How journalists source newsA linguistic ethnographic approach

Université catholique de Louvain14 October 2012

Dr. Tom Van Houttom.vanhout@gmail.com

ETHNOGRAPHYA 5-slide primer on:

Foto: medhead (flickr.com)

cultural ecology

a family of methods involving direct and sustained social contact with agents and of richly writing up the encounter, respecting, recording, representing at least partly in its own terms the irreducibility of human experience.

(Willis & Trondman 2002: 394)

ethnography

• studies meaning in context (fieldwork)

• participates in, observes and reconstructs

• documents the how, what and why

• makes the familiar strange (process)• makes the strange familiar (product)

ethnographic analysis

case study methodology= micro-level analyses of social action

– evidential: empirical facts– conjectural: meaning in context

knowledge is generated inductively

ethnographic analysis

Blommaert, Jan, & Dong, Jie. (2010). Ethnographic Fieldwork: A Beginner's Guide. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

NEWS ETHNOGRAPHYNext, a 3 slide outline of

newsroom ethnographies

the organisational requirements of news combine with the professional ideology of objectivity to routinely privilege the voices of the powerful, and this further reinforces the tendency towards the standardised and ideological nature of news.

(Cottle 2007: 4)

a tale of two paradigms

Paterson, Chris, & Domingo, David (Eds.). (2011). Making Online News - Volume 2. Newsroom Ethnography in the Second Decade of Internet Journalism (Vol. 2). New York: Peter Lang.

Bird, Elizabeth S. (Ed.). (2010). The Anthropology of News and Journalism: Global perspectives. Indiana: Indiana University Press.

http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/magnolia/pageoneinsidethenewyorktimes/

LINGUISTIC ETHNOGRAPHY

And finally: 2 slides on

tying down & opening up

• "'tying ethnography down': pushing ethnography towards the analysis of clearly delimitable processes, increasing the amount of reported data that is open to falsification, looking to impregnate local description with analytical frameworks drawn from outside. [...]

• 'opening linguistics up': inviting reflexive sensitivity to the processes involved in the production of linguistic claims and to the potential importance of what gets left out, encouraging a willingness to accept (and run with) the fact that beyond the reach of standardised falsification procedures '[e]xperience … has ways of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas'."

Rampton et al 2004: 4

discourses

• education• workplace• community• literacy• multimodality

empirical example

Oct 2006 – March 2007De Standaard

How do journalists write from sources?

access

‘foot in the door’ approach

– interview– ‘meeloopdag’– fieldwork

fieldwork

trial & error

research protocol– story identification– reporter confirmation– data recording & observation– retrospective interview

parameters

1. Analyzing the spatiotemporal unfolding of news production;

2. Describing concrete situations in order to interrogate claims made about journalism;

3. Alternating between levels of analytical magnification;

4. Sustaining a dialogue between theory, observation and interpretation

veldwerk

analysis

interview

• My first idea was actually

• Now I must give the floor to

• ‘Ma bon’, it’s Apple

Writing at warp speed

descriptive stats

AppleTV process product differential

Total number of characters 3054 2455 599

Total number of words 491 409 82

Production time (in minutes) 18.11 / /

Pause time (in minutes) 18.24 / /

Total duration of writing process (in minutes)

36.36 / /

pause behavior

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writing from sources

1. what journalists do, how they do so and why;

2. knowledge mediation and journalistic representation processes; and

3. ultimately have wider applicability for the study of media production, intertextuality and cultural production in general.