C.

Raetzsch: Journalistic Practices: Towards a Cultural Approach to News Media

The German journalist Ralph Janik recently wrote that newspapers will survive as long as you
can not use a laptop to whisk away a fly from the breakfast table.1 Janik refered to Riepl‘s law of media
evolution, first formulated in a study of the Roman communication system (1913) by Wolfgang Riepl,
who had held the view that new media merely supplemented older ones and did not wholly replace
them. In a similarly humorous spirit, the godfather of media studies, Marshal McLuhan, once said that
a television set might as well be used as a source of light for someone reading a book. McLuhan, of
course, did not endorse such a perspective, regarding television above all as a powerful „extension of
man“. These two examples of surprising uses of the media bring us to the more serious question of
what social function news media have and especially what the function of the newspaper as one of the
oldest means of mass communication could be in the future. Superficially, the current crisis of the
newspaper is an economic one. But at second sight the crisis of this medium is at the same time a crisis
of a particular model of communication that I propose to study from a cultural perspective. In that
perspective, the demise of the newspaper will become apparent as its biggest success. In order to
outline this counterintuitive argument, it is first necessary to separate the news from the paper.

Journalism and Culture

In his seminal, seven-volume study of newspapers as an „unrecognized cultural power“ [Die

unerkannte Kulturmacht], published in the 1960‘s, the German media scholar Otto Groth concluded
that the function of the newspaper in a modern society was not to print letters on paper but to inform
readers individually without regard for social status, income or level of education. As such, the
newspaper was bridging the gaps and holes between different groups in society created by the division
of labour and specialization. A hundred and thirty years earlier, Alexis de Tocqueville had written in
Democracy in America that the „effect of a newspaper is not only to suggest the same purpose to a great
number of persons, but also to furnish means for executing in common the designs which they may
have singly conceived“ (Tocqueville, 2002: 633). The appeal of newspapers as a political tool and their
dependency on audiences led Tocqueville to conclude that „a newspaper can only subsist on the
condition of publishing sentiments or principles common to a larger number of men“, that are „its
habitual readers“ (636). Both authors, Groth and Tocqueville, accord the newspaper a function that
goes far beyond the mere transmission of news. The medium is correlated with a political mission or in
more modest terms identified as a central instrument of social cohesion.

1 Janik, Ralph „Von Political Correctness bis zum E-Book: Sprache, Medien und Manipulation“
http://ef-magazin.de/2009/11/17/1649-von-political-correctness-bis-zum-e-book-sprache-
medien-und-manipulation Last access 2009/11/24.
 The times of political associations and their adjacent newspapers are certainly waning in the
United States. Although individual newspapers may still endorse a liberal or conservative perspective,
it has become problematic to insist on the strictly political over the arbitrarily commercial in
newspaper publishing. As newspapers in the U.S. are facing dwindling circulation figures, massive lay-
offs and immense decline in revenue from advertising, their established business model of selling the
paper to an audience and selling the audience to an advertiser no longer seems to work profitably
(enough). Some commentators regard this as an opportunity to enhance journalistic standards and
address quality issues in reporting (Meyer, 2004). For others the development of the media in a
globalized setting tends towards entropy and „cultural chaos“ (McNair, 2006). The current crisis of the
newspaper‘s business model can also be regarded as another evolutionary step towards new sources of
income and different ways of presenting news to specialized audiences. However, on the next level of
development, it will have to be for cash (Ruß-Mohl, 2009).

The problem with either of these perspectives is that they base their analyses in an assumption
about journalism serving the public interest that all too neatly obscures the waning importance of
journalists as agents of the Fourth Estate. To make a case for the study of journalistic practices in
studies of American Culture, it is necessary to shift the focus away from prescriptive models towards a
more theoretical and historical analyses that starts with the emergence of mass media in the proper
sense around the middle of the 19th century in the United States. This follows Paul Starr‘s approach to
study the origins of mass media, outlined in The Creation of the Media (2004), but seeks to complement
his argument by bringing changing practices of journalists at decisive turning points of newspaper
history into focus.

Journalistic Practices: The „I“ of the Beholder

The use of the term practice might easily get associated with refusing to formulate a theory of
journalism and its role in society. It certainly has such an impetus if theory means a normative theory
of what journalism ought to be. But my recourse to the concept of practice is in itself a theoretical
move that takes up the currency of the term in more recent debates of cultural development,
globalizing flows of images, and the possibility of alternative, local interpretations of media messages.
The insistence on practices reflects the utter impossibility to formulate a normative theory of
journalism in a media-saturated, multipolar society and wants to widen the field of journalistic
products to those utterances that are not made by professionals.

Practice, in my context, will refer to a textual strategy employed by a journalist (or even a proto-
journalist) that constitutes him in-between those objects/subjects he is reporting and those that can be
identified as an audience. A textual strategy in this context does not have to be restricted to mere texts,
but can include oral and visual media as well. The importance, however, is placed on the narrativity of
the text that seeks to avoid an explicit reference to the author. If there is one peculiarity of a standard
journalistic text it is the absence of a narrator or even the denial of an authorial voice.

Typical examples of professional news are phrases like „A government employee admitted …“
or „It was understood that …“. Writing in such a manner effectively obscures the fact that these
statements, after all, were made in response to someone legitimate enough to ask a question. The
narrative form of a news report is consciously or unconsciously political by placing information in a
hierarchical order and by resting on assumptions about the news-worthiness of sources and
information that are not made explicit in the text itself (Schudson, 1995). A straightforward news
report from an agency can be seen as a prime example of this kind of writing, seeking to establish
authority over facts while negating the reporting voice. Matthew Winkler, editor-in-chief at
Bloomberg news, even ordered his reporters to „to avoid adverbs and adjectives, along with “but” and
“however”“ to achieve greater clarity.2 But agency news is certainly not what a reader would like to
read in „his“ paper although the majority of papers depend on agencies for the facts. AP, AFP, DPA,
Reuters, and Bloomberg are the original authors of what appears as „stories“ in newspapers around the
world.

Practices in Theory

The term „practice“ also has a more theoretical implication that is inspired by Pierre Bourdieu‘s
reflections on the logic of practice as a way to reunite objective and subjective levels of describing
social processes (Bourdieu, 1990; 1977). His elaborations on the „field of cultural production“
originally referred to the field of art and literature (Bourdieu, 1993). But his perspective and central
terms can also be applied to the field of journalism. The advantage of such a transfer for my thesis is
that Bourdieu places culture in a central position of his theory of field, habitus and symbolic capital.
Culture comes to encompass „the everyday symbolic dimension of social life and acting“ (Ebrecht and
Hillebrandt, 2002: 10). In this framework it is possible to read journalistic reports as both a document
and constituent of symbolic order without according too much emphasis on the technological or
political dimensions of journalism as an institution. By going back to the emergence of the penny
papers of the 1830‘s, the coming of age of large-scale advertising in the 1880‘s up to the revolutions of
radio (1920‘s), television (1950‘s), and of digital networks (1990‘s) this dissertation seeks to analyze
changes in journalistic practices in relation to the widening framework in which journalists operate.

2 Clifford and Creswell, 2009

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/business/media/15bloom.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=At%20Blo
omberg,%20Modest%20Strategy%20to%20Rule%20the%20World%20&st=cse (Last retrieved
2009-11-20)
 Coda

Crises in newspaper publishing are not new. Already in 1947 the American journalist A.J. Liebling
lamented the demise of the plurality of newspapers: "A city with one newspaper,“ he remarked, “is like
a man with one eye, and often the eye is glass" (Liebling, 2009: 705). In 2009, we may optimistically
conclude that the glass has become a prism too wide for a single medium to capture the world.

Works cited

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