anderson (2006: 24) writes, journalistic expertise ‘seems as generous as it does jealous’. So while boundary work is evident in the investigations undertaken by our contributing authors, the studies show how negotiating essentially permeable boundaries between journalism and other fields also fosters the kind of reorientations we observe.

Structure and Action

The journalistic institution is a multifaceted system of rules and norms governing social relationships both formally and informally. Here, the process of institutionalization ensures that social practices assume rule-like status in social thought and action. The chapters in this volume – although not all of them explicitly engaged in theoretical discussions – demonstrate how relevant this perspective is when researching journalism’s encounter with the Internet. New institutionalism focuses on the multiplicity and flexibility of goals within social systems and considers collectives to be in a reciprocal relationship with their socio-economic environments. We see this, for instance, in how forms of ownership both enable and constrain journalistic organizations (see Benson chapter 3); in the impact that ethical cultures have on journalistic practice (see Fenton chapter 4); and in how bloggers encounter journalistic framing (see Ytre-Arne chapter 12). Here, institutions are not just considered constraint structures. Institutions simultaneously empower and control. Whether we look at blogging, computational journalism, multiplatform publishing or ownership issues, the structures that condition the way journalism moves forward into the digital future provide opportunities as well as challenges. As Taina Bucher points out in her chapter on algorithms as new objects of journalism, while the integration of programmers into the newsroom is certainly felt within the journalistic institution, ‘editorial and algorithmic logics [do] not necessarily stand in opposition to each other, but are mutually articulated’ (p. 88). As such, the study of the digitalization of journalism needs to be examined within the duality of structure that agents operate.

This encourages us to see action and structure not as contradictory concepts, but as complementary terms, as faces of the duality of structure. By this notion, Giddens expresses that ‘social structures both are constituted by human agency, at the same time that structures are the very medium for this constitution’ (1979: 5). The interdependency of structure and action means that structure cannot be understood as synonymous to constraint (or system compulsion) – structure is both force and choice; both restriction and incitement. Structures exist only as structural properties in a social system, which are organized as regular social practices. A typical expression of such structured social practices is an institution, which must be understood as a subcategory of system. That is, it must have an extension in time and space and be recognized by a majority of the members of a society.

In Giddens’ work, structure tends to adopt an almost virtual status. Among the critics of this position, we find the economic historian Christopher Lloyd. Structures exist, says Lloyd, as ‘emergent ensembles of rules, roles, relations and meanings’ (1993: 42). Like society and culture they are real entities ‘that are neither artifacts of the theorists’ or the actor’s creation ‘nor reducible to characteristics of individuals or patterns of individual behaviour’ (1993: 39). This approach breaks with methodological individualism, where social categories and explanations can be reduced to descriptions in terms of individual predicates. Neither is this approach compatible with traditional structure-oriented approaches, where the acting agents are puppets in a structural web of influences.

Rules and resources surrounding, and present in, the newsroom should be conceived as both media for and results of journalists’ action. Different journalistic criteria are probably more fruitfully understood as ‘rules’ – in Giddens’ sense as generalizable procedures – than as causal explanations of journalistic behaviour (Eide 1992). David Ryfe (2006b) offers a helpful contribution here through the distinction between constitutive and regulative rules. According to Ryfe, a journalistic rule is ‘a normative assumption or expectation about appropriate or legitimate modes of behaviour – what a journalist’s role is, what her or his obligations are, what values and commitments are appropriate – in the context of news production’ (Ryfe 2006b: 205). New institutionalism conceptualizes news rules by distinguishing between constitutive (what counts as news) and regulative rules (how to produce the news). The two forms of rules are coupled with resources and form structures that when they become routine, form regimes. Journalists follow the rules of journalism because they want to be recognized as journalists – one of the reasons why news is so consistent across time and space.

Professional Reorientations?

Normative institutionalism (cf. Nee 1998) explains how individual behaviours and values have been shaped by their membership in institutions. Norms, values and myths play crucial roles in depicting formal structures as rational means to attain desirable aims that lie beyond the discretion of individuals or organizations, and are therefore taken for granted as legitimate. As Hovden discovers in his analysis of professionalism among journalism students in the Nordic countries (chapter 5), changing market and work situations for journalists could be expected to condition journalists to see investigation as a less central value, however this does not seem to weaken traditional investigative journalistic ideals. Important hereunder is a ‘logic of appropriateness’, where routines, standard operating procedures and symbols provide the context for behaviour, where agents’ choices are largely conditioned by their membership in institutions (March & Olsen 1984). The logic of appropriateness sees action as ‘driven by rules of appropriate or exemplary behaviour, organized into institutions’ (March & Olsen 2009: 2). Hence, while web technologies pose ontological challenges to journalistic forms and practices (see Eide chapter 2), the rules that guide news procedures remain relatively stable. Adjustments towards platform multiplicity, Kvalheim finds (chapter 8), introduce new considerations in journalists’ daily work, but this ‘does not mean that what is judged as newsworthy in the first place necessarily changes’ (p. 136). And while moving to a stronger online presence entails a differentiation in content on the print and web platforms, Sjøvaag (chapter 7) finds that the online journalistic venture is firmly anchored in newspapers’ print brand identities.

Journalism can, as indicated above, be described as one of the more norm-dependent institutions in our society. This is not only due to its lack of proper professional status, but is enhanced by the complexity of institutions surrounding the field. Journalism faces pressures from agencies beyond its borders – essentially the rules and resources at play in the economic and political fields that impact on the journalistic operations of newsrooms – particularly through the economic rationalization of owners and regulation by the state. Fenton, in her analysis of the regulatory reactions to the UK phone-hacking scandal in 2011 (chapter 4), finds that sliding ethical practices are more linked to the system of news production than to individual journalists. In fact, she argues that solutions to the interconnected problems faced by the profession at the framework level – ownership concentration, lack of media pluralism and unethical journalism – ‘must take account of both the structure and funding of media that best served their democratic and social purposes’ (p. 54).

Boundary maintenance (cf. above) is especially relevant in a time of great technological upheaval (cf. Gieryn 1983). This can be seen, for instance, in the negotiation over the introduction of algorithms in the newsroom. While Bucher (chapter 6) finds an ‘automation’ benefit facilitated by algorithms, her informers also ‘strongly believe that algorithms cannot compete with the professional know-how and judgement of an experienced journalist or editor’ (p. 94) – as a matter of institutional protection. Similarly, Elgesem and Nordeide (chapter 9), in their analysis of online newspaper debates, show how editorial policies towards anonymous commenting entails aspects of border patrolling between editorial and user content. Such border patrol behaviour generally transforms the norms and myths of the profession to an orthodoxy that ensures stability within the field, but can also be seen as efforts to sustain and strengthen such borders. As Benson also argues (chapter 3), ‘New entrants into the field of journalism, regardless of their ownership origin, may find themselves strongly pressured to adapt to the prevailing professional norms of the field’ (p. 42). The professional social contract and journalism’s social mission play important roles here, as efforts to formulate a normative framework and as a strategic resource in journalism’s effort to establish itself among other, more classic institutions.

Change and Stability

The news media are institutions not only because journalistic practices are commonly accepted to serve a legitimate function, but also because they have evolved and endured over time. Concepts such as newsworthiness (see Kvalheim chapter 8), news beats (see Blach-Ørsten chapter 11) and news commentary (see Knapskog et al. chapter 10) are evidence of the extent to which – while challenged – core professional traits continue to orient the profession. Such regularized practices have been established with the intent to counter the uncertainties and complexities of the profession (cf. Cook 1998). News content is institutional rather than organizational because organizational aims tend to converge – not diversify – thus creating an environment that produces a common news perspective across the institution. Once established, journalism remains institutional because of the consensus among journalists, audiences and political actors of the media’s social and political function. While there is evidence of reorientation in journalism students’ professional ideals, Hovden (chapter 5) also finds that socially shared enduring ideals about the role and function of journalism in society, such as investigative ideals, are becoming stronger within the field. In this regard, Knapskog et al. (chapter 10) argue that the proliferation of the commentary genre entails a key aspect in journalism’s efforts to continuously renew its contract with increasingly fragmenting audiences.

Understanding journalism as an institution is important because of the central role that journalism plays in relation to other social institutions in the public sphere, particularly in relation to the political field, but also in a wider sense as the ‘mediatization’ of society brings the media logic into play in social, political and cultural interactions (cf. Altheide & Snow 1979, 1988; Asp 1990; Hjarvard 2008; Strömbäck 2008). The logic of the journalistic institution – with its attention to conflict and disclosure, its narratives of failure and triumph, and its ideological position as the adversaries of power – impacts on the operations of other institutions, as agents in the pursuit of power tend to adapt to the journalistic logic and way of thinking (Eide 2007). Hardly any modern institution or social actor is untouched by the prevailing media logic, existing media conventions or journalistic modes of operation. However, as Blach-Ørsten argues, the shift from government to governance in the political realm presents a challenge to the theory of mediatization of politics, as his study of the Danish EU news beat (chapter 11) finds that ‘not all kinds of politics or political actors are being equally mediatized, most likely because the news media’s definition of the political is still centred on the nation state’ (p. 199). Nevertheless, the journalistic logic is expanding, and its power is routinely mobilized by ambitious social and political agents aiming to advance within their field (Eide 2007).

Throughout the research history of the sociology of journalism, structure has generally held primacy over agency, with limited attention as to how structure is enabling as well as constraining. Efforts have mainly been directed towards uncovering the structural restraints on journalism – a practice most notably found in organizational studies of journalistic production (e.g., Epstein 1973; Fishman 1980; Schudson 1978; Tuchman 1972). Equally prevalent in the research history is the attention paid to the constraining force of professional ideology and its support function for the dominant hegemony (e.g., Gitlin 1980; Golding & Elliott 1979; Hall 1982). The academic study of journalism has always been based on the assumption that journalists help maintain the news system through their practices. The fluctuating question has rather been to what extent journalists follow professional norms and rules blindly, or if they indeed have any effect upon the rules that constitute practice. As Eide shows (chapter 2), the challenges that fuel upheavals in the duality between structure and agency in the journalistic institution today constitute, among other things, a de-industrialization of journalistic production, practice and discourse – as well as the very business model of the industry. In this regard, Bucher (chapter 6) shows how such challenges can also be internalized. New tools and practices, while seemingly new to the profession, ‘rather contest and change existing ways of thinking and doing journalism’ (p. 99) – a crucial point that speaks to how practices remain enduring within the institution.

Journalism as a profession has always been portrayed in the sociology of news as a more or less constructive tug-of-war between the effects of the restrictions that curb the vocational performance from editorial, financial, managerial and regulatory structures, and the mythological freedom and individualism inherent in practicing journalism. Within this framework, news institutions and their journalistic products are maintained through established practices. These practices – the daily production of news and its universal methodologies (such as the interview and the inverted pyramid, the news beat, commentary genre and editorial principles) – are continuously produced and reproduced through the intended and unintended consequences of agents’ actions. This explains how the daily journalistic routines further condition action in a causal loop that maintains the institution of journalism (cf. Giddens 1984: 14). So whereas the constraining force of structure holds primacy over the agency perspective in journalism research, the awareness of the duality of structure should always be kept present. The organizational and institutional news structure may have a restraining force on journalistic agency, and the political and economic structure may constrain the agency of news institutions, but it is the actions of journalists and news outlets that continue to reproduce and maintain the constraining system in which they operate on a daily basis. As such, the relationship between the individual and the structure is one that has called for new issues regarding the interplay between following rules and norms and helping maintain them. This is a question that has been of concern particularly among the new institutionalists, and one that the various contributions to this volume address in different ways.

Conclusion

When approaching the Internet as a potentially altering factor to the future of journalism, we should keep in mind that even as new resources emerge – and even as the rules might change – changes are never integrated into social systems outside the grounding effect that the durability of institutions has on its members. The Internet in many ways entails a structuring aspect of journalism. It certainly is part of the infrastructure of journalistic production and dissemination, but just because technologies change, this does not necessarily change what journalists do in newsrooms. The Internet both enables and restrains the traditional professional practice, but enduring vocational procedures also largely determine how these new resources are utilized, and how new rules are formed. Because new institutionalism gives more room for human agency, we consider this a most fruitful approach to studying the impact of the Internet on journalism. Our intention with this book is to highlight some of the areas where the duality of institutional structure and the agency of its practitioners come into play as journalism moves forward into the digital future.

With a few exceptions, the following chapters address this endeavour from a Scandinavian – and mostly Norwegian – perspective. We argue that the Scandinavian case is relevant in a more general context, as is also the case with the US and UK contributions (chapters 3 and 4). That said, the Scandinavian situation is of particular interest, given its blend of a robust welfare state and a public service-oriented media system. The Media Welfare State – a concept coined by Syvertsen et al. (2014) – describes this media system as built on four pillars. First, an organization of the media as public goods; second, an institutionalization of editorial freedom and self-governance; third, a cultural policy including content obligations and public support, in order to secure diversity and quality; and fourth, cooperation between the state, media and the public (Syvertsen et al. 2014: 17). These four pillars carry a media welfare state and constitute a fertile ground for journalistic maintenance and adjustment. References in political discourse to a Nordic, or Scandinavian model therefore bear witness of the relevance of the empirical examples and normative considerations in most of the following chapters.

Introducing the Chapters

Martin Eide’s contribution ‘Journalistic Reorientations’ (chapter 2) addresses four challenges concerning the definition of journalism under current circumstances: a de-industrialization of journalism; a challenge of accountability; a participatory turn; and a quest for new metaphors in understanding journalism. With its accompanying reorientations, these challenges consider tendencies in contemporary journalism from a political-economic perspective, an ideological perspective, a professional perspective and a cultural perspective. Eide argues that journalism in light of the indicated challenges and the corresponding reorientations must prove its indispensability as an institution dedicated to the public good.

Rodney Benson’s contribution ‘Institutional Forms of Media Ownership and Their Modes of Power’ (chapter 3) analyses modes of ownership power and how these vary according to ownership institutional logic, social location of the news organization and its audience, and national journalistic field and field of power. Drawing on interviews and close readings, the chapter identifies four modes of ownership power: business instrumentalism, political instrumentalism, public service orientation and commitment, and audience adjustment. Benson here investigates the structural level of news production in the context of the financial crisis and its effects on the journalistic institution, and finds that diversity of ownership forms linked to different institutional logics accounts for most differences in the use of various modes of power.

In chapter 4, ‘Media Reform in the UK Post-Leveson’, Natalie Fenton considers the recent crisis in the newspaper industry in the United Kingdom through a critique of the hacking scandal, its policy responses and the issues this raises for media reform in a post-Leveson environment. In particular, Fenton considers the key debates that pivot on the concept of ‘freedom of the press’, closely related to aspects of transparency and accountability in journalistic practice in the digital age, as well as normative concerns regarding news in a democratic society. Fenton finds that even in a situation where we have financial breakdown, moral bankruptcy and public desire for change, it is difficult to break out of the neo-liberal conformity in which markets equate to freedom and increased regulation equals creeping authoritarianism.

Jan Fredrik Hovden, in ‘Changing Journalistic Professionalism’ (chapter 5), presents a longitudinal survey of Nordic journalism students’ role orientations,