ABSTRACT

The title of this introductory essay sounds like the title of a university seminar. Rightly so, since its authors are employed in the academy, and the academy is bound to question its objects of study or it can hardly claim to be studying them. Questioning professional journalism is thus the everyday activity of everyone involved in Journalism Studies. Today, however, journalism faces another line of altogether different questioners, this time from outside the academy. Advertisers, publishers, readers, viewers and listeners – and even journalists themselves – are all questioning journalism, wondering what it is for and asking whether its professional, paid-for incarnation provides anything that digital media users are unable to supply for free. This line of inquiry may have been initiated at the same time as ‘Web 2.0’, i.e.

around the turn of the twenty-first century, but at that time it was pencil thin. Since then the question mark hanging over journalism has been cross-hatched by a combination of cyclical advertising recession and fundamental economic downturn, with the added complication that each of these has now segued into the other, making it almost impossible to distinguish one cause from another’s effects. You know the score: we only know that the tally of journalism’s casualties (titles closed; publishing houses brought down; hacks no longer hunting in packs, but singly, for jobs) will be higher by the time you read this than it was when we wrote it. Questioning journalism has become much more than an academic exercise. In

today’s context, the hardest questions are framed by the turn of events outside the academy. Surely this should have some effect on those inside the academy and the way we go about studying journalism. If it was one thing to question the moral authority of professional journalism while its commercial viability looked assured, it must be another, lesser thing to kick at journalism when all its doors are open and unguarded. Now journalism is down, the academy will only confirm its irrelevance – and

there is no shortage of those looking for confirmation – if it carries on kicking in the same way that it did when journalism was on the up. On the other hand, while external events are combining to deconstruct journalism, Journalism Studies could distinguish itself by contributing to journalism’s reconstruction.

Instead of continuing its dog-bites-man routine (Not All Journalism Is Good – Shock! Horror!), perhaps the best outcome for the academy would be for academicians to make the most effective case for dogged, professional reporting. We certainly think so. In today’s context, the most pertinent part of critique,

we believe, is that which pertains to reconstruction: logical reconstruction of the historical development of journalism, undertaken in the attempt to show the logic of its future histories. Though we are not qualified to determine which version of journalism’s future will prevail, our book is an unreserved attempt to develop a version of Journalism Studies which supports what is best about journalism and plays some part in today’s struggle to ensure that journalism has a future. To this end, we reject the kind of negative labelling which the academy has

readily practised on journalism. There may have been a time and a place for something along such lines, but we think it is intellectually and morally wrong for Journalism Studies to stay within its established tramlines now that journalism has been bounced out of its own routines – almost to the point of being disestablished. Especially in today’s conditions, uncritical continuation of ‘critical thinking’ will add little more to the understanding of journalism’s past, still less to the prognosis for its future; moreover, it can only have a corrosive effect on the academy’s relationship with media and society. This does not mean that we find all journalism defensible. Some of it has been

truly culpable (such as the erstwhile role of the British press in legitimising state racism or its regular propaganda service in wartime), and it is the responsibility of Journalism Studies to make their own culpability comprehensible to journalists, i.e. to explain it in such a way that journalists can recognise themselves in the explanation. But this, too, is a responsibility that Journalism Studies has not often lived up to. All too often, Journalism Studies has talked past journalism rather than addressing it. Neither is it for Journalism Studies to address itself to the day-to-day require-

ments of commercial journalism or its public service counterpart. Even in the abstract it would be self-defeating for the academy to suspend judgement and turn itself into an industrial training provider; but in today’s circumstances this turn would be doubly disastrous. If we in the academy were to rehearse our students to perform for journalism as it was, we would be failing to prepare them for what now is. Equally, there is little point in drilling students in the established patterns of today’s industry, since they are not yet confirmed: at present, whatever may become the new pattern has barely begun to emerge from the disestablishment of old-style journalism.