Looking like the news

I’ll use this blog to jot down thoughts related to news media, media’s role in community and society, news work and news technologies — and anything else that occurs to me along the way.

First thoughts: News media are struggling to change because too many others want it to stay the way it is. I’m not talking necessarily about audiences here, though they count as some of these “others.” I’m talking about the interests that other powerful institutions have in news products looking, sounding, reading like we think a credible news source should. If the news changes too much, it loses public legitimacy because it slips away from our shared, legitimated image of “the news.”

A government institution, a powerful politician or political party, a large company that wants to advertise, need a publicly legitimated source through which to send their messages. Their own PR wings won’t serve. The news makes their messages sacred in a sense, cleans them up. So it ain’t so easy to change because of interdependencies that hold journalism in place. Changing the news means changing the way others feel the way they need to do things.

And of course, audiences too have something of a stake in the news looking, reading and sounding like news. Change violates shared understandings,  and poor cognitively challenged creatures that we are (both audiences and journalists), we can only handle so much change before confusion sets in.

Does that mean change is impossible? No, but it probably requires more than just in-house tinkering to really make a difference. In-house tinkering often leads just to “window dressing” kinds of change that don’t touch the core. Or maybe mimicry of what others are doing. Again, we’re back to the pursuit of legitimacy — this time changing to look progressive.

Sociologist Max Weber understood the special importance of attaining legitimacy. Those who would have authority or control over others or even over their work must have cultural and social legitimacy too. Money is not everything (though legitimacy and money aren’t mutually exclusive in a capitalistic society). For journalism, legitimacy can come from merely “looking like the news,” from accord with the accepted, understood view.