February 6, 2004, 1.21am • 20 comments » • 3,569 Views

Digitising The News

Sociologist Pablo J. Boczkowski’s new book attempts to explain the development of newspaper websites in an ethnological context, reports Online Journalism Review. Online, he finds:

The news seems to be shaped by greater and more varied groups of actors [so] the news moves from being mostly journalist-centered, communicated as a monologue, and primarily local, to also being increasingly audience-centered, part of multiple conversations, and micro-local.

Whilst that scenario is something like a wet dream for decentred, participatory journalism evangelists like me, I wonder if the evidence bears it out. Whilst it’s true that readers “have a more direct impact on the production process than what is typically accounted for in studies of print and broadcast newsrooms”, even in mainstream online newsrooms “interactive” elements often pay only lip-service to the real concept of many-to-many journalism.

Boczkowsi continues: “[the] interactions [between a traditional newsroom and its online counterpart], may shape what constitutes the news, who reports it, and when it is made available to the public”. Well, from experience, there has been many a time when stories written by myself or colleagues have been fed into our television and radio output, reluctantly at first and often without credit. Also, Boczkowsi is bang-on when he alludes to that all-important acid test of an old media outlet’s digital credentials - do you let the scoop run online immediately, or wait until the morning radio show for which you always intended it? I know which way that often works out, but it’s changing.

But Boczkowsi asserts that readers now shape what is “newsworthy” by their participation in forums attached to websites and so on. Unfortunately, this frequently doesn’t bear fruit. Many outlets now have message boards or facilities purporting to facilitate “interactivity” - but frequently the news agenda stays the privileged keep of the editors, and the opportunity for reader participation confined to responses to a solicitation for feedback on a particular story. For example, BBC News’ Have Your Say may see thousands of participants through its doors daily, but they are all talking about what Auntie told them to talk about - stick to the script. The Guardian’s Talk is essentially a free-for-all message board - but no-one could argue that participants there have ever seen their comments or suggestions in print or even online.

Undoubtedly, there is a power shift, in some circles, away from editors and toward consumers. But, in other circles, I wonder, unfortunately, if it’s less of a power shift and more of a conversation adjunctive to the conventional news product, the two parties having met slightly left of halfway.

Boczkowski quotes Leon Sigal:

News is consensible: newspaper audiences, by their responses to news, actively shape its content. Yet the average reader has little impact on the consensual process.

This is just a re-appropriation of 1970s media reception theory studies which were pioneered by the likes of Stuart Hall and go like this - one-to-many media may be closed-message systems, and so media producers may encode within their content a preferred reading they hope will be decoded by consumers, but consumers’ own divergent life experiences and psychological nuances of all kinds may compel them to decode a different meaning from the one intended. So Boczkowski is saying that newspaper audiences’ responses to stories consensually alter their meaning - but only in the nationwide psychological network made evident by conversation, not in newsprint. Many-to-many media, logically, extend the number and direction of possible discussions both about stories, and which constitute or break stories, on the screen itself.

To my mind, however, the extent to which this is true depends largely on the extent to which a media operator employs true many-to-many or participatory journalism techniques - merely talking back is to sell short this wonderful new medium for change and connection. On the other hand, merely e-mail alone has been a massive leveller, allowing readers to post us corrections to stories pretty soon after publication, where, before, they may never have bothered to pick up the telephone.

Boczkowski adds:

This, in turn, opens the news to a higher degree of contestation, expressed either by direct conflict of opinions or indirect multiplicity of views, than the typical case of traditional media.

This tallies with my theory that, from media plurality, follows plurality of opinion, ideology and politics. As a consequence, the traditional mass opinion splinters into a series of niche affiliations, with the majority vote becoming easier and easier to win but harder and harder to justify on such a small mandate.

Anyway, it’s this “contestation” which is now interesting because what we can witness is the mass regulation and fisking of our media not by our new Ofcom but by an army of bloggers. Now, they may all have their own agendas, but the phenomenon they practise is giving rise to more and more inevitable contestation of the merit and worth of stories. In the one-to-many age, news stories were closed memes you had to swallow and if you disagreed with it (for it would never seek to disagree with you), tough. In the online era, stories are becoming never-ending conversations, continually open to debate, question and scrutiny by their public. So the power shift to the public may not yet be enough for it to create and disseminate its own version of news, but it is increasingly calling in to question the integrity of Big Journalism’s own stories, which are now launched into a very large public sphere in which the slightest nuance is instantly spotted and corrected, pored over in unprecedented detail - unprecedented, of course, until the Hutton Inquiry held a magnifying class over the precise words of Andrew Gilligan, the BBC and Downing Street…

If you want to be ready for the participatory journalism era, it looks like you’d better brush up on semantics.