This book examines pressing debates concerning how and why journalism education should respond to... more This book examines pressing debates concerning how and why journalism education should respond to digital changes in and around the industry, and questions market oriented ideology and civic responsibility in the field.
Surveying a broad field of discourse and research into journalism education, Creech shows how public ideals, market logics and industry concerns have come to animate discussions about digital journalism education and journalism’s future, and how academic structures and cultures are positioned as a key obstacle to attaining that future. The book examines labor conditions, critiques of journalism education as an institution, and curricular change, with reference to how conversations around race, fake news, and digital infrastructures impact the field. Creech argues for a critical pedagogy of journalism education, one that pushes beyond jobs training and instead is centred around a commitment to public and civic value via a liberal arts tradition made practicable for the digital age.
This insightful book is vital reading for journalism educators and scholars, as well as journalists and news executives, education scholars, and program officers and decision-makers at journalism-adjacent foundations and think tanks.
Recent debates about journalism’s abiding values have often
centered the role journalistic object... more Recent debates about journalism’s abiding values have often centered the role journalistic objectivity has played in sustaining various inequities in American society. Amid these challenges, newsroom leaders, executives, and owners have spoken publicly about a need to defend the profession’s traditions, especially a commitment to objectivity and independence. Through a textual analysis of arguments and statements from top editors and publishers defending values like objectivity and independence, this study considers how a form of metajournalistic discourse has emerged from journalism’s managerial class that rhetorically and ideologically moderates calls for cultural change from both inside and outside the profession. As elite figures define threats to the field—externally from rising authoritarianism and inwardly from a generation questioning traditional values—they proffer a return to independence, setting boundaries around critiques calling for ethical and normative change, but also preserving an elite insularity that has long been part of journalism’s professional culture.
As local news has grown as a research and policy concern, venture philanthropy organizations, lik... more As local news has grown as a research and policy concern, venture philanthropy organizations, like the Google News Initiative, Meta Journalism Project, and American Journalism Project, have forwarded a capacious vision of innovation as offering a broad set of revenue-based solutions to local news’ crises. This article analyzes materials produced by these organizations as a form of metajournalistic discourse to understand how venture philanthropists’ focus on local news and innovation buttresses their authority to intervene in journalistic cultures and articulate visions for the future. Venture philanthropy organizations have claimed a broad and granular authority to define the directions of local journalism’s future, recursively justifying their role as stewards of tech industry largesse by declaring which problems, practices, and innovations are worthy of investment and attention.
In the research and commentary around ‘fake news’, there has been growing attention
to the way th... more In the research and commentary around ‘fake news’, there has been growing attention to the way the phrase evidences a growing field of technology industry critique, operating as a shorthand for understanding the nature of social media companies’ power over the public sphere. This article interrogates elite and popular discourses surrounding ‘fake news’, using the tools of critical discourse analysis to show how public commentary constitutes a discursive field that renders tech industry power intelligible by first defining the issue of fake news as a sociotechnical problem, then debating the infrastructural nature of platform companies’ social power. This article concludes that, as commentary moves beyond a focus on fake news and critiques of technology industries grow more complex, strains of elite discourse reveal productive constraints on tech power, articulating the conditions under which limits on that power are understood as legitimate.
This article argues that the discourses and techniques of political journalism worked to make Whi... more This article argues that the discourses and techniques of political journalism worked to make White working class identity sensible as an assumed norm in American politics during the 2016 US presidential campaign. Throughout the campaign, many news organizations sent journalists to small towns and various Donald Trump rallies to understand what was driving a burbling resentment among his base of White working class voters, and by interrogating the explanatory and long-form reporting produced by these journalists, we can come to understand how the White working class began to cohere as a particular political subjectivity. By documenting the economic decline and social peril borne from neoliberal policies, acts of journalism substantiate the conditions that animate White working class identity and legitimate its resentments. However, that same journalism also failed to adequately deal with the consequences of policy and the way economic conditions and cultural identities reflexively constitute one another, instead focusing on the ways class-and race-based resentments formed a well of political support, constraining any sense of agency to the discursive bounds of a political campaign. This article concludes by arguing that in order to decenter the primacy of whiteness in American politics, it is incumbent upon scholars and observers alike to attend to the various cultural discourses and techniques that render it simultaneously central and invisible.
This article argues that environmental citizenship, understood as sustainable forms of consumptio... more This article argues that environmental citizenship, understood as sustainable forms of consumption, is increasingly constructed through visual regimes of nostalgia for both pristine wilderness and an era of unfettered resource extraction. Drawing on the linkages between survey photography, popular constructions of nature, and nostalgia, it takes the Environmental Protection Agency's Documerica and State of the Environment projects as opportunities to understand how depictions of the environment reinforce contemporary notions of sustainability. As the predominant discourse guiding envi-ronmentality, or the governance of our relationships with the non-human world, sustainability relies on scientific knowledges in order to harmonize economic growth, population health, and ecologies. To do so, sustainability draws on the power of media to encourage forms of consumption that might indefinitely perpetuate capitalist economies at the expense of the non-human world. Analysis of the images of small-town life, extraction industries, and pollution, as well as seemingly pristine wilderness in Documerica and State of the Environment demonstrates how these projects draw on widespread nostalgias in order to reinforce notions about sustainable modes of consumption and perpetual industrial growth. This article subsequently shows how the circulation of survey photographs harnesses the camera's nostalgic lens in the service of contemporary environmentalities.
As fake news has become a growing concern since the 2016 U.S. presidential election, attention to... more As fake news has become a growing concern since the 2016 U.S. presidential election, attention to journalism history offers a useful means for rediscovering strategies for both fighting fake news and shoring up journalism’s commitment to the truth. This article argues that truth’s value emerges from the conditions under which journalism is produced, both commercial and cultural. Looking at arguments about fake news published in news reports, columns, letters to editors, and advertisements in major metropolitan papers between 1891 and 1919, we recover the particular ways journalists came to define the problem of fake news, arguing that its emergence as a discursive object offered opportunities for conceiving of and articulating practicable responses across the industry. For contemporary practitioners, scholars, and commentators alike, this means that clearly defining and responding to the problem of fake news in ways that are both critical and contextual offer a means for recovering agency in the face of this crisis.
As journalistic work has become increasingly precarious in recent decades, exposure to risk – tha... more As journalistic work has become increasingly precarious in recent decades, exposure to risk – that is, true bodily harm – has become a normalized condition for those reporting from conflict zones. This article considers the political economy of risk, paying particular attention to the ways it has been constructed as a desirable and manageable condition for various classes of news workers. The burden of risk is distributed unequally across staff reporters, freelancers, and non-Western local journalists of all stripes, and a persistent discourse of witnessing obscures both these inequities and the structural conditions that allow news organizations to profit from an increased assumption of individual risk. As structural conditions, individual mitigations, and practices of textual commodification are considered and critiqued, the article concludes by identifying specific strategies that push beyond an economic logic, and thus reassert the cultural and political value of conflict and war reporting as a practice that merits protection, regardless of who produces it. Such a critique focuses on developing the discursive tools that allow journalists and outside observers alike to ask 'who should bear the costs of witnessing?'
As US news organizations have faced twin crises in funding and authority in recent years, innovation has become a key concept and ideal driving many interventions aimed at saving journalism. Often, ahistorically and uncritically deployed notions of innovation elide questions of digital journalism’s democratic aspirations in favor of market-oriented solutions. To critically examine the discourse around innovation, this article interrogates documents produced by think tanks and non-profit institutes researching the future of journalism: the Knight Foundation, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, Harvard’s Nieman Foundation, and the Shorenstein Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, among others. A post-industrial vision for journalism emerges with an overriding and celebratory focus on innovation. We argue that this discourse marginalizes normative concerns about journalism’s democratic purpose and rests on an entrepreneurial logic that seeks to dictate digital journalism’s broader public virtues.
Scholars who use textual approaches to study news often blend theoretical perspectives in their w... more Scholars who use textual approaches to study news often blend theoretical perspectives in their work, asking some combination of questions about how news narratives function culturally, how news narratives are produced, and how news narratives are situated epistemologically. These perspectives often lead to compelling insights, and this article argues that a more fully fleshed-out approach to genre in journalism studies offers a robust means for contextualizing a wide array of theoretical concerns. Methodologically, attention to the textual conventions of a genre helps scholars attend to news narratives as both the products of standardized journalistic routines and evidence of broader cultural forces at play, cultural forces that rely upon journalism’s implicit authority over the truth. This article lays out guidelines for performing genre analysis while also offering examples for potential future studies.
As devices become a more visible and integral part of media practice, it is important for researc... more As devices become a more visible and integral part of media practice, it is important for researchers and scholars to attend to the ways in which philosophies, professional discourses, and technical limits structure the ways these technologies are deployed. The 35mm camera is a technological waypoint between earlier large format cameras and contemporary digital photography, and offers a useful historical example for interrogating the relationship between seemingly inert technical operations and journalism’s modes of meaning production. To that end, this paper offers a theoretical perspective for interrogating the 35mm camera through the lens of Latour, with the aim of developing a schema for integrating devices into the cultural study of media and communication.
This paper presents a case study of the possibilities of slow photojournalism. Over the past deca... more This paper presents a case study of the possibilities of slow photojournalism. Over the past decade, award-winning photojournalist David Burnett has used a 60-year-old Speed Graphic film camera to document US political events, several Olympic Games, and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, among other projects. His photographs reveal a significantly different aesthetic from contemporary photojournalism and he is celebrated for the perspective his analog photographs offer. This analysis is based on two points of examination: first, a textual analysis of articles and videos discussing the work; and second, a semiotic analysis of the imagery. The examination suggests Burnett’s photo aesthetic signifies a longing for an imagined analog, journalistic utopia of yore, where individual journalists had the time and freedom to put care and attention into their work.
When The New Republic owner and Facebook founder Chris Hughes replaced the magazine’s top editors... more When The New Republic owner and Facebook founder Chris Hughes replaced the magazine’s top editors in December 2014, it set off a round of vociferous commentary declaring “The Death of The New Republic.” Portrayed as a conflict between journalistic tradition and Silicon Valley values, changes at the magazine crystallized lingering anxieties about the future of journalism and its relationship to the demands of the market. This article examines commentary about changes at the magazine through the lens of metajournalistic discourse, arguing that the discourses analyzed established the means by which structural conditions and philosophical challenges in the journalism industry were rendered sensible to the broader public. Though acts of personalized blame and schadenfreude at the publication’s supposed demise characterized much of the discourse, other texts worked to clarify the stakes in the conflict, ultimately creating the terms by which the conflict could be made sense of and its consequence articulated to the broader field of journalism.
KEYWORDS: future of journalism; journalism and technology industries; journalism studies; metajournalistic discourse; The New Republic
Digitization has resulted in great uncertainty for journalism, leading to disruption of business ... more Digitization has resulted in great uncertainty for journalism, leading to disruption of business models, revenue streams, media distinctions, and production practices. This uncertainty has led to many articles, reports, blog posts, and general commentary discussing the future of both journalism and the skills required by journalists to succeed in this environment. This essay analyzes these discourses, focusing specifically on the nature of technology as the sole determiner of journalism’s future, with interventions aimed at journalism education and the structure of newswork. An idealized notion of the technologically adept journalist, ready to usher in digital stability, emerges as the object of these debates and, thanks in large part to the limited scope and ahistorical character of digital discourse, obscures more persistent, systemic critiques of technology and journalism.
Culture in Conversation: A Critical and Cultural Studies Roundtable, Aug 2013
A discussion of process and academic discourse, written to commemorate the launch of interdiscipl... more A discussion of process and academic discourse, written to commemorate the launch of interdisciplinary cultural studies website Culture in Conversation.
The November 2008 attacks on Mumbai stand as a key moment in understanding how liberalized Wester... more The November 2008 attacks on Mumbai stand as a key moment in understanding how liberalized Western values discursively construct the terms through which acts of terror may be understood. Rooted in the work of Foucault, this article examines newspaper coverage of the 2008 attacks on Mumbai from the Times of India, Indian Express, and Daily News and Analysis India. Journalistic narratives situated local values and identities inside a discursive structure that construed Mumbai as a victim of a new type of global terror whose threat can be stemmed only through America-centric policies of perpetual militarism. This paper argues that a critical analysis of the discourses surrounding terrorism begets an understanding of the terms that not only construct the attacks themselves, but also render sensible possible reactions to the attacks, even as Western values appear amid news texts published in domestic Indian outlets.
This essay posits American journalism as a particular realm of public knowledge production, infle... more This essay posits American journalism as a particular realm of public knowledge production, inflected with its own professional practices as well as the way in which those practices subjugate technologies of representation. Taking the Arab Spring of 2011 as a case study in journalistic knowledge production, this article analyzes three epistemological conditions underscoring the Arab Spring’s development as an object of knowledge: the use of social media tools within the practice of journalism, the representational authority of the individual reporter, and the articulation of journalistic knowledge to broader institutions of liberal democratic power. While these are by no means the only possible themes of investigation, by looking at how journalistic practices rendered the Arab Spring sensible and worthy of public consideration, this essay hopes to reveal them as temporally and technologically contingent, but also linked to the values of liberal democracy that undergird journalism’s role in American public life.
Convergence; Special Issue on New Media, Global Activism, and Politics, Nov 2014
This article considers the ways in which practices of digital representation were deployed in the... more This article considers the ways in which practices of digital representation were deployed in the Occupy Wall Street movement, arguing that acts of self-representation render intelligible not just the politics of a movement like Occupy Wall Street, but also make sensible the relations of power such projects are immersed within. Building upon the notion that the specific power of the movement was exercised via a situated understanding of representation, this essay investigates how a digitally mediated sensibility made the broader critiques at the core of the Occupy movement not only intelligible to those inside and outside the movement, but also offered a mode of subject constitution that pushed against liberal notions of political subjectivity.
The point of a genealogical project is to tease out the historically rooted forces that produce r... more The point of a genealogical project is to tease out the historically rooted forces that produce received objects of knowledge. As a crucial part in building a critical interpretation, history becomes a method for tracing the contingent and contested intellectual, political, and cultural practices that create seemingly fixed objects of knowledge. In the following argument, I would like to posit that a genealogical approach to journalism's historical record treats theory not as an inert noun in opposition to history, but as a verb, a rigorous process reliant on historical evidence to form an interpretation about the broader relations of power and, in the case of journalism, public knowledge production. Historically archived materials, then, exist as the documentary evidence of power at work, and reveal on their surface and conditions of production the discourses and practices that give intelligible form to the objects of received knowledge.
During the Vietnam War, American planes dropped more bombs on Cambodia than had fallen in all of ... more During the Vietnam War, American planes dropped more bombs on Cambodia than had fallen in all of Europe during World War II. The event marks a key moment in the secretive expansion of U.S. military power, and this article looks at how mainstream journalism helped create the discursive conditions that abetted this expansion. After an explication of the historical and theoretical rationales for studying the relation between journalism and U.S. military power, this article analyzes Time magazine's coverage of Cambodia from 1969 to 1973 and finds that the American press at the time was not discursively configured to critique the U.S. military-diplomatic apparatus. The article analyzes the depiction of Cambodia as a theater of war and argues that most critiques of the bombing were limited to President Richard Nixon's quality of character, providing a locus that prevented more systemic critiques from emerging.
This book examines pressing debates concerning how and why journalism education should respond to... more This book examines pressing debates concerning how and why journalism education should respond to digital changes in and around the industry, and questions market oriented ideology and civic responsibility in the field.
Surveying a broad field of discourse and research into journalism education, Creech shows how public ideals, market logics and industry concerns have come to animate discussions about digital journalism education and journalism’s future, and how academic structures and cultures are positioned as a key obstacle to attaining that future. The book examines labor conditions, critiques of journalism education as an institution, and curricular change, with reference to how conversations around race, fake news, and digital infrastructures impact the field. Creech argues for a critical pedagogy of journalism education, one that pushes beyond jobs training and instead is centred around a commitment to public and civic value via a liberal arts tradition made practicable for the digital age.
This insightful book is vital reading for journalism educators and scholars, as well as journalists and news executives, education scholars, and program officers and decision-makers at journalism-adjacent foundations and think tanks.
Recent debates about journalism’s abiding values have often
centered the role journalistic object... more Recent debates about journalism’s abiding values have often centered the role journalistic objectivity has played in sustaining various inequities in American society. Amid these challenges, newsroom leaders, executives, and owners have spoken publicly about a need to defend the profession’s traditions, especially a commitment to objectivity and independence. Through a textual analysis of arguments and statements from top editors and publishers defending values like objectivity and independence, this study considers how a form of metajournalistic discourse has emerged from journalism’s managerial class that rhetorically and ideologically moderates calls for cultural change from both inside and outside the profession. As elite figures define threats to the field—externally from rising authoritarianism and inwardly from a generation questioning traditional values—they proffer a return to independence, setting boundaries around critiques calling for ethical and normative change, but also preserving an elite insularity that has long been part of journalism’s professional culture.
As local news has grown as a research and policy concern, venture philanthropy organizations, lik... more As local news has grown as a research and policy concern, venture philanthropy organizations, like the Google News Initiative, Meta Journalism Project, and American Journalism Project, have forwarded a capacious vision of innovation as offering a broad set of revenue-based solutions to local news’ crises. This article analyzes materials produced by these organizations as a form of metajournalistic discourse to understand how venture philanthropists’ focus on local news and innovation buttresses their authority to intervene in journalistic cultures and articulate visions for the future. Venture philanthropy organizations have claimed a broad and granular authority to define the directions of local journalism’s future, recursively justifying their role as stewards of tech industry largesse by declaring which problems, practices, and innovations are worthy of investment and attention.
In the research and commentary around ‘fake news’, there has been growing attention
to the way th... more In the research and commentary around ‘fake news’, there has been growing attention to the way the phrase evidences a growing field of technology industry critique, operating as a shorthand for understanding the nature of social media companies’ power over the public sphere. This article interrogates elite and popular discourses surrounding ‘fake news’, using the tools of critical discourse analysis to show how public commentary constitutes a discursive field that renders tech industry power intelligible by first defining the issue of fake news as a sociotechnical problem, then debating the infrastructural nature of platform companies’ social power. This article concludes that, as commentary moves beyond a focus on fake news and critiques of technology industries grow more complex, strains of elite discourse reveal productive constraints on tech power, articulating the conditions under which limits on that power are understood as legitimate.
This article argues that the discourses and techniques of political journalism worked to make Whi... more This article argues that the discourses and techniques of political journalism worked to make White working class identity sensible as an assumed norm in American politics during the 2016 US presidential campaign. Throughout the campaign, many news organizations sent journalists to small towns and various Donald Trump rallies to understand what was driving a burbling resentment among his base of White working class voters, and by interrogating the explanatory and long-form reporting produced by these journalists, we can come to understand how the White working class began to cohere as a particular political subjectivity. By documenting the economic decline and social peril borne from neoliberal policies, acts of journalism substantiate the conditions that animate White working class identity and legitimate its resentments. However, that same journalism also failed to adequately deal with the consequences of policy and the way economic conditions and cultural identities reflexively constitute one another, instead focusing on the ways class-and race-based resentments formed a well of political support, constraining any sense of agency to the discursive bounds of a political campaign. This article concludes by arguing that in order to decenter the primacy of whiteness in American politics, it is incumbent upon scholars and observers alike to attend to the various cultural discourses and techniques that render it simultaneously central and invisible.
This article argues that environmental citizenship, understood as sustainable forms of consumptio... more This article argues that environmental citizenship, understood as sustainable forms of consumption, is increasingly constructed through visual regimes of nostalgia for both pristine wilderness and an era of unfettered resource extraction. Drawing on the linkages between survey photography, popular constructions of nature, and nostalgia, it takes the Environmental Protection Agency's Documerica and State of the Environment projects as opportunities to understand how depictions of the environment reinforce contemporary notions of sustainability. As the predominant discourse guiding envi-ronmentality, or the governance of our relationships with the non-human world, sustainability relies on scientific knowledges in order to harmonize economic growth, population health, and ecologies. To do so, sustainability draws on the power of media to encourage forms of consumption that might indefinitely perpetuate capitalist economies at the expense of the non-human world. Analysis of the images of small-town life, extraction industries, and pollution, as well as seemingly pristine wilderness in Documerica and State of the Environment demonstrates how these projects draw on widespread nostalgias in order to reinforce notions about sustainable modes of consumption and perpetual industrial growth. This article subsequently shows how the circulation of survey photographs harnesses the camera's nostalgic lens in the service of contemporary environmentalities.
As fake news has become a growing concern since the 2016 U.S. presidential election, attention to... more As fake news has become a growing concern since the 2016 U.S. presidential election, attention to journalism history offers a useful means for rediscovering strategies for both fighting fake news and shoring up journalism’s commitment to the truth. This article argues that truth’s value emerges from the conditions under which journalism is produced, both commercial and cultural. Looking at arguments about fake news published in news reports, columns, letters to editors, and advertisements in major metropolitan papers between 1891 and 1919, we recover the particular ways journalists came to define the problem of fake news, arguing that its emergence as a discursive object offered opportunities for conceiving of and articulating practicable responses across the industry. For contemporary practitioners, scholars, and commentators alike, this means that clearly defining and responding to the problem of fake news in ways that are both critical and contextual offer a means for recovering agency in the face of this crisis.
As journalistic work has become increasingly precarious in recent decades, exposure to risk – tha... more As journalistic work has become increasingly precarious in recent decades, exposure to risk – that is, true bodily harm – has become a normalized condition for those reporting from conflict zones. This article considers the political economy of risk, paying particular attention to the ways it has been constructed as a desirable and manageable condition for various classes of news workers. The burden of risk is distributed unequally across staff reporters, freelancers, and non-Western local journalists of all stripes, and a persistent discourse of witnessing obscures both these inequities and the structural conditions that allow news organizations to profit from an increased assumption of individual risk. As structural conditions, individual mitigations, and practices of textual commodification are considered and critiqued, the article concludes by identifying specific strategies that push beyond an economic logic, and thus reassert the cultural and political value of conflict and war reporting as a practice that merits protection, regardless of who produces it. Such a critique focuses on developing the discursive tools that allow journalists and outside observers alike to ask 'who should bear the costs of witnessing?'
As US news organizations have faced twin crises in funding and authority in recent years, innovation has become a key concept and ideal driving many interventions aimed at saving journalism. Often, ahistorically and uncritically deployed notions of innovation elide questions of digital journalism’s democratic aspirations in favor of market-oriented solutions. To critically examine the discourse around innovation, this article interrogates documents produced by think tanks and non-profit institutes researching the future of journalism: the Knight Foundation, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, Harvard’s Nieman Foundation, and the Shorenstein Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, among others. A post-industrial vision for journalism emerges with an overriding and celebratory focus on innovation. We argue that this discourse marginalizes normative concerns about journalism’s democratic purpose and rests on an entrepreneurial logic that seeks to dictate digital journalism’s broader public virtues.
Scholars who use textual approaches to study news often blend theoretical perspectives in their w... more Scholars who use textual approaches to study news often blend theoretical perspectives in their work, asking some combination of questions about how news narratives function culturally, how news narratives are produced, and how news narratives are situated epistemologically. These perspectives often lead to compelling insights, and this article argues that a more fully fleshed-out approach to genre in journalism studies offers a robust means for contextualizing a wide array of theoretical concerns. Methodologically, attention to the textual conventions of a genre helps scholars attend to news narratives as both the products of standardized journalistic routines and evidence of broader cultural forces at play, cultural forces that rely upon journalism’s implicit authority over the truth. This article lays out guidelines for performing genre analysis while also offering examples for potential future studies.
As devices become a more visible and integral part of media practice, it is important for researc... more As devices become a more visible and integral part of media practice, it is important for researchers and scholars to attend to the ways in which philosophies, professional discourses, and technical limits structure the ways these technologies are deployed. The 35mm camera is a technological waypoint between earlier large format cameras and contemporary digital photography, and offers a useful historical example for interrogating the relationship between seemingly inert technical operations and journalism’s modes of meaning production. To that end, this paper offers a theoretical perspective for interrogating the 35mm camera through the lens of Latour, with the aim of developing a schema for integrating devices into the cultural study of media and communication.
This paper presents a case study of the possibilities of slow photojournalism. Over the past deca... more This paper presents a case study of the possibilities of slow photojournalism. Over the past decade, award-winning photojournalist David Burnett has used a 60-year-old Speed Graphic film camera to document US political events, several Olympic Games, and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, among other projects. His photographs reveal a significantly different aesthetic from contemporary photojournalism and he is celebrated for the perspective his analog photographs offer. This analysis is based on two points of examination: first, a textual analysis of articles and videos discussing the work; and second, a semiotic analysis of the imagery. The examination suggests Burnett’s photo aesthetic signifies a longing for an imagined analog, journalistic utopia of yore, where individual journalists had the time and freedom to put care and attention into their work.
When The New Republic owner and Facebook founder Chris Hughes replaced the magazine’s top editors... more When The New Republic owner and Facebook founder Chris Hughes replaced the magazine’s top editors in December 2014, it set off a round of vociferous commentary declaring “The Death of The New Republic.” Portrayed as a conflict between journalistic tradition and Silicon Valley values, changes at the magazine crystallized lingering anxieties about the future of journalism and its relationship to the demands of the market. This article examines commentary about changes at the magazine through the lens of metajournalistic discourse, arguing that the discourses analyzed established the means by which structural conditions and philosophical challenges in the journalism industry were rendered sensible to the broader public. Though acts of personalized blame and schadenfreude at the publication’s supposed demise characterized much of the discourse, other texts worked to clarify the stakes in the conflict, ultimately creating the terms by which the conflict could be made sense of and its consequence articulated to the broader field of journalism.
KEYWORDS: future of journalism; journalism and technology industries; journalism studies; metajournalistic discourse; The New Republic
Digitization has resulted in great uncertainty for journalism, leading to disruption of business ... more Digitization has resulted in great uncertainty for journalism, leading to disruption of business models, revenue streams, media distinctions, and production practices. This uncertainty has led to many articles, reports, blog posts, and general commentary discussing the future of both journalism and the skills required by journalists to succeed in this environment. This essay analyzes these discourses, focusing specifically on the nature of technology as the sole determiner of journalism’s future, with interventions aimed at journalism education and the structure of newswork. An idealized notion of the technologically adept journalist, ready to usher in digital stability, emerges as the object of these debates and, thanks in large part to the limited scope and ahistorical character of digital discourse, obscures more persistent, systemic critiques of technology and journalism.
Culture in Conversation: A Critical and Cultural Studies Roundtable, Aug 2013
A discussion of process and academic discourse, written to commemorate the launch of interdiscipl... more A discussion of process and academic discourse, written to commemorate the launch of interdisciplinary cultural studies website Culture in Conversation.
The November 2008 attacks on Mumbai stand as a key moment in understanding how liberalized Wester... more The November 2008 attacks on Mumbai stand as a key moment in understanding how liberalized Western values discursively construct the terms through which acts of terror may be understood. Rooted in the work of Foucault, this article examines newspaper coverage of the 2008 attacks on Mumbai from the Times of India, Indian Express, and Daily News and Analysis India. Journalistic narratives situated local values and identities inside a discursive structure that construed Mumbai as a victim of a new type of global terror whose threat can be stemmed only through America-centric policies of perpetual militarism. This paper argues that a critical analysis of the discourses surrounding terrorism begets an understanding of the terms that not only construct the attacks themselves, but also render sensible possible reactions to the attacks, even as Western values appear amid news texts published in domestic Indian outlets.
This essay posits American journalism as a particular realm of public knowledge production, infle... more This essay posits American journalism as a particular realm of public knowledge production, inflected with its own professional practices as well as the way in which those practices subjugate technologies of representation. Taking the Arab Spring of 2011 as a case study in journalistic knowledge production, this article analyzes three epistemological conditions underscoring the Arab Spring’s development as an object of knowledge: the use of social media tools within the practice of journalism, the representational authority of the individual reporter, and the articulation of journalistic knowledge to broader institutions of liberal democratic power. While these are by no means the only possible themes of investigation, by looking at how journalistic practices rendered the Arab Spring sensible and worthy of public consideration, this essay hopes to reveal them as temporally and technologically contingent, but also linked to the values of liberal democracy that undergird journalism’s role in American public life.
Convergence; Special Issue on New Media, Global Activism, and Politics, Nov 2014
This article considers the ways in which practices of digital representation were deployed in the... more This article considers the ways in which practices of digital representation were deployed in the Occupy Wall Street movement, arguing that acts of self-representation render intelligible not just the politics of a movement like Occupy Wall Street, but also make sensible the relations of power such projects are immersed within. Building upon the notion that the specific power of the movement was exercised via a situated understanding of representation, this essay investigates how a digitally mediated sensibility made the broader critiques at the core of the Occupy movement not only intelligible to those inside and outside the movement, but also offered a mode of subject constitution that pushed against liberal notions of political subjectivity.
The point of a genealogical project is to tease out the historically rooted forces that produce r... more The point of a genealogical project is to tease out the historically rooted forces that produce received objects of knowledge. As a crucial part in building a critical interpretation, history becomes a method for tracing the contingent and contested intellectual, political, and cultural practices that create seemingly fixed objects of knowledge. In the following argument, I would like to posit that a genealogical approach to journalism's historical record treats theory not as an inert noun in opposition to history, but as a verb, a rigorous process reliant on historical evidence to form an interpretation about the broader relations of power and, in the case of journalism, public knowledge production. Historically archived materials, then, exist as the documentary evidence of power at work, and reveal on their surface and conditions of production the discourses and practices that give intelligible form to the objects of received knowledge.
During the Vietnam War, American planes dropped more bombs on Cambodia than had fallen in all of ... more During the Vietnam War, American planes dropped more bombs on Cambodia than had fallen in all of Europe during World War II. The event marks a key moment in the secretive expansion of U.S. military power, and this article looks at how mainstream journalism helped create the discursive conditions that abetted this expansion. After an explication of the historical and theoretical rationales for studying the relation between journalism and U.S. military power, this article analyzes Time magazine's coverage of Cambodia from 1969 to 1973 and finds that the American press at the time was not discursively configured to critique the U.S. military-diplomatic apparatus. The article analyzes the depiction of Cambodia as a theater of war and argues that most critiques of the bombing were limited to President Richard Nixon's quality of character, providing a locus that prevented more systemic critiques from emerging.
This paper argues that Sri Lankan pop star M.I.A. forms an ideal site for the textual study of gl... more This paper argues that Sri Lankan pop star M.I.A. forms an ideal site for the textual study of globalized identity, particularly amid discourses of state power, terrorism, and violence. Rooted in the literature of media and terrorism and grounded in post-colonial theories of hybridization, this study analyzes M.I.A. and her music as globalized media objects, looking at how they use hip-hop as a cultural form to aesthetically engage with discourse of violence in order to launch a critique of state power. The factors that enable this critique (globalized media systems, technologies, and cultural forms) help to create a discursive position from within popular culture where new forms of critique can be enunciated and popularized.
Travel journalism has long had an unsteady relationship with both travel
writing and the journali... more Travel journalism has long had an unsteady relationship with both travel writing and the journalism industry. As an industrialized form of writing, it has often been derided as never reaching the literary ambitions of travelogues written by Jack London, Evelyn Waugh, or Joseph Conrad, to name a few. As a form of journalism, travel journalism has long been derided as less serious, intended for consumers of frivolous experiences. The distinction between travel writing as a form of either “high” or “middle-brow” literary culture and travel journalism as disposable mass culture is not always a useful one. Concerns over representation and ethical engagement with cultural others provide a rich ground of postcolonial critique, regardless of the economic or institutional arrangements that presage the production of travel texts.
Compounded with an explosion of digital content and the fact that the economic sustainability of journalism in North America and certain parts of Western Europe appears to be in perpetual crisis, changes in travel journalism’s industrial structure portend changes in the way in which the broader world is represented. As major news organizations close foreign reporting bureaus, more international news content takes the form of travel writing and reporting, often subsidized by the tourism industry.
While the understanding of travel journalism as a representational prac- tice implicated in the spread of tourism as a consumption practice merits critical attention, there is also the potential to consider travel journalism, with its ostensible ethical commitment to accuracy and truth, as a form of representation that complicates the discursive construction of foreign bodies and locales as existing for the consumption of interested travelers. Furthermore, many of the digital changes disrupting journalism have led to a seeming explosion of voices within travel journalism, as amateur writers, local guides, environmental activists, and other nonprofessionals take the reins of representation. To that end, this chapter traces the impact that new media technologies have on the travel journalism industry, with a specific focus on the concerns of post-colonial theory and sense of global flattening abetted by the digital.
Situating their article in the field of Transcultural Media Studies, the authors adopt a perspect... more Situating their article in the field of Transcultural Media Studies, the authors adopt a perspective that investigates globalized modes of meaning-making alongside economic modes of international media production and distribution. The essay argues that material, semiotic, historical, geographic and political tensions are often given intelligible form through the production of transcultural media products that eclipse traditional global/local framings of international media and offer modes of expression that reveal hybridized, postcolonial identities existing within a mode of global exchange. Drawing on literatures of globalization and postcolonial media criticism as well as concepts of subjectivity, the authors theorize their concept of transcultural subjectivity, which they then illustrate by means of a case study of how journalist and Google executive Wael Ghonim became one of the central figures in the international media representations of the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt. The nuances and contradictions within these representations illustrate that a transcultural understanding of media subjectivity requires attention and adherence to the conditions that such mediated figures as Wael Ghonim emerge in.
Dark tourism, as an established form of tourism, has been implicated by scholars in the commodifi... more Dark tourism, as an established form of tourism, has been implicated by scholars in the commodification of sites that relate to disaster, tragedy, and death. This chapter reviews the literature surrounding dark tourism, recovering a tension between commercialization and cultural significance in both dark sites and dark spectators. Cambodian history is filled with sites of recent atrocity, but dark tourism has offered an economic boon to the country, expanding the middle class. As a case study, this chapter introduces the travel discourses surrounding Cambodia’s Tuol Sleng genocide museum and argues that dark sites form from the tensions between acts of commodification and practices of historical reverence. Travel journalism, while not resolving these tensions, offers a style of engagement for negotiating them discursively.
A collection of interviews with leading digital scholars on the development of digital storytelli... more A collection of interviews with leading digital scholars on the development of digital storytelling.
This report examines the relationship between the health of a local news ecosystem and the precar... more This report examines the relationship between the health of a local news ecosystem and the precarity felt by individual news workers. We followed a two-fold analysis. First, we map out the media markets in Philadelphia and Cincinnati, two post-industrial cities with comparable histories of deindustrialization and population decline that have seen civic resources invested in technology and culture sectors, aimed at attracting young, college-educated people back into the cities. We identify trends in each market, as well as the major media institutions with the goal of identifying the specific opportunities and conditions our interview respondents navigate. Second, we interview early career journalists in both cities, who have worked in Cincinnati or Philadelphia for between two and 10 years, what we call the “postcrisis” generation. They came from a mix of organizations: legacy newspapers, radio, and television stations, public and commercial media, as well as a range of digital startups funded with both private and philanthropic dollars. The interviews illustrate the ways in which individuals make sense of the conditions that surround them, the strategies they use to navigate those conditions, and the decisions they make, or, in many cases, feel like they have no choice but to make. The report concludes with recommendations, tangible and specific, for funders, the news industry, journalism schools, and students and early-career journalists.
This research was co-funded by the Media, Inequality and Change Center (MIC) and the Center for Media at Risk as part of a series on the future of journalism.
International Center of Photography Perspectives., May 19, 2015
As the smartphone camera sits at the center of modern protest movements, the following essay expl... more As the smartphone camera sits at the center of modern protest movements, the following essay explores the power relationships that extend from the device's circuitry and drive its cultural deployment.
The Mumbai attacks are an important moment for the study of global terror, as the methods, motive... more The Mumbai attacks are an important moment for the study of global terror, as the methods, motives, and coverage of the attacks marked changes in how international terrorism was represented. Recently published in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, my essay attempts to show how Western interests, through news reports published in Indian outlets, defined the popular terms for understanding both terrorism and reactions to it. Articles in The Times of India, Indian Express, and Daily News and Analysis created a context constructing Indian institutions, government officials, and civilians as reliant upon Western power to formulate a reaction to the attacks. Representations of Mumbai moved between general categories of victim and battle site; the city often became a character in the story, standing in for the human suffering felt by the victims of the violence. At other times, it symbolized the luxury historically associated with the city, taking on the character as an exoticized other when seen through the eyes of Westerners who appear in the news coverage. Throughout the coverage, an American-centric perspective emerges. Through this perspective, the significance of the attacks and possible reactions were constructed.
Amid the social and political upheavals of recent years, the cell phone camera has gained a parti... more Amid the social and political upheavals of recent years, the cell phone camera has gained a particular kind of social agency. For instance, during the Arab spring protests of 2011, commentators in academia and the mainstream media argued that these devices offered a new form of social organization that presaged democratic mobilization and governance. Elsewhere, encamped in public parks, Occupy Wall Street protesters used cell phone cameras to document the movement and its politics, as well as key moments of conflict between the police and protesters.
However, as time passed and revelations about the U.S. government’s surveillance across mobile devices were revealed, popular commentary also began to construct the cell phone camera as a site of compromised potential, where the techniques of government control took an even more granular form.
The popular consensus’ shift away from the cell phone camera as completely emancipatory device reveals a key analytic problematic often encountered in the cultural studies of communication devices: they are either inscribed within the overdetermining forces of late capitalism or beacons pointing toward a new politics of possibility. In order to escape this analytic split rooted in techno-optimism and pessimism, this project puts forth a line of analysis that allows critical scholars to begin to analyze the cell phone camera (and other communication devices) as containing specific technological and cultural affordances. In order to do so, I propose a theoretical schema that posits the cell phone camera as embedded within contemporary social relations, with a specific agency that emerges from the productive tension between its technological capability and the discursive regimes that make sense of the device and the images it is used to produce.
This essay turns to Bruno Latour and Felix Guattari in order to put forth a notion of journalism ... more This essay turns to Bruno Latour and Felix Guattari in order to put forth a notion of journalism as a realm of public knowledge production where practices and technologies of representation grant events, issues, and phenomena a perceptible form.
This essay begins by establishing, through Latour, journalism as a realm of practice where individual actors and tools of perception bring certain objects of knowledge into the realm of public consideration. In this context, Latour’s books, particularly The Politics of Nature, Making Things Public, and An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, offer a touchstone for understanding how journalism’s professional practices echo the methods of science, articulating seemingly stable objects of knowledge onto the broader realm of political deliberation through its own epistemological authority. In short, objects of journalistic knowledge emerge when established professional codes (i.e. ethics, rules for sourcing, verification) interact with tools of representation (i.e. cameras, twitter feeds, data visualization) in order to create credible, newsworthy and stable “stories.”
While Latour helps establish an understanding of journalism as a field of knowledge production abetted by specific tools, the totalizing nature of his theories may leave little room for understanding the role of the individual actant. This essay then turns to Felix Guattari, whose later work shares some of Latour’s concerns, but also offers a way of conceiving a technologically mediated subjectivity whereby the individual exists amid a field of objects and is capable of articulating new objects of knowledge from this seemingly fixed configuration. As a practical example, a revision of Latour informed by Gauttari offers a way of understanding how digital objects (i.e. Wikileaks documents, Occupy Wall Street videos, Tweets from Tahrir Square) have created a mode of sourcing that shifts the materiality of newsgathering as well as journalists’ and news institutions’ deeper claims to epistemological authority.
This essay considers the role of space in global media studies, offering the term dispersion as a... more This essay considers the role of space in global media studies, offering the term dispersion as a conceptual category for dealing with the way media products spread that does not limit communication to a process dependent upon global forces. Instead, scholars need a conceptual vocabulary sensitive to scale in media processes that accounts for the conditions under which media practices and processes spread. To illustrate, three brief cases are discussed.
(With Amy Sindik, Central Michigan University) As the digital divide persists, our research exami... more (With Amy Sindik, Central Michigan University) As the digital divide persists, our research examines the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) role in establishing media regulation in the public interest. Traditionally considered a weak, easily captured agency due to its lack of pricing powers, the FCC displays a dynamic relationship with the industries it regulates, abetted by sparse guidance from Congress. Backlash exists, but attempts to involve the public in the decision-making process through ex parte comments and public hearings are considered ineffective. This research focuses on the debates surrounding the National Broadband Plan, the Connect America Fund, and net neutrality as recent advocacy moments dealing with aspects of the digital divide, examining the way in which the “public interest” is articulated within the regulatory process. It is our contention that regulatory capture does not fully explain the FCC’s shortcomings. Instead, a more actionable definition of the “public interest” is needed to presage policy reform.
In order to understand how devices like the 35mm camera become an extension of journalism’s publi... more In order to understand how devices like the 35mm camera become an extension of journalism’s public epistemology, this essay proceeds in two parts. First, it puts forth a theoretical and methodological argument for looking at devices as social and cultural relations made durable (Latour, 1991). Second, this paper lays out a provisional means for interrogating the camera, looking at technical specifications, patents, training and educational materials, and photographers’ writings on photography as evidence of the discursive field the camera is immersed within. By using the 35mm camera as an example to explicate the relationship between technology, news images, and the production of truth, I hope to show that new technologies enter into a field of relations that establish epistemological standards, and that though new technologies may disrupt existing practices, these standards offer a means for orienting changed practices.
Distance, education, and access are but some of the obstacles that scholars and critics claim imp... more Distance, education, and access are but some of the obstacles that scholars and critics claim impede perfect democracy. At the turn of the century, John Dewey lauded the emerging mass communication technologies as mechanisms that would bring the country closer together and encourage the rational spread of ideas and plant the seeds for a better democracy. Yet, as Czitrom (1989) shows, Dewey's ideals fell before the capitalization and corporatizing of the mass media (142). Still, the longevity of Dewey's insight is his greatest strength, and with the propagation of the Internet, scholars can again ask some of the same questions Dewey attempted tackle, namely, how can this technology be used to strengthen democratic ideals?
As the lens communications theory moves into the developing and postcolonial world, we have to co... more As the lens communications theory moves into the developing and postcolonial world, we have to contend with the problems of analysis afforded by a vocabulary inflected with the problems, history, culture, and concerns of the West. Yet, as former colonies enter into the realm of global trade and as corporate practice and the machinations of capital become more global, there is an impetus to understand how the practices of culture are influenced by these phenomena and forces.
Contemporary media reformers will celebrate this book for making the case that the current moment... more Contemporary media reformers will celebrate this book for making the case that the current moment offers an opportunity similar to the battles of the 1940s and that, given courage and persistence, policy change is possible. For students and scholars of media history, though, there is a different and subtler lesson to be learned, specifically about the nature of critique. By looking at moments of disjuncture and debate, we can see how the discursive conditions that inscribe our present came to be, and that by putting a name to these limits, paradigms, and ideologies, we may show others where the possible ways out may lead.
As social media become de rigeur in undergraduate media and communication programs, a focus on in... more As social media become de rigeur in undergraduate media and communication programs, a focus on instrumental use has tended to eclipse more rigorous analyses of the power relations digital platforms reify, disrupt, or reconfigure. Despite some notable alternatives, pedagogical approaches to social media have tended to focus on the more programmatic aspects of its use, often ignoring contextual perspectives that give meaning to practice. Despite a wealth of critical media and communication studies readers, those seeking to teach alternative approaches to social media have been left adrift without an anchoring text.
The goal of this course is to help you become a more informed producer, consumer, and/or research... more The goal of this course is to help you become a more informed producer, consumer, and/or researcher of news media by exploring the content, purposes, and practices of journalism. To this end, we will deal primarily, but not exclusively, with American journalism and the particular social and historical context it operates within.
Course readings and discussions will explore the social and normative value of journalism in a democratic society and equip you with the tools to evaluate and critique American media in light of these values. We explore the relationship between journalism and other institutions, as well as the structural, professional, and technological problems facing contemporary journalists. This course is evenly split between the field’s foundational values and the ongoing “crisis” of journalism – i.e., changes wrought by shifting technologies and declining revenues.
The institutional discourses of US journalism display both an ever present sense of crisis and a ... more The institutional discourses of US journalism display both an ever present sense of crisis and a persistent nostalgia for a mythic golden age when the news was better made and better respected by the public. This article examines discussions hosted by the American Society of Newspaper Editors between 1986 and 2000, what we call ‘the pre-Internet era’, as a site of discursive constitution and relative stability in the news industry. As various actors inside the news industry utilize both nostalgia and crisis as common representational strategies, these discourses circulate and propagate a sense-making regime that is both precise and flexible in its deployment, and thus, helps journalism cohere as a field. Specific discussions around the First Amendment, journalistic identities, and business issues all provide fertile ground for challenging and reaffirming journalism’s binding values, and reveal larger structures of power around who has the authority to both describe threats to journalism and prescribe possible solutions.
As technology chief executive officers have become public figures, their personae operate as loci... more As technology chief executive officers have become public figures, their personae operate as loci for journalistic discourse about the intersection of moral responsibilities, regulation, and political-economic power of the tech industry. They possess a power often construed as beyond the reach of politics or civil society to address. This study considers how the ubiquity of tech power has become a kind of common sense in journalistic discourse, specifically looking at news, commentary, and analysis that has circulated around Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg since 2016, arguing that even as critiques of Zuckerberg’s moral fitness and leadership capacity proliferate, they construct the epistemic bounds within which tech industry power over American public life is understood as legitimate, even as journalists and commentators question certain executives’ ability to wield the tech industry’s infrastructural and cultural power.
Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism, Jan 27, 2022
This article considers how reporting about work during the COVID-19 pandemic operated as a field ... more This article considers how reporting about work during the COVID-19 pandemic operated as a field of discourse that challenged the ideological workings of neoliberalism. By documenting the risks and stresses workers of all classes faced during the first year of the pandemic, the reporting began to question neoliberal capitalism as socially unsustainable. Drawing on a corpus of 151 long-form articles and commentary, we show how journalistic discourse structured relationships between different classes of workers and implicated institutions for failing to properly mitigate the risks associated with COVID-19, even though the discourse largely centered on professionals working from home. As the reporting substantiated the precarities revealed by the pandemic as social facts, it challenged presumptions that undergird neoliberal ideologies, though it remains to be seen whether journalism will discursively re-center neoliberal logics in the wake of the pandemic.
This article considers how reporting about work during the COVID-19 pandemic operated as a field ... more This article considers how reporting about work during the COVID-19 pandemic operated as a field of discourse that challenged the ideological workings of neoliberalism. By documenting the risks and stresses workers of all classes faced during the first year of the pandemic, the reporting began to question neoliberal capitalism as socially unsustainable. Drawing on a corpus of 151 long-form articles and commentary, we show how journalistic discourse structured relationships between different classes of workers and implicated institutions for failing to properly mitigate the risks associated with COVID-19, even though the discourse largely centered on professionals working from home. As the reporting substantiated the precarities revealed by the pandemic as social facts, it challenged presumptions that undergird neoliberal ideologies, though it remains to be seen whether journalism will discursively re-center neoliberal logics in the wake of the pandemic.
What makes digital storytelling different than other received forms of storytelling? There are ma... more What makes digital storytelling different than other received forms of storytelling? There are many forms of digital storytelling. Some very much exist, but receive little theoretical attention, such as YouTube narratives or the mostly autobiographical stories that people exchange through social media. Others receive lots of attention from literary scholars, but represent-at best-marginal forms of storytelling, such as hypertext, remixes, and the experimental texts that one finds on the Electronic Literature Organization website. Still others form the subject of endless theorization and experimentation, but do not yet exist, such as holodeck types of narratives-highly interactive narratives with plots generated in real time by the system as a response to the user's actions. The common feature of all these examples is that they all use digital technology as a medium, but they use it in many different ways, which correspond to the various conceptions of medium: as means of transmission (as does fan fiction), as means of expression (as do video game narratives), and as means of production (as do the noninteractive multimedia narratives produced in the workshops of the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley). So, I can only give an obvious answer to your question: What's different is that digital storytelling uses computers in one way or another. But I assume that it is when it uses the digital as means of expression that one can speak of digital storytelling as something truly different from other received forms. Admittedly, digital is a loose term that comes with some restrictive assumptions. With that being said, what encompasses the digital for you, and what particular affordances does it offer? My answer to the preceding question partially answers this one, but let me provide a more precise list of the possible manifestations of digital narrative: social media and blog stories, computer-dependent literary
The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Travel Writing, 2017
Travel journalism has long had an unsteady relationship with both travel writing and the journali... more Travel journalism has long had an unsteady relationship with both travel writing and the journalism industry. As an industrialized form of writing, it has often been derided as never reaching the literary ambitions of travelogues written by Jack London, Evelyn Waugh, or Joseph Conrad, to name a few. As a form of journalism, travel journalism has long been derided as less serious, intended for consumers of frivolous experiences. The distinction between travel writing as a form of either “high” or “middle-brow” literary culture and travel journalism as disposable mass culture is not always a useful one. Concerns over representation and ethical engagement with cultural others provide a rich ground of postcolonial critique, regardless of the economic or institutional arrangements that presage the production of travel texts. Compounded with an explosion of digital content and the fact that the economic sustainability of journalism in North America and certain parts of Western Europe appears to be in perpetual crisis, changes in travel journalism’s industrial structure portend changes in the way in which the broader world is represented. As major news organizations close foreign reporting bureaus, more international news content takes the form of travel writing and reporting, often subsidized by the tourism industry. While the understanding of travel journalism as a representational prac- tice implicated in the spread of tourism as a consumption practice merits critical attention, there is also the potential to consider travel journalism, with its ostensible ethical commitment to accuracy and truth, as a form of representation that complicates the discursive construction of foreign bodies and locales as existing for the consumption of interested travelers. Furthermore, many of the digital changes disrupting journalism have led to a seeming explosion of voices within travel journalism, as amateur writers, local guides, environmental activists, and other nonprofessionals take the reins of representation. To that end, this chapter traces the impact that new media technologies have on the travel journalism industry, with a specific focus on the concerns of post-colonial theory and sense of global flattening abetted by the digital.
ABSTRACT The past half-decade has seen the rise of venture philanthropy in the journalism industr... more ABSTRACT The past half-decade has seen the rise of venture philanthropy in the journalism industry, a kind of charitable giving often driven by tech industry actors Google and Facebook working through intermediary institutions such as the Knight Foundation and the American Journalism Project. As an ideological project, this intervention symbolizes both a significant economic and cultural investment. This paper interrogates how venture philanthropists and their investments have been made sense of via metajournalistic discourse. Through a critical discourse analysis of reporting and commentary about venture philanthropy, we find that professional discussions are often notably insular, framing journalism’s public values in market-centric terms and establishing funders as transformative figures intervening in a journalistic culture ill-prepared to adapt to the needs of the market. The analysis shows how venture philanthropy works as a site of tech industry influence and ideology in the field of journalism, primarily by demonstrating how the discourse construes publicly focused journalism as existing in part thanks to the largesse and beneficence of the tech companies who structure and extract value from the digital public sphere.
This article argues that the discourses and techniques of political journalism worked to make Whi... more This article argues that the discourses and techniques of political journalism worked to make White working class identity sensible as an assumed norm in American politics during the 2016 US presidential campaign. Throughout the campaign, many news organizations sent journalists to small towns and various Donald Trump rallies to understand what was driving a burbling resentment among his base of White working class voters, and by interrogating the explanatory and long-form reporting produced by these journalists, we can come to understand how the White working class began to cohere as a particular political subjectivity. By documenting the economic decline and social peril borne from neoliberal policies, acts of journalism substantiate the conditions that animate White working class identity and legitimate its resentments. However, that same journalism also failed to adequately deal with the consequences of policy and the way economic conditions and cultural identities reflexively c...
In the research and commentary around ‘fake news’, there has been growing attention to the way th... more In the research and commentary around ‘fake news’, there has been growing attention to the way the phrase evidences a growing field of technology industry critique, operating as a shorthand for understanding the nature of social media companies’ power over the public sphere. This article interrogates elite and popular discourses surrounding ‘fake news’, using the tools of critical discourse analysis to show how public commentary constitutes a discursive field that renders tech industry power intelligible by first defining the issue of fake news as a sociotechnical problem, then debating the infrastructural nature of platform companies’ social power. This article concludes that, as commentary moves beyond a focus on fake news and critiques of technology industries grow more complex, strains of elite discourse reveal productive constraints on tech power, articulating the conditions under which limits on that power are understood as legitimate.
This article argues that environmental citizenship, understood as sustainable forms of consumptio... more This article argues that environmental citizenship, understood as sustainable forms of consumption, is increasingly constructed through visual regimes of nostalgia for both pristine wilderness and an era of unfettered resource extraction. Drawing on the linkages between survey photography, popular constructions of nature, and nostalgia, it takes the Environmental Protection Agency’s Documerica and State of the Environment projects as opportunities to understand how depictions of the environment reinforce contemporary notions of sustainability. As the predominant discourse guiding environmentality, or the governance of our relationships with the non-human world, sustainability relies on scientific knowledges in order to harmonize economic growth, population health, and ecologies. To do so, sustainability draws on the power of media to encourage forms of consumption that might indefinitely perpetuate capitalist economies at the expense of the non-human world. Analysis of the images of...
The institutional discourses of US journalism display both an ever-present sense of crisis and a ... more The institutional discourses of US journalism display both an ever-present sense of crisis and a persistent nostalgia for a mythic golden age when the news was better made and better respected by the public. This article examines discussions hosted by the American Society of Newspaper Editors between 1986 and 2000, what we call ‘the pre-Internet era’, as a site of discursive constitution and relative stability in the news industry. As various actors inside the news industry utilize both nostalgia and crisis as common representational strategies, these discourses circulate and propagate a sense-making regime that is both precise and flexible in its deployment, and thus, helps journalism cohere as a field. Specific discussions around the First Amendment, journalistic identities, and business issues all provide fertile ground for challenging and reaffirming journalism’s binding values, and reveal larger structures of power around who has the authority to both describe threats to journa...
As journalistic work has become increasingly precarious in recent decades, exposure to risk – tha... more As journalistic work has become increasingly precarious in recent decades, exposure to risk – that is, true bodily harm – has become a normalized condition for those reporting from conflict zones. This article considers the political economy of risk, paying particular attention to the ways it has been constructed as a desirable and manageable condition for various classes of news workers. The burden of risk is distributed unequally across staff reporters, freelancers, and non-Western local journalists of all stripes, and a persistent discourse of witnessing obscures both these inequities and the structural conditions that allow news organizations to profit from an increased assumption of individual risk. As structural conditions, individual mitigations, and practices of textual commodification are considered and critiqued, the article concludes by identifying specific strategies that push beyond an economic logic, and thus reassert the cultural and political value of conflict and wa...
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 2014
This article considers the ways in which practices of digital representation were deployed in the... more This article considers the ways in which practices of digital representation were deployed in the Occupy Wall Street movement, arguing that acts of self-representation render intelligible not just the politics of a movement like Occupy Wall Street but also make sensible the relations of power such projects are immersed within. Building upon the notion that the specific power of the movement was exercised via a situated understanding of representation, this essay investigates how a digitally mediated sensibility made the broader critiques at the core of the Occupy movement not only intelligible to those inside and outside the movement but also offered a mode of subject constitution that pushed against liberal notions of political subjectivity.
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Books by Brian Creech
Surveying a broad field of discourse and research into journalism education, Creech shows how public ideals, market logics and industry concerns have come to animate discussions about digital journalism education and journalism’s future, and how academic structures and cultures are positioned as a key obstacle to attaining that future. The book examines labor conditions, critiques of journalism education as an institution, and curricular change, with reference to how conversations around race, fake news, and digital infrastructures impact the field. Creech argues for a critical pedagogy of journalism education, one that pushes beyond jobs training and instead is centred around a commitment to public and civic value via a liberal arts tradition made practicable for the digital age.
This insightful book is vital reading for journalism educators and scholars, as well as journalists and news executives, education scholars, and program officers and decision-makers at journalism-adjacent foundations and think tanks.
Articles by Brian Creech
centered the role journalistic objectivity has played in sustaining
various inequities in American society. Amid these challenges,
newsroom leaders, executives, and owners have spoken publicly
about a need to defend the profession’s traditions, especially a
commitment to objectivity and independence. Through a textual
analysis of arguments and statements from top editors and
publishers defending values like objectivity and independence,
this study considers how a form of metajournalistic discourse has
emerged from journalism’s managerial class that rhetorically and
ideologically moderates calls for cultural change from both inside
and outside the profession. As elite figures define threats to the
field—externally from rising authoritarianism and inwardly from a
generation questioning traditional values—they proffer a return
to independence, setting boundaries around critiques calling for
ethical and normative change, but also preserving an elite
insularity that has long been part of journalism’s professional
culture.
to the way the phrase evidences a growing field of technology industry critique,
operating as a shorthand for understanding the nature of social media companies’
power over the public sphere. This article interrogates elite and popular discourses
surrounding ‘fake news’, using the tools of critical discourse analysis to show how
public commentary constitutes a discursive field that renders tech industry power
intelligible by first defining the issue of fake news as a sociotechnical problem, then
debating the infrastructural nature of platform companies’ social power. This article
concludes that, as commentary moves beyond a focus on fake news and critiques of
technology industries grow more complex, strains of elite discourse reveal productive
constraints on tech power, articulating the conditions under which limits on that power
are understood as legitimate.
As US news organizations have faced twin crises in funding and authority in recent years, innovation has become a key concept and ideal driving many interventions aimed at saving journalism. Often, ahistorically and uncritically deployed notions of innovation elide questions of digital journalism’s democratic aspirations in favor of market-oriented solutions. To critically examine the discourse around innovation, this article interrogates documents produced by think tanks and non-profit institutes researching the future of journalism: the Knight Foundation, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, Harvard’s Nieman Foundation, and the Shorenstein Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, among others. A post-industrial vision for journalism emerges with an overriding and celebratory focus on innovation. We argue that this discourse marginalizes normative concerns about journalism’s democratic purpose and rests on an entrepreneurial logic that seeks to dictate digital journalism’s broader public virtues.
KEYWORDS: future of journalism; journalism and technology industries; journalism studies; metajournalistic discourse; The New Republic
Surveying a broad field of discourse and research into journalism education, Creech shows how public ideals, market logics and industry concerns have come to animate discussions about digital journalism education and journalism’s future, and how academic structures and cultures are positioned as a key obstacle to attaining that future. The book examines labor conditions, critiques of journalism education as an institution, and curricular change, with reference to how conversations around race, fake news, and digital infrastructures impact the field. Creech argues for a critical pedagogy of journalism education, one that pushes beyond jobs training and instead is centred around a commitment to public and civic value via a liberal arts tradition made practicable for the digital age.
This insightful book is vital reading for journalism educators and scholars, as well as journalists and news executives, education scholars, and program officers and decision-makers at journalism-adjacent foundations and think tanks.
centered the role journalistic objectivity has played in sustaining
various inequities in American society. Amid these challenges,
newsroom leaders, executives, and owners have spoken publicly
about a need to defend the profession’s traditions, especially a
commitment to objectivity and independence. Through a textual
analysis of arguments and statements from top editors and
publishers defending values like objectivity and independence,
this study considers how a form of metajournalistic discourse has
emerged from journalism’s managerial class that rhetorically and
ideologically moderates calls for cultural change from both inside
and outside the profession. As elite figures define threats to the
field—externally from rising authoritarianism and inwardly from a
generation questioning traditional values—they proffer a return
to independence, setting boundaries around critiques calling for
ethical and normative change, but also preserving an elite
insularity that has long been part of journalism’s professional
culture.
to the way the phrase evidences a growing field of technology industry critique,
operating as a shorthand for understanding the nature of social media companies’
power over the public sphere. This article interrogates elite and popular discourses
surrounding ‘fake news’, using the tools of critical discourse analysis to show how
public commentary constitutes a discursive field that renders tech industry power
intelligible by first defining the issue of fake news as a sociotechnical problem, then
debating the infrastructural nature of platform companies’ social power. This article
concludes that, as commentary moves beyond a focus on fake news and critiques of
technology industries grow more complex, strains of elite discourse reveal productive
constraints on tech power, articulating the conditions under which limits on that power
are understood as legitimate.
As US news organizations have faced twin crises in funding and authority in recent years, innovation has become a key concept and ideal driving many interventions aimed at saving journalism. Often, ahistorically and uncritically deployed notions of innovation elide questions of digital journalism’s democratic aspirations in favor of market-oriented solutions. To critically examine the discourse around innovation, this article interrogates documents produced by think tanks and non-profit institutes researching the future of journalism: the Knight Foundation, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, Harvard’s Nieman Foundation, and the Shorenstein Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, among others. A post-industrial vision for journalism emerges with an overriding and celebratory focus on innovation. We argue that this discourse marginalizes normative concerns about journalism’s democratic purpose and rests on an entrepreneurial logic that seeks to dictate digital journalism’s broader public virtues.
KEYWORDS: future of journalism; journalism and technology industries; journalism studies; metajournalistic discourse; The New Republic
writing and the journalism industry. As an industrialized form of writing, it
has often been derided as never reaching the literary ambitions of travelogues written by Jack London, Evelyn Waugh, or Joseph Conrad, to name a few. As a form of journalism, travel journalism has long been
derided as less serious, intended for consumers of frivolous experiences.
The distinction between travel writing as a form of either “high” or
“middle-brow” literary culture and travel journalism as disposable mass
culture is not always a useful one. Concerns over representation and ethical engagement with cultural others provide a rich ground of postcolonial critique, regardless of the economic or institutional arrangements that presage the production of travel texts.
Compounded with an explosion of digital content and the fact that the
economic sustainability of journalism in North America and certain parts
of Western Europe appears to be in perpetual crisis, changes in travel
journalism’s industrial structure portend changes in the way in which the
broader world is represented. As major news organizations close foreign
reporting bureaus, more international news content takes the form of travel
writing and reporting, often subsidized by the tourism industry.
While the understanding of travel journalism as a representational prac-
tice implicated in the spread of tourism as a consumption practice merits
critical attention, there is also the potential to consider travel journalism,
with its ostensible ethical commitment to accuracy and truth, as a form of
representation that complicates the discursive construction of foreign bodies and locales as existing for the consumption of interested travelers. Furthermore, many of the digital changes disrupting journalism have led to a seeming explosion of voices within travel journalism, as amateur writers,
local guides, environmental activists, and other nonprofessionals take the
reins of representation. To that end, this chapter traces the impact that new media technologies have on the travel journalism industry, with a specific focus on the concerns of post-colonial theory and sense of global flattening abetted by the digital.
Available here: http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc
This research was co-funded by the Media, Inequality and Change Center (MIC) and the Center for Media at Risk as part of a series on the future of journalism.
However, as time passed and revelations about the U.S. government’s surveillance across mobile devices were revealed, popular commentary also began to construct the cell phone camera as a site of compromised potential, where the techniques of government control took an even more granular form.
The popular consensus’ shift away from the cell phone camera as completely emancipatory device reveals a key analytic problematic often encountered in the cultural studies of communication devices: they are either inscribed within the overdetermining forces of late capitalism or beacons pointing toward a new politics of possibility. In order to escape this analytic split rooted in techno-optimism and pessimism, this project puts forth a line of analysis that allows critical scholars to begin to analyze the cell phone camera (and other communication devices) as containing specific technological and cultural affordances. In order to do so, I propose a theoretical schema that posits the cell phone camera as embedded within contemporary social relations, with a specific agency that emerges from the productive tension between its technological capability and the discursive regimes that make sense of the device and the images it is used to produce.
This essay begins by establishing, through Latour, journalism as a realm of practice where individual actors and tools of perception bring certain objects of knowledge into the realm of public consideration. In this context, Latour’s books, particularly The Politics of Nature, Making Things Public, and An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, offer a touchstone for understanding how journalism’s professional practices echo the methods of science, articulating seemingly stable objects of knowledge onto the broader realm of political deliberation through its own epistemological authority. In short, objects of journalistic knowledge emerge when established professional codes (i.e. ethics, rules for sourcing, verification) interact with tools of representation (i.e. cameras, twitter feeds, data visualization) in order to create credible, newsworthy and stable “stories.”
While Latour helps establish an understanding of journalism as a field of knowledge production abetted by specific tools, the totalizing nature of his theories may leave little room for understanding the role of the individual actant. This essay then turns to Felix Guattari, whose later work shares some of Latour’s concerns, but also offers a way of conceiving a technologically mediated subjectivity whereby the individual exists amid a field of objects and is capable of articulating new objects of knowledge from this seemingly fixed configuration. As a practical example, a revision of Latour informed by Gauttari offers a way of understanding how digital objects (i.e. Wikileaks documents, Occupy Wall Street videos, Tweets from Tahrir Square) have created a mode of sourcing that shifts the materiality of newsgathering as well as journalists’ and news institutions’ deeper claims to epistemological authority.
Course readings and discussions will explore the social and normative value of journalism in a democratic society and equip you with the tools to evaluate and critique American media in light of these values. We explore the relationship between journalism and other institutions, as well as the structural, professional, and technological problems facing contemporary journalists. This course is evenly split between the field’s foundational values and the ongoing “crisis” of journalism – i.e., changes wrought by shifting technologies and declining revenues.