Dominic Boyer
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801451881
- eISBN:
- 9780801467356
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801451881.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
News journalism is in the midst of radical transformation brought about by the spread of digital information and communication technology and the rise of neoliberalism. What does it look like, ...
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News journalism is in the midst of radical transformation brought about by the spread of digital information and communication technology and the rise of neoliberalism. What does it look like, however, from the inside of a news organization? This book offers the first anthropological ethnography of contemporary office-based news journalism. The result is an account of journalists struggling to maintain their expertise and authority, even as they find their principles and skills profoundly challenged by ever more complex and fast-moving streams of information. The book's findings challenge popular and scholarly images of journalists as roving truth-seekers, showing instead the extent to which sedentary office-based “screenwork” (such as gathering and processing information online) has come to dominate news journalism. To explain this phenomenon the book puts forth the notion of “digital liberalism”—a powerful convergence of technological and ideological forces over the past two decades that has rebalanced electronic mediation from the radial (or broadcast) tendencies of the mid-twentieth century to the lateral (or peer-to-peer) tendencies that dominate in the era of the Internet and social media. Under digital liberalism an entire regime of media, knowledge, and authority has become integrated around liberal principles of individuality and publicity, both unmaking and remaking news institutions of the broadcast era. The book offers scenarios for how news journalism will develop in the future and discusses how other intellectual professionals, such as ethnographers, have also become more screenworkers than fieldworkers.Less
News journalism is in the midst of radical transformation brought about by the spread of digital information and communication technology and the rise of neoliberalism. What does it look like, however, from the inside of a news organization? This book offers the first anthropological ethnography of contemporary office-based news journalism. The result is an account of journalists struggling to maintain their expertise and authority, even as they find their principles and skills profoundly challenged by ever more complex and fast-moving streams of information. The book's findings challenge popular and scholarly images of journalists as roving truth-seekers, showing instead the extent to which sedentary office-based “screenwork” (such as gathering and processing information online) has come to dominate news journalism. To explain this phenomenon the book puts forth the notion of “digital liberalism”—a powerful convergence of technological and ideological forces over the past two decades that has rebalanced electronic mediation from the radial (or broadcast) tendencies of the mid-twentieth century to the lateral (or peer-to-peer) tendencies that dominate in the era of the Internet and social media. Under digital liberalism an entire regime of media, knowledge, and authority has become integrated around liberal principles of individuality and publicity, both unmaking and remaking news institutions of the broadcast era. The book offers scenarios for how news journalism will develop in the future and discusses how other intellectual professionals, such as ethnographers, have also become more screenworkers than fieldworkers.
Phaedra Daipha
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780226298542
- eISBN:
- 9780226298719
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226298719.003.0004
- Subject:
- Sociology, Science, Technology and Environment
This chapter takes a systematic look at how NWS forecasters take stock of the weather and establishes that they have cultivated an omnivorous appetite for information, at times even enlisting ...
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This chapter takes a systematic look at how NWS forecasters take stock of the weather and establishes that they have cultivated an omnivorous appetite for information, at times even enlisting personal observations of the weather outside to resolve the ambiguity and complexity of the weather on their screens. To illuminate how forecasters harness diverse information to project themselves into the future, the concept of “collage” is introduced—a heuristic that frames meteorological decision-making as a process of assembling, appropriating, superimposing, juxtaposing, and blurring of information. Weather forecasting as the art of collage underscores the culture of disciplined improvisation that characterizes NWS forecasting operations. And it externalizes into screenwork the cognitive labor of distilling and extrapolating complex atmospheric data into a provisionally coherent prognosis.Less
This chapter takes a systematic look at how NWS forecasters take stock of the weather and establishes that they have cultivated an omnivorous appetite for information, at times even enlisting personal observations of the weather outside to resolve the ambiguity and complexity of the weather on their screens. To illuminate how forecasters harness diverse information to project themselves into the future, the concept of “collage” is introduced—a heuristic that frames meteorological decision-making as a process of assembling, appropriating, superimposing, juxtaposing, and blurring of information. Weather forecasting as the art of collage underscores the culture of disciplined improvisation that characterizes NWS forecasting operations. And it externalizes into screenwork the cognitive labor of distilling and extrapolating complex atmospheric data into a provisionally coherent prognosis.
Dominic Boyer
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801451881
- eISBN:
- 9780801467356
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801451881.003.0002
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
This chapter discusses the work of Associated Press Deutscher Dienst (AP-DD), an international news agency responsible for supplying raw and finished forms of breaking news content to other news ...
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This chapter discusses the work of Associated Press Deutscher Dienst (AP-DD), an international news agency responsible for supplying raw and finished forms of breaking news content to other news organizations. It highlights the screenwork process of the agency, focusing on the challenges of managing vast quantitative increases in digital information and the challenges of defining news value on a fast-time basis. The chapter also discusses the role of “slotting” in digital journalism. In news agency journalism, the process took on greater significance because of the pressure to manage breaking news on a fast-time basis. Slotters decide what stories news agencies will send out and how they will cover them. And, agency clients increasingly rely upon news agencies both to obtain fast-time channels of breaking news content and to reduce their own production costs for reporting, editing, and analysis.Less
This chapter discusses the work of Associated Press Deutscher Dienst (AP-DD), an international news agency responsible for supplying raw and finished forms of breaking news content to other news organizations. It highlights the screenwork process of the agency, focusing on the challenges of managing vast quantitative increases in digital information and the challenges of defining news value on a fast-time basis. The chapter also discusses the role of “slotting” in digital journalism. In news agency journalism, the process took on greater significance because of the pressure to manage breaking news on a fast-time basis. Slotters decide what stories news agencies will send out and how they will cover them. And, agency clients increasingly rely upon news agencies both to obtain fast-time channels of breaking news content and to reduce their own production costs for reporting, editing, and analysis.
