Patrol car headlights pierced the clouds of tear gas, illuminating toddlers sitting on their fathers’ shoulders. The children squinted into the glare, raising their small arms to say, “Hands up, don’t shoot.” Protesters poured milk into their eyes to quench the sting of pepper spray. Officers crouched on tanks, guns pointed at the crowd. Police in riot gear stuffed handcuffed journalists into vans. These images dominated the news for days after unarmed African American teen Michael Brown, Jr., was shot and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. Months, and even years, after the television satellite trucks caravanned away to cover other tragedies, Brown’s killing continued to make national headlines. Journalists’ attention to Ferguson stretched beyond Canfield Drive, where Brown’s body had lain in the street for hours, and past West Florissant Avenue, where protesters faced rows of police riot shields. News coverage began to interrogate systems and institutions in new ways.
Journalists across the country voted “police killings of blacks”1 as the top news story of 2014, marking the first time in more than 25 years that an issue of racial violence had appeared anywhere on the Associated Press Top Ten Stories of the Year list.2 Although undeniably tragic, Brown’s death was not unique. He was not famous. Brown was at least the 16th unarmed African American killed by police in 2014. At least five such deaths were documented in 2013 and at least ten were documented in 2012.3 Brown’s death was not deviant among the killings that had preceded it. Those deaths had also generated public outrage that flashed big in headlines, then disappeared. One month before Brown was killed, 43-year-old Eric Garner was choked to death by a Staten Island police officer. Garner’s last words, “I can’t breathe,” became a trending Twitter hashtag, but his death did not make national news until after protests erupted in Ferguson. One year before, the acquittal of the neighborhood watch volunteer who shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, spawned the Black Lives Matter movement4 and earned the attention of legislators and professional athletes.5 Five years earlier, Oscar Grant, 22, was shot and killed by an Oakland transit cop while handcuffed on the floor of a metro train. The award-winning film Fruitvale Station chronicled his death.6 Journalism recorded these deaths as singular moments—as surprising news absent larger context. Then came Ferguson. The coverage of Ferguson persisted longer and went deeper. It began to connect events to show trends.
Journalists selecting the killings of African American men by police as the top news story of 2014 marked a profound shift from a decades-old pattern of racial issues being among the most underreported issues in US news coverage.7 In 2015, journalists selected two stories about racialized violence for the AP’s Top Ten poll. “Black deaths in encounters with police”—described as a trend rather than a series of discrete events—in Baltimore, Chicago, Tulsa, and North Charleston, South Carolina, ranked as the fifth most important story of the year.8 Ranked ninth was the murder of nine African Americans in a Charleston, South Carolina, church, a crime that was notably deviant but ranked less importantly than the police killings. White supremacist Dylann Roof was sentenced to death for the murders. In 2016, journalists ranked “Black men killed by police” as the third most important story in the AP poll. The election of US President Donald Trump and the Brexit vote in the UK ranked first and second.9 The Associated Press description of the third-place vote read, “One day apart, police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, fatally shot Alton Sterling after pinning him to the ground, and a white police officer shot and killed Philando Castile during a traffic stop in a suburb of Minneapolis. Coming after several similar cases in recent years, the killings rekindled debate over policing practices and the Black Lives Matter movement.”10 This description linked cases of police killings in ways not seen in pre-Ferguson coverage. Although the three men named represented less than 1 percent of the 963 documented fatal police shootings of civilians in 2016,11 their deaths were presented as part of a larger issue.
After the protests in Ferguson, news coverage began to tie Brown’s death not only to other police killings but to larger systems of power. For example, on April 5, 2017, more than two years after the shooting, The New York Times covered the election of a new city council in Ferguson, a city of 20,846.12 On August 10, 2018, nearly three years to the day after the killing, The Washington Post reported that Brown’s mother, Lezley McSpadden, was running for Ferguson City Council.13 Following a small city’s election was not typical for the nation’s largest and most prestigious newspapers. Nor was covering municipal government in relation to a local shooting, especially one that by news standards was not deviant or novel. Yet, the news coverage of Ferguson began to connect to larger narratives of policy and government structures. In 2015, a team of Washington Post journalists created an online database to monitor civilian deaths at the hands of police. The following year, the “Fatal Force” database won the profession’s most coveted award, the Pulitzer Prize, for national reporting. The database continues to be updated, including using information submitted by the audience and verified by Post staff, to chronicle hundreds of police killings each year. The project began because Wesley Lowery, a young African American reporter who was covering Ferguson, saw a systemic problem rather than a singular incident.14 That the project has continued acknowledges that the problem has continued too.
In the consistently problematic history of US news coverage of racial issues, the events in Ferguson came to stand out as different not only for the amount of news attention they received but for the depth of the news narratives, the systemic exploration of racism in those narratives, and the way technology enabled the audience to become part of the news narratives and to speak back to them. In a Washington Post op-ed printed days after Brown’s death, Columbia University Political Science Professor Fredrick Harris wrote, “Some believed that the beating of Rodney King and the riots that followed would lead to improved policing in black communities. But energy went toward rebuilding, not reforming. Ferguson presents an opportunity to pursue a different course. Let’s turn this tragedy into a tipping point.”15 Understanding whether Ferguson represented a moment or a movement in journalism about racial issues requires exploring the confluence of phenomena that crystalized there. It requires widening the lens to capture emerging types of journalism that leverage technology to give the audience a larger role. It means turning that lens to examine coverage of the racial inflection points that came before and talking to the journalists who were there. This book attempts to start a conversation about how three elements—past and emerging journalism practice, communication about and understanding of racism, and the influence of (and pushback against) new digital technologies—came together at a time when journalists turned their attention to racial violence, and what that might mean for the future of news coverage of racial issues.
The book begins with an overview of how legacy journalism adheres, despite viewing itself as fiercely independent and ever skeptical, to unspoken institutional rules. It shows how field norms have facilitated troubling and persistent patterns in news coverage of racial issues. It then develops a taxonomy to examine emerging paradigms of journalism that embrace different values and habits and leverage digital technology to meet them. Chapter 2 reviews the history of coverage of racial issues and explores how institutional norms, including a steadfast allegiance to a notion of objectivity, have helped maintain coverage that reflects a white, upper-middle-class status quo. It then examines digital technology as a potential place of disruption, one that is limited by the way journalists and the audience leverage those tools. Chapter 3 turns to narrative analysis of coverage of three moments of racial inflection: the election of Barack Obama as the nation’s first African American president and the way it prompted national conversations about whether the US was now “past racism,” the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the events in Ferguson from the day Brown was killed until 18 months later when the Department of Justice released its scathing report about racism in the Ferguson Police Department. The analysis compares coverage across three dimensions—sourcing, narrative of the conflict, and systemic awareness of racism—then examines whether those things changed over time. Chapter 4 centers the voices of the journalists who produced the coverage. It provides insights into how journalists covering racial issues in different paradigms do their jobs and how they view the field. Finally, Chap. 5 puts the narrative analysis into conversation with the interviews to posit what these changes might mean for future coverage and, more broadly, to the field.
The book moves from past to present context, and from Traditional journalism to new paradigms, exploring contemporary influences of technology as a precursor to these events. This examination defines contemporary journalism more broadly than previous studies have done.
This work avoids the online-versus-print dichotomy popular in studies from the early 2000s.16
The premise that reporters work either online or in print does not fit well, because decisions about what will be published online are not always—or even usually—made ahead of time. Also, there is substantial overlap in what a news organization publishes in print and puts on its website. Further, that dichotomy does not allow for the inclusion of the digital-only journalism outlets, many of which have larger audience share than many Traditional news outlets17 and are particularly important in coverage of racial issues because they leverage technology to engage with the audience in ways legacy journalism has not.18 Rather than categorizing types of journalism by delivery platform, this book develops a taxonomy of journalism about race that centers on the values of the news organization rather than their delivery platforms. How technology enables new ways to produce journalism and interact with the audience is a key facet of this work, but the influence of technology is treated as an open question. As this work unfolds, it shows US news coverage of racial issues breaking from decades-old patterns of coverage, becoming more aware of racial stereotypes, providing larger context about systemic racism, relying more on the people living the issue and less on official sources, and reveals that journalists who are telling the stories are thinking and working from a standpoint that breaks with previous norms and routines.
New Paradigms of Journalism About Race Emerge
This book surveys the emerging wider landscape of journalism about racial issues at a time when journalists are paying more attention and new technologies have enabled new ways to publish and to interact with the audience. Those technologies have also given the audience new ways to participate in journalism and to speak back to journalists. One cannot assume that because technology comes into being, it “causes” change. That is known as “technological determinism.” Technology is not always used in the ways in which its designers intended—sometimes, it is not used at all. Journalists and audience members may use the same technology in different ways based on their values or goals.19 For example, a reporter can use Twitter to find a source, but because the tool exists does not mean the reporter will use it that way. What is more likely is that the reporter will use Twitter as a publishing platform by tweeting a link to a story, rather than using it as a way to interact, for example, by asking the audience a question.20
That is largely because the latter mirrors decades-old patterns of one-way mass communication.21 Given that, this book explores which journalistic norms, practices, and values are shifting and what is remaining the same as technology creates new possibilities for journalists and their audiences. Reporting on Race in a Digital Era examines Traditional journalism found in legacy news coverage alongside two digitally enabled emerging paradigms, one I call “Interactive Race Beat” journalism and another defined as Journalism 3.0.22 This comparison helps show how the new models fit into the media ecology of journalism about race.
This new taxonomy of paradigms stretches existing theories in new ways that allow them to speak to a digital news environment. The taxonomy draws on Normative Criteria in Democratic Theory. This model, which has been applied to understand newspaper discourse in different countries, helps label the values that underpin each news paradigm, thus getting to what goes into producing news rather than focusing on how it is distributed.23 Traditional journalism, sometimes called “legacy media,” is found in print newspapers and their online editions. This type of journalism values elite expertise and stories told with a sense of detachment, a utilitarian approach to news values (meaning the stories that affect the greatest number of people will receive the most attention), and a propensity to report news as singular events absent larger context. In Democratic Theory terms, Traditional journalism fits within the Representative Liberal paradigm of journalism.24 Although Traditional news also appears online, that is a platform, not a paradigm. The values that go into producing Traditional journalism are consistent whether a story is published online, in print, or both.
Interactive Race Beat and Journalism 3.0 are both emerging, online-only platforms, but it is their institutional values, rather than their publishing platforms, that distinguishes them. Interactive Race Beat journalism is found in legacy-media outlets’ digital subsections devoted to coverage of race. These platforms represent a new era in “the race beat” that was first established in the 1960s to provide a dedicated space for coverage of racial issues. Interactive Race Beat journalism leverages technology to engage in conversations about news coverage of racial issues with a digital audience. Interactive Race Beat journalism values taking a longer, deeper, and sometimes more theoretical look at complex issues and questions. This aligns with a Discursive paradigm of journalism in Democratic Theory.25 The Discursive paradigm values popular inclusion, rather than reliance on elite sources, embraces civil deliberation above disseminating facts, and draws on the audience to build consensus in thinking about events. In this paradigm, the audience is actively engaged rather than passively informed. Although these Interactive Race Beat news outlets are housed within legacy-media outlets, they have different values and goals.
The third paradigm, Journalism 3.0, is characterized by an intentional focus on providing content that the audience wants versus what editors think the audience needs, by engaging with the audience via digital technology, by a focus on a combination of coverage of high and low culture, and by its use of curated content.26 Journalism 3.0 leverages social media technology to pay attention to audience desires, values, and contributions. It also appeals to a younger, tech-savvy public. Journalism 3.0 maps on to Democratic Theory’s Constructionist paradigm, which privileges the voices of people who are marginalized, values an empowerment narrative, and seeks to hold questions open for further examination rather than quickly drawing conclusions.27 Whereas Interactive Race Beat journalism asks for the audience’s thoughts on topics journalists select, Journalism 3.0 follows the audience’s lead in determining the most pressing topics. Because each type of journalism is subject to distinct structural contexts, this work examines coverage of race in each paradigm to explore how the field might be adapting coverage—or resisting change to the way it covers—race, one of the most polarizing and deeply personal issues in an increasingly diverse US population.
Studies have shown, over decades, when Traditional news covers racial issues, it does so with identifiable patterns that often reproduce hegemonic narratives and racial stereotypes. But coverage of race in the two types of emergent platforms is a new area for study. The new platforms, in which the audience plays a role in shaping the discussion, challenge long-held journalism norms about control over the agenda and content. How Traditional journalism about race is produced in this context when the field is on the “hinge” between tradition and change28 is a question with the potential to widen understanding about changes in the field in the national conversation about race.
New Institutionalism Reinforces Problematic Norms
Breed documented how reporters relied on interoffice gossip, learned editors’ preferences and dislikes, and emulated patterns to curry editor approval.The news about whites and Negroes is also of a distinct sort. Should he then write about one of these groups, his story will tend to reflect what he has come to define as standard procedure. Certain editorial actions taken by editors and older staffers also serve as controlling guides. “If things are blue-pencilled [sic]consistently,” one reporter said, “you learn he [the editor] has a prejudice in that regard.”30
Two decades later, sociologists Herb Gans and Gaye Tuchman, scholars who spent years in different newsrooms, both concluded that although journalists considered themselves to be independent and neutral observers, they were subject to the influences of their sources, bosses, and lived experiences. They found journalists defined “news value,” or what made something newsworthy, in similar ways. Political stories driven by elite sourcing represented the most important news. The effect of these institutionalized values was news that reflected a white, upper-middle class, yet asserted positioning as neutral. The titles of both books, Tuchman’s Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality and Gans’s Deciding What’s News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time, foreground the high level of subjectivity in the journalistic process. Gans and Tuchman observed, across news organizations, a reliance on the unspoken, assumed, informal rules about news value. This showed how journalism as an institution created a self-sustaining culture that has reproduced patterns in news coverage.
What these scholars described was new institutionalism, defined as the ways in which institutions interact, create meaning for individuals, and influence society. Theories of new institutionalism can help explain how organizations change or stay the same.31 New institutionalism in journalism helps explain why studies conducted across four decades all touched on racial or gender bias in determining news value. They showed how newsrooms develop patterns around deciding what is news, reporting, and writing.32 Journalists don’t always agree on news value, but there are institutional pressures to conform to a particular sense of what constitutes news. That includes assumptions about what is “normal” versus what is aberrant and whose tragedy merits what type of attention.
Professional norms and newsroom “rules” are important influences on journalists at the level of the individual, but there are also important influences at the level of culture. Reporters are individuals shaped by their own beliefs and lived experiences and as professionals working within the contexts and confines of a field. Pamela Shoemaker and Stephen Reese33 asserted that journalists are subject to influences at five levels: individual-level lived experience, media routines, the news organization for which one works, social institutions such as influences from outside of the news organization, and social systems, or forces of hegemony that are more likely to reinforce outgroup stereotypes. Journalists are largely unaware of these influences, in part because their steadfast adherence to the norm of objectivity teaches them it’s possible to avoid influences and because these influences become part of their everyday routines. As members of what Barbie Zelizer has called “interpretive communities,”34 journalists adhere to shared ideals not only within a given organization but also within a larger field. Yet, journalists, as human beings with lived experiences that influence their sense of what is news, operate at a purely cultural level.35 For example, journalists follow the topics political elites are debating and then drop those issues when elites drop them.36 Thus, journalists are not simply chroniclers of events nor are they neutral brokers of values-free information; they privilege power and reinforce dominant-group experiences.
The role of new institutionalism in maintaining professional norms and an understanding of cultural influences on journalists helps explain why a substantial body of research over several decades shows that news coverage has largely ignored racial issues and that when race has been covered, coverage has reproduced stereotypes. This has held true as legal systems have changed from Jim Crow-era legal segregation to a more de facto segregation. Traditional journalists still work in newsrooms in which most of their colleagues, particularly managers, are white; and their work continues to rely heavily on elite sources.37 When racial topics are covered, the coverage has overwhelmingly centered on events rather than issues. Journalists have been shown to have done a poor job of identifying the underlying systemic issues that contribute to oppression and, in many cases, have framed people of color as responsible for the events that affect them.38 Little has changed in Traditional news coverage of race over the past 40 years.
Journalists play a primary role in the production and interpretation of difference, especially in regard to race. News narratives reproduce prejudiced discourse because they report on what is being said, then offer that material for the public to debate. As Oscar Gandy argued, “There is also little doubt that it is through communication that the structural influence of racism is maintained. It is through language and communication that we develop and share the multidimensional impressions of ourselves and others that become part of the structures of meaning we rely upon to guide us through our day-to-day routines.”39 News media are a site of meaning production and interpretation of difference. These meanings are contingent, subjective, and part of a process, not something concrete or universal.40 As part of this meaning production, news narratives rely on myths, or what Jack Lule described as “an essential social narrative, a rich and enduring aspect of human existence, which draws from archetypal figures and forms to offer exemplary models for social life.”41 For example, the myths of Victim, Hero, and Scapegoat become oversimplified narratives that erase a complicated and changing understanding of race. As Lule wrote in his book Daily News, Eternal Stories: The Mythological Role of Journalism, “The news tells us not only what happened yesterday—but also what has always happened.”42 Michael Schudson asserted that these myths in news narratives “do not tell a culture’s simple truths so much as they explore its central dilemmas.”43 Journalists’ work is subtly obscured but a powerful structuring force for how people come to understand and communicate about race. News narratives provide background for individuals to develop and/or maintain racial prejudice because they reproduce elite discourse vested in maintaining the status quo.
The Paradigms: Traditional, Interactive Race Beat, and Journalism 3.0
Journalism is essentially a conversation between journalists and audience. The values of each paradigm determine the character of that conversation. Three concepts from Normative Criteria in Democratic Theory help explain the values that underpin each paradigm44 and how those values guide coverage. Broadly, the evaluative criteria used to define these normative concepts speak to who may speak, how they may speak, and the goal of the coverage, which ranges from answering or “closing” a question, widening the conversation to build consensus slowly over time, or holding a question open to allow more voices to speak and more questions and influences to emerge. Because new technology allows the audience an unprecedented role in the conversation, these distinctions are magnified in a new media environment. However, just because the audience has been allowed a voice doesn’t mean journalists have to listen to it.
Traditional Journalism
In terms of Democratic Theory, the Representative Liberal tradition best describes the values that have been manifest in US Traditional news coverage of racial issues. The Representative Liberal tradition views citizens as ill-informed, passive recipients of information upon which they are not expected to act. This mirrors the one-to-many dissemination strategy of Traditional news in which journalists decide what to cover, who deserves to be a source, and which facts to include, then report that information to audiences. Traditional journalists operate under the understanding that their training and professional skills make them qualified to determine the most pressing issues and who should speak to those issues. The Representative Liberal paradigm privileges the voices of elites and values detachment, meaning those who speak about issues should not be stakeholders in the controversy, but rather experts who are outside of the issue looking in. This mirrors Traditional journalism’s reliance on elite sources rather than those with lived experience. The Representative Liberal paradigm also values proportionality, which reflects Traditional journalism’s understanding of newsworthiness; in other words, the more people affected, the bigger the story. This last facet is important in coverage of race because those affected by racial issues are statistically underrepresented and the effects on them may not be obvious on the surface or may not be provably linked to race. Central to this paradigm is a desire for “closure,” or news that informs the public and moves on. This describes Traditional journalism’s tendency toward episodic coverage45 in which events are treated as discrete rather than as products of overlapping systems.
The exemplars used in this book to gain insight into Traditional journalism are two of the nation’s largest and most established news organizations. The New York Times and The Washington Post are daily newspapers that cover national issues and thus were likely to provide significant coverage of the moments central to this study: the question of a post-racial America under President Barack Obama, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, and Ferguson. Each of these news organizations also has a strong web presence with more digital readers than print readers, which was important because the comparison paradigms of Interactive Race Beat and Journalism 3.0 are digital-only news.
The New York Times is the largest general-market newspaper in the country. At the time this study ended in 2016, it had an average weekday print circulation of 625,951 and had reached a high of 65.8 million unique page views per month on its website.46 Founded in 1851, it had won 119 Pulitzer Prizes as of 2016—the most of any news organization.47 During the period examined in this book, the Times had a “race beat” with one reporter, Tanzina Vega, who created the beat for herself, but eliminated that beat in January 2015.48 Vega later left to work for CNNMoney covering race and inequality as a digital correspondent (she is now with WNYC). As of 2016, when the study ended, The New York Times did not have a section devoted to coverage of racial issues, but did have a newsletter called Race Related that it sent to people who requested it by filling out a form on the newspaper’s website.
The Washington Post is the country’s sixth-largest general-market newspaper. It has a uniquely important footprint because of its publication in the nation’s capital. Founded in 1877, the Post has an average daily print circulation of 377,466 and in November 2015 had more unique monthly visitors to its website than did the previous frontrunner, The New York Times , with 66.9 million.49 The Post had been family owned for 80 years, but was purchased in 2013 by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, who pledged to allocate substantial resources to the Post’s online approaches and offerings. The Post does not have a section dedicated to coverage of racial issues. As mentioned, a team of Post reporters won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize “For its revelatory initiative in creating and using a national database to illustrate how often and why the police shoot to kill and who the victims are most likely to be.”50 Post reporters who covered Ferguson developed that database after they realized the federal government was not tracking that data in ways that would reveal systemic issues.51 These Traditional news outlets represent the nation’s most influential publications both in audience size and in attention to coverage of racial issues at the national level.
Interactive Race Beat Journalism
The Discursive tradition best describes what this book calls the Interactive Race Beat paradigm. This paradigm emphasizes popular inclusion of a variety of sources and viewpoints. It asserts that the voices of peoples’ everyday, lived experiences are important to the discussion elites are having. The quality of the ideas rather than the power/prestige of the speaker is the most important factor in determining who should speak to issues; but the journalists still put themselves in charge of deciding which issues are most important. The goal of this tradition is to build consensus gradually until eventually closure is reached in a way that serves the public good. It treats the deliberation as educational for the audience. This Discursive paradigm mirrors the Interactive Race Beat because rather than a one-to-many distribution of news, it seeks to provide a conversation between journalists and the audience, and among audience members. It leverages digital technology to build a space for conversations. For example, rather than simply providing a space where readers can post comments at the end of an article, as Traditional journalism has done, this emerging paradigm uses comments and discussion as primary to coverage intended to be a longer conversation.
The Interactive Race Beat is so new in the context of racial coverage that when this study began in 2015, only one nationally oriented news organization fit the category: National Public Radio’s Code Switch. On April 7, 2013, NPR launched Code Switch, a blog run by a team of between six and eight journalists whose website describes their mission as covering “the overlapping themes of race, ethnicity and culture, how they play out in our lives and communities, and how all of this is shifting.” Code Switch operates within a legacy-media organization, but it seeks to reach an audience that is not necessarily already tuned in to NPR.
Code Switch is leveraging Twitter to promote a conversation with readers outside of NPR to listen to new perspectives and create a dialogue that is broader than a single news organization.52 What also sets it apart from NPR generally is that Code Switch offers a new model of journalism that conflicts with the journalistic norm of objectivity by openly declaring a standpoint, even though the blog is hosted on a Traditional news outlet’s platform. In their work, Code Switch journalists regularly identify their positions in coverage.
At the time of the study, Code Switch sought to engage with its audience via comments posted on articles on the blog’s website. Code Switch bloggers were actively moderating conversations, which was in keeping with the deliberative tradition of valuing civility. However, in August 2016 (after data gathering for this study was complete), NPR shut off comments on all of its platforms, citing a low number of commenters.53 In my interview with lead Code Switch blogger Gene Demby, he said that Code Switch generated an enormous amount of comments and the job of moderating them was unfeasible. He said he views Code Switch as still engaging in dialogue with readers, but now those discussions are taking place on Twitter.54 Thus, Code Switch still leverages new media technology to encourage audience participation and thus popular inclusion, rather than to promote content. Code Switch also uses tagging to connect stories into larger themes. For example, it has tags that appear at the bottom of a story about the Black Lives Matter movement. They include #BlackLivesMatter, Twitter, Ferguson, Mo. These tags allow users to click on them and see all stories about a topic. Additionally, because journalists have to conceptualize and apply the tags, the tags themselves provide insight into how the journalists view relationships between news events. March 2017 audience data for NPR.org shows it receives 41.4 million unique page visitors each month, but that is for all of NPR, not Code Switch. As an organization, NPR has put a premium on its online presence. In 2009, before Code Switch launched, Fast Company magazine claimed, “The most successful hybrid of old and new media comes from the last place you’d expect. NPR’s digital smarts, nonprofit structure, and good old-fashioned shoe leather might save the news.”55 Code Switch is one of those digital initiatives. Although a paradigm of one at the time #Ferguson emerged, Code Switch is arguably different than Traditional or Journalism 3.0, as Chap. 2 explains. The Interactive Race Beat paradigm expanded with the May 17, 2016, launch of ESPN’s The Undefeated under the leadership of editor Kevin Merida, who was lured away from The Washington Post.56 Its mission statement reads, “The Undefeated is the premier platform for exploring the intersections of race, sports and culture. We enlighten and entertain with innovative storytelling, original reporting and provocative commentary. Not Conventional. Never Boring.” The Undefeated came into being well after the civil unrest in Ferguson, but one of its reporters, Soraya McDonald, who had previously covered racial issues for The Washington Post, participated in the interviews.
Journalism 3.0
The Constructionist tradition best describes the values of Journalism 3.0 in seeking to empower the audience and privileging voices of the marginalized. In the book that applied Democratic Theory to examining news discourse about abortion policies, Ferree et al. wrote, “With regard to content and style, Constructionists do not devalue deliberation and formal argument in discourse, but they are concerned that unexamined assumptions about how discourse should be conducted may, intentionally or inadvertently, limit who participates.”57 Constructionists believe that voices from the grassroots have the power to disrupt media routines. Journalism 3.0 not only privileges audience voices but leverages technology to determine the audience’s agenda or what the audience is talking about. While Interactive Race Beat journalism allows the audience to speak back to what elites are saying, Journalism 3.0 seeks to empower the narratives produced by those experiencing racism. Whether elites are raising topics or exploring angles different from those being discussed by the oppressed is an important question explored in the next chapter. The Constructionist tradition believes there is not one public sphere, but multiple spheres.58 This is at odds with Traditional journalism’s conception of a “general market,” which has historically been shaped by geography. Because technological advances erase the constraints of geography, this poses interesting questions about how community might be redefined.
Journalism 3.0 is the most heterogeneous paradigm of the three types of journalism about racial issues. It is also the most emergent and the paradigm seeing the most audience growth. For example, BuzzFeed’s 78 million unique monthly page views outpace both The New York Times and The Washington Post by more than 10 million.59 It is not just born-digital; it is an altogether different concept of journalism that blends commentary with objective reporting, high and low culture, and privileges voices often left out of news discourse. There are many news outlets that fit some of the parameters of Journalism 3.0, but two stand out as meeting the criteria of its definition and standing on par with the size of the digital audience for Traditional journalism: BuzzFeed and Mashable. Like their Traditional journalism counterparts, these are general-interest news organizations, which means that unlike Interactive Race Beat paradigms, they have a mission to cover a wide range of news and issues. Journalism 3.0 differs from general-market news organizations because its focus is on learning what the public is talking about and covering those matters, rather than covering the news and presuming the audience cares. Both BuzzFeed and Mashable are a little more than a decade old, compared to their Traditional journalism counterparts, which are both more than a century old. Although BuzzFeed and Mashable are both for-profit news organizations, which sets them apart from the original understanding of Constructionist news,60 Normative Criteria in Democratic Theory puts more emphasis on participation than it does on an economic model.
BuzzFeed launched in 2006 as a bot combing viral videos (often of cute cats); but the site evolved to produce original news content under the supervision of human editors, most of them with strong backgrounds in Traditional journalism, including Ben Smith from Politico, who became editor-in-chief in 2011.61 BuzzFeed is unlike any Traditional or Interactive Race Beat news organization because it relies on social media “shares” rather than people landing on its page or Googling things.62 “People are the new distribution network,” BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti said. “If people become the distribution network, that should be something good for media, good for reporting, and good for journalism, because it’s closer to humans and further away from the constraints of the medium or the particular way something will be broadcasted. People are what spreads the media, and that’s a stronger and better signal than a media company could [build alone].”63 BuzzFeed’s data asserts that 75 percent of its traffic comes from social media shares. As of 2015, BuzzFeed had grown into a large operation of 900 employees in ten bureaus globally. It had 78 million unique visitors a month, more than any Traditional news organization, and was more profitable than most news organizations.64 By 2017, BuzzFeed’s website described its demographics as having more than 200 million monthly unique visitors, half of whom were 18–34 years old. BuzzFeed’s desire to deliver what the audience wants (i.e., what is trending on social media) has led it to be a standout for coverage of contemporary racial issues. In the words of author, civil rights activist, and journalist for The Atlantic Ta-Nehisi Coates, “No publication has more aggressively dealt with diversity than BuzzFeed.”65 Additionally, BuzzFeed’s newsrooms are more than twice as racially diverse as Traditional newsrooms as a whole.66 Thirty-three percent of BuzzFeed’s editorial staff identifies as people of color.67 This is particularly compelling because it shows how BuzzFeed is following what the audience wants, and that is more and perhaps different coverage of racial issues; and audience posts on social media are the driver.
Mashable shares many characteristics with BuzzFeed, but it began with a more serious focus than cat videos. Mashable’s founder, then 19-year-old Pete Cashmore, launched the blog in 2005 to cover tech startups. Like BuzzFeed, Mashable seeks a young and digitally savvy audience and focuses first on what the audience is already talking about on social media.68 Like BuzzFeed, it began with curation and later added original content, hiring prestigious former journalists—in this case, New York Times veteran reporters and digital editors—to become executive and managing editors. According to data the company posted on its website in 2016, Mashable had 45 million unique visitors each month, with 55 percent of its traffic coming from mobile devices. To put that into context, three Mashable articles were shared every second.
Mashable provides original content, aggregation, and analysis. Like BuzzFeed, Mashable does not have a section devoted to race and it does not have reporters assigned to cover racial issues. BuzzFeed and Mashable have followed similar trajectories in that neither one started out with a desire to cover general-interest news, much less news about racial issues. Both organizations’ publications have grown rapidly, positioning BuzzFeed as having a larger audience than either of the Traditional outlets in this study and Mashable as on par with them.
The three paradigms of journalism about racial issues are devoted to covering the same broad topic from a national perspective, but their newsrooms operate within drastically different value systems. Previous research has focused on content delivery method (i.e., print versus digital) as a key difference in the way journalists work and the coverage they produce. This book examines the paradigms based on their goals and values rather than their publication platforms. Traditional journalism’s values, as reflected in its coverage of racial issues, have changed little over decades. The emerging paradigms use technology as something more than a distribution platform. These journalists leverage digital technology to foreground and elevate the voices of audience members and to help shape coverage. These values and norms are the focus of the next chapter’s journey through Traditional journalism’s problematic history of racial coverage and its fraught relationship with digital technology—and the ways in which emerging paradigms are doing things differently.