MITCHELSTEIN - Most studies continue to apply existing lenses to look at new phenomena

Between tradition and change: A review of recent research on online news production 
Eugenia Mitchelstein and Pablo J. Boczkowski 
Journalism 2009; 10; 562 
DOI: 10.1177/1464884909106533 
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Abstract 


Online news media have become a key part of social, economic, and cultural life in many societies. Research about these media has grown dramatically, especially in the past few years, but there have been few reviews of this research and none of the most recent scholarship. 


This article reviews scholarship on online news production published since 2000. 


It examines research on five key topics: historical context and market environment, the process of innovation, alterations in journalistic practices, challenges to established professional dynamics, and the role of user-generated content. 


A tension between tradition and change emerges from this discussion and is evident at two levels. 


First, the world of practice seems to straddle the re-enactment of established forms and tinkering with alternative pathways. 


Second, the modes of inquiry oscillate between using existing concepts to look at new phenomena and taking advantage of these phenomena to rethink these concepts and come up with new ones. 


The article concludes by identifying shortcomings in the existing scholarship and suggesting avenues for future studies to overcome them. It suggests how scholarship on online news production could contribute to rethinking some of the fundamental building blocks of understanding communication and society in the contemporary media environment. 


Concluding remarks 


This article has discussed five key research streams about online news production since 2000: 
the historical context and market environment; the process of innovation; the role of professional dynamics; the modifi cations of journalistic practices; and the role of user-generated content. 


From this review, it becomes obvious that, as news producers re-enact journalism in the networked environment, they live out in their everyday practices a tension between tradition and change. 


This tension also characterizes scholarly endeavors; most studies continue to apply existing lenses to look at new phenomena, but the potential for theoretical renewal is becoming increasingly evident. 


The remainder of this section takes advantage of this discussion to reflect on avenues for future work in each of these streams and on the broader contributions that scholarship about online news production could make to media and society research. 


Historical matters have not figured prominently in the scholarship about online news production. 


This leaves a void in recording the evolution of this emerging area of editorial work. 
It also runs the risk of overemphasizing novelty and gives a sense of shallowness to the empirical findings and associated theoretical conclusions of many studies. 


It might overemphasize novelty by failing to recognize historical antecedents and evolutionary paths of contemporary practices. For instance, contemporary, user-authored content manifestations, such as blogs and citizen journalism, resonate with past forms of audience participation in content creation in other media and with various online precursors (Boczkowski, 2004a; Butsch, 2008; De Sola Pool, 1983; Douglas, 1987; Jenkins, 1992; Rheingold, 1994). 
This historical neglect, in turn, endows the findings of many studies with a kind of empirical and conceptual shallowness because they are unable to disentangle patterns of continuity from more discontinuous trends. 


The study of online news production would benefit greatly from more research on the similarities and differences between past and present, as well as longitudinal accounts of current developments. 


Studies of the market environment of online content production illuminate the role of profitability, business models, and the growing importance of advertising. However, absent from these considerations is an examination of the role that labor processes and conditions play in online news enterprises. 


In his study of organizations within the News Corporation, Marjoribanks (2000a, 2000b) shows that labor dynamics can play a critical part in the process of technological change. Future scholarship might examine how the composition of the off- and online journalistic labor market, the structuring of career paths, the various levels of unionization in different contexts, and labor regulations in various countries shape who gets to produce online news, how that production takes place, and what stories result from these dynamics. 


Studies about innovation have made contributions about the causes, dynamics, and consequences of technological change in online news production. 


However, two limitations of most of this scholarship are its relatively narrow focus on online news and the low level of attention it devotes to placing the empirical findings in the context of comparable processes in other industries. 


That is, making sense of the similarities and differences between innovation processes in online news and in other settings would help to ascertain what might be unique to the journalistic field and what might be shared across other domains of work. 


A recent example of the benefits of adopting a multi-area approach is Deuze’s (2007) account of changes in work practices across different creative and cultural industries. 


An extension of this approach outside the space of symbolic work could add depth and breadth to our understanding of online news. 


A comparative perspective, albeit of a different kind, could strengthen knowledge about online news production by contrasting practice and professional matters across countries and regions of the world. The review section of this article shows that studies of these matters have largely been about organizations and workers located in the USA. Moreover, research in other countries has ‘usually followed theoretical and methodological proposals as they evolved in the American Literature on the topic’ (Domingo, 2008b: 15). 


Recently, there have been accounts of phenomena taking place in other parts of the world. 


Although this is a positive trend, more could be done to compare whether issues of practice and professional dynamics vary across different locales and to explain the sources and patterns of variance. The burgeoning development of comparative analyses of news, media systems, and political communication (Esser and Pfetsch, 2004; Hallin and Mancini, 2004; Shoemaker and Cohen, 2006) illustrates the heuristic power of looking at phenomena across nations and regions. 


Studies about user-authored content have promoted an understanding of the factors that affect one of the most fundamental shifts in the architecture of contemporary media systems: the redrawing of the boundaries between the spheres of production and consumption. However, this stream of research has been limited, at least in part, by its overwhelming reliance on data gathered through surveys of contributors and content analysis of their contributions and by a shocking dearth of ethnographic and field research. 


The pioneering ethnographic accounts of journalistic work in the 1970s and 1980s helped to generate novel understandings of the practice and experience of content creation within newsrooms (Epstein, 1973; Fishman; 1980; Gans, 1980; Sigal, 1973; Tuchman, 1978). In the same way, complementary studies of the practices, interpretations, and experiences of bloggers, citizen journalists, and occasional forum contributors are needed to better grasp the processes and politics of distributed forms of content creation in the contemporary media environment. 


In addition to identifying possible avenues for future scholarship within already established areas of research about online news, we conclude by suggesting a more radical path for future work. Emerging areas of inquiry in media studies often develop from a desire to make sense of new phenomena. 


For the most part, studies about online journalism have been no different. 
They have focused on what seems to be distinctive about these phenomena in comparison with traditional media and how they might relate to established theoretical constructions or both. Thus, Deuze (2008: 199) notes that ‘the literature in the field of journalism studies is largely informed by the standards of research, education, routines, rituals, and practices set by print journalism.’ 


For instance, much has been written about interactivity and user-authored content or the contribution of the media to the public sphere (Habermas, 1989), or the categorization of journalists as gatekeepers (White, 1949). 


Although useful in mapping a new territory, this dominant stance falls short of using the emerging world of online news production to explore some of the fundamental theoretical organizers in the study of journalism and the media. Rather than continuing to adopt a phenomenon-centered or a theoretically tributary stance, the evolution of online news scholarship will gain much by choosing trends that lead to rethinking major building blocks in the understanding of journalism and its role in society. 


Two of the most consequential theoretical organizers of media scholarship over the past half century have been the division between production and consumption (and the subsequent division of labor between scholars who study either one or the other) and debates about the effects of media messages in relation to whether audiences are passive or active recipients of these messages. 


The scholarly division between studies of production and consumption has been tied to the one-way, unidirectional information architecture that dominated print and broadcast media during the 20th century. Furthermore, this very separation has made it difficult to ascertain the nature and form of media effects. 


This is because audiences have had limited opportunities to express their agency, not only as readers of media texts but also as their producers. 


However, the transformed information architecture of online environments and the increased options for audiences to become content producers provide scholars with opportunities to undertake research projects about the division between production and consumption that can shed new light on the character and determinants of audience agency. 


At stake in this type of inquiry would be not just understanding the dynamics of online journalism, but probing critical intellectual foundations and unresolved dilemmas in the larger field of communication and media studies.