There is a lot of good work that details the interaction of professional and new media. Generally, the professional press is believed to largely set the agenda for amateur or citizen new media outlets given their resources for original reporting. But there are numerous confounding factors. For one, it is not always clear what terms such as “professional,” “traditional,” “citizen,” or “amateur” even mean. The most trafficked political blogs, for instance, often explicitly coordinate messaging with elected and party officials. In general, there is research that suggests that elected officials and other bureaucratically credible actors set the agenda for public discourse as a whole. There is also a body of work that suggests that at extraordinary times, citizen journalism and blogs can set the professional agenda. Frankly, we just do not know enough yet about these new media producers to say how they interact with one another and the paths their content travels.
This is something you’ll be studying at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte in early September. How are you planning to do that research? What are you expecting to find?
An interdisciplinary team of researchers at UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the School of Information and Library Science are heading to the convention to conduct work at the media site for non-credentialed producers called the PPL. The convention is interesting because there is a shortage of scholarly work on conventions as sites for the production of public discourse. After violence spilled into the streets during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, the leaders of both parties decided that the drama of producing a nominee would play out in the voting booth. As a result, scholars have argued that the conventions have become anodyne and tightly scripted media events, denuded of political passion.
And yet, over the last decade networked media have opened the production of political discourse to an incredible range of new social actors, from social movements to ordinary citizens. The 2000 conventions launched the independent activist news platform IndyMedia and raised the question of who counted as a legitimate journalist. In 2004, in recognition of the growing resource base of partisan bloggers and in a challenge to professional news producers, the parties began formally credentialing their most fervent supporters. In 2008, the parties expanded their credentialing further, providing opportunities for a host of non-legacy media to cover the event, including bloggers, advocacy organizations, and new media journalistic outlets.
These dynamics suggest that parties, movements, partisans, and the professional press view conventions as important sites for public political communication. Despite this, very little is understood about how these actors interact to produce political discourse.
Our study will examine how parties, the professional press, and the new actors in the public sphere interact to produce narratives of the 2012 presidential election. We’ll be comparing differences in coverage between professional journalism organizations such as The New York Times and FOX News; blogs such as Daily Kos and FireDogLake; new media journalistic outlets such as The Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo, and allied Democratic interest groups such as labor unions and advocacy organizations. We will also conduct interviews with these producers to elicit how they understand their new media production and audiences. One of the great things about this research is that we are not sure what we are going to find, but we suspect that interaction among these various outlets, both in terms of content flows and coordination behind the scenes, is a large part of the story.
Although I am pleased by the admission that "we just do not know enough yet about these new media producers to say how they interact with one another and the paths their content travels," I am somewhat stunned that there is no concern over the looming government regulation of these very same new media producers.
I am not very smart and I saw it coming a decade ago.
Further, I am more than a little suspicious that a hunt for coordination will turn up -- coordination. Which strikes me as nothing more than fodder for the speech regulators and a terribly 20th c. concept in any case.
Sometimes there really is no story behind the story -- at least not one worth telling. And especially not one which presumes archaic motives and actors while strengthening antediluvian regulatory impulses.
#1 Posted by Jeff A. Taylor, CJR on Tue 24 Apr 2012 at 08:46 AM
Hey Jeff,
Thanks for weighing in.
I'm hoping Dan will look beyond just the ideological bloggers like the five who work for the John Locke Foundation in North Carolina and others who blog at Daily Kos. (Though I've seen real reporting on both.)
I was thinking more of the live streamers that took to the streets in New York with Occupy, in hopes of some eventual sponsorship or paid gig, or those who write for CLT Blog in Charlotte for the same purpose (as well as passion, as you mention in your linked post.)
I'd also hope that any government regulations on divulging blogger pay would first look at those who blog for 501(c)3s, which are getting tax breaks and calling themselves nonpartisan. IRS scrutiny on such organizations and their use of the word "nonpartisan" has also put obstacles in the way of new *news* nonprofits aiming to be nonpartisan in the traditional SPJ Ethics Code sense.
Of course, indie bloggers (and reporters!) still exist, and they go to the same conferences and support like-minded friends. That happens across the political spectrum. My hope is that the Kreiss research shows who's doing real *reporting* or coming up with new ideas, rather than just spinning off someone else's work with a great headline or spouting some talking points. We'll see what emerges.
Again, thanks for the comment.
#2 Posted by Andria Krewson, CJR on Tue 24 Apr 2012 at 09:35 PM