ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the evolving meanings and role of newsmaking and journalism, as well as the wider media landscapes and socio-technical environments in which they have been embedded. It seeks to provide a historically grounded and nuanced platform of concepts and ideas to help frame the more detailed analysis of contemporary developments in subsequent chapters. First, this chapter considers the role of different forms of news, especially
everyday and organised news, indicating how this book is primarily concerned with organised or professional news services. Second, it outlines the changing forms and roles of organised news in pre-modern (briefly) and in modern times, and third, it addresses the emergence of an orientation to ‘the public’ as an important feature, if not ‘god term’ (Carey, 2007: 12) for journalism and newsmaking in the modern era. Fourth, this chapter sets out to establish an initial conceptual frame to aid
understanding of the extent, forms and drivers of the flux and change in news media today, especially the role of technological innovations, such as the Internet, which feature prominently in recent analyses of newsmaking. This is an important, if tricky, theme because we live in ‘technology tempered times’ (Preston, 2001) and a culture which tends to favour technology-centred explanations of changes in journalism. Whilst it may be true that ‘the history of journalism is in many ways defined by technological change’ (Pavlik, 2000: 229), the precise role of technological innovation in shaping change in newsmaking is one of the least developed areas of journalism studies (Schudson, 2000; Boczkowski, 2004b). For example, many textbooks still tend to treat technological change in rather
simplistic if rigid fashion by framing the relevant issues in terms of whether its
presumed ‘effects’ on journalism or media cultures are deemed to be positive or negative. Whatever choices students make in response to such framing, they are directed towards a deterministic bind of erroneous assumptions that technology has autonomous or discrete powers to shape journalism or media culture. Such framing of the issues fails to consider the distinctions between causal or necessary relations and what may be contingent or coincidental relations between new technologies on the one hand and specific new developments in journalism on the other hand. These approaches ignore the long history of research rejecting such deterministic views of technological innovation, including that on the radical variability or flexibility of most new communication technologies when it comes to their application and use in specific sectors, social contexts, organisational or cultural settings. Like some others, we propose that analyses of journalism and newsmaking
have much to gain by engaging with the large body of recent research focused on the relations between technological and social change (Boczkowski, 2004b; Carey, 2005). For these reasons, this chapter advances a particular socio-technical model for understanding the co-evolution of technological and social change and applies it to the field of journalism and newsmaking. This enables a historically grounded and non-deterministic approach which also acknowledges how technological innovation may play a role in enabling or providing incentives for other patterns of change. This schema also identifies how the current cluster of digital media and information technologies is now poised to play a central role not merely in journalism, but also (for the first time in modern industrialism) in the overall patterns of socio-technical change. It also provides us with a conceptual platform for understanding the expanding scope of news-related activities and journalism in the modern era and which helps to inform our explorations of current trends in the following chapters. In sum, this chapter introduces theoretically and historically grounded ideas that serve to better inform the detailed investigations of the current trends and change factors in news and journalism to be addressed in the remainder of this book.
