The killing of an unarmed African American teen in Ferguson, Missouri, at the hands of a white police officer marked a change in news coverage of racial issues. Journalists, for the first time in more than a quarter-century, voted a story about racial violence as the most important story of the year.1 Sadly, the killing of Michael Brown , Jr., was not unique. It was not the first or only time in 2014 that police killed an unarmed African American man—even in St. Louis County.2 Ferguson, the most-used hashtag in Twitter’s first decade, came to represent attention to a movement that expanded well past that city’s borders. What happened in Ferguson appears to have served as a catalyst for journalists to attend to issues of racial violence in new—and transformational—ways. Journalists began to go beyond chronicling disparate incidents in what became a weekly, sometimes daily, litany of names of people of color, including children, who were killed in encounters with law enforcement: Tamir Rice, Anthony McKinney, Eric Harris, Walter Scott, Samuel DuBose, Freddie Gray, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Charleena Lyles, Rekia Boyd, Mya Hall, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, and others. Journalists began to examine these deaths as a nationwide symptom of a systemic problem.
This book has shown how news coverage has changed over time from the election of the country’s first African American president through the release of a Department of Justice report showing racial bias in the Ferguson police department—and confirming the accounts told to reporters by so many of the protesters in Ferguson. The findings show changes in specific facets of coverage, and some sameness in other facets. The examination looks across new paradigms of journalism enabled by digital technologies because looking at change required understanding how the field has widened. The lenses of new institutionalism, Democratic Theory, Critical Race Theory, and the Hierarchy of Influences Model helped distinguish models of journalism and examine areas of resistance and change. Analysis of news narratives in Traditional and emerging paradigms coupled with interviews with journalists who produced the coverage provides compelling insights that hint at where the field may be heading. The findings help illustrate what facilitated the shift in Traditional journalism, how the two emerging paradigms took different approaches, and what this might mean for the future of reporting on race. In this final chapter, I bring together the findings from the narrative analysis in Chap. 3 and the interviews with reporters in Chap. 4 to compare how they align or diverge across paradigms.
Journalists’ Coverage Mirrors Their Values
This work presents strong evidence that Traditional journalism about racial issues has shifted and will continue to become more democratic, more nuanced, and more contextualized. These findings mark a significant departure from research that showed Traditional journalism entrenched in long-term patterns reliant on elite sourcing, reporting racial violence as episodic and surprising, an avoidance of discussion of racism as systemic, and an adherence to the norm of objectivity.3 In the cases of Interactive Race Beat and Journalism 3.0, these findings represent a new area of research and provide a baseline for future analyses. Traditional journalists initially did not produce coverage that aligned with their stated work routines and values. However, this changed over time during and after the civil unrest in Ferguson. Journalists in Traditional and Interactive Race Beat paradigms said they noticed shifts in coverage of racial issues after Ferguson. In that way, the narrative analysis and the interview data aligned. For example, The Washington Post’s Lowery was self-reflective about his disappointment with his early coverage of Ferguson. He described having been dismissive of African American residents’ claims of historic and ongoing police unfairness. He said he regretted not initially focusing on issues of ongoing discrimination, which appeared in later coverage (and ultimately resulted in a Pulitzer Prize). After Ferguson, Traditional coverage went from being dominated by elites to reflecting popular inclusion. Narratives of the conflict went from depicting dangerous, disorganized protesters to depicting an empowered civil rights movement. Awareness of systemic racism went from questioning whether the US was post-racial to showing where and how racism endured.
In interviews with Traditional journalists, all of whom covered Ferguson, they described their values and routines with a mix of Representative Liberal and Constructionist statements. For example, all interviewees expressed the importance of having “everyday people” in their coverage and all decried the practice of “parachute journalism” in which journalists unfamiliar with a place arrive from out of town and try to characterize that place. However, initially, Traditional coverage of the post-racial question, the Black Lives Matter movement, and Ferguson did not reflect these values. Only after Ferguson did Traditional coverage and the interview responses both show Constructionist values of privileging the voices of the oppressed and presenting racism as systemic. Traditional coverage during the later weeks of the unrest in Ferguson and thereafter showed sustained movement from Representative Liberal to mostly Constructionist. In the Traditional paradigm, shifts were pronounced and tied to later coverage of Ferguson.
This work is an early dive into the emerging paradigm of Interactive Race Beat coverage. Interactive Race Beat coverage stayed mostly within the Discursive paradigm with one exception: sourcing in coverage of Ferguson. That was the only time Code Switch moved from a Discursive sourcing pattern of popular inclusion to a Constructionist value of privileging the voices of the oppressed. In the interviews, reporters expressed Constructionist rather than Discursive values in regard to the norm of objectivity. Interactive Race Beat reporters said journalism’s notion of objectivity reinforces whiteness as normative and fails to acknowledge whiteness as an identity. Interactive Race Beat coverage aligned with Discursive values of keeping the conversation going while adding in new elements to complicate the questions.4 It is particularly compelling that Interactive Race Beat journalism is housed within Traditional outlets, yet it does not emulate Traditional coverage patterns nor do its reporters espouse Traditional values. This means two things: Traditional journalism organizations are not exerting professional control over their Interactive Race Beat newsrooms, and the journalists who work in Interactive Race Beat outlets do not feel bound to Traditional norms and values.
In Journalism 3.0, also an emerging paradigm that hasn’t yet been extensively studied in comparison to Traditional news, particularly in the context of racial issues, the narrative analysis and interviews with reporters aligned across all facets. The coverage matched the way the journalists talked about their routines and values in Constructionist terms. At the fore was an understanding of systemic racism portrayed through the stories of people who experience it. This paradigm was the only one in which coverage was consistent and aligned with journalists’ values and routines. That consistency shows a deep sense of intentional identity has been established in this emerging, born-digital paradigm. This paradigm is the fastest growing and is the most popular among a younger demographic that is more diverse and more attuned than ever to public-affairs news. That opens questions for future research exploring this up-and-coming audience and the ways in which its news needs are being met across paradigms.
Consistency and Change over Time
These shifts and consistencies raise questions about why Traditional journalism changed while Interactive Race Beat and Journalism 3.0 remained consistent. Several factors that may have influenced change and sameness in each paradigm include increased newsroom diversity, digital technology (particularly smartphones and Twitter), the election of the nation’s first African American president, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the civil unrest in Ferguson.
Newsroom Diversity
Understanding to what extent newsroom diversity played a role in Traditional journalism’s shift is a complex matter, especially given that newsrooms have grown less diverse relative to the population. To evaluate this influence, I looked at the narrative analysis over time, compared it to historical patterns from previous journalism studies, and considered those in the context of the interviews with journalists. I concluded that increased diversity in the newsroom played a role in the shift, but may not have if not for other factors occurring at the same time.
News organizations’ goal of having staffs that mirror the demographic of the communities they serve has grown increasingly out of reach. Newspaper newsroom diversity peaked in 2006.5 During the time newsroom diversity rates were rising, coverage of racial issues continued to reproduce problematic patterns, reinforce stereotypes, cover racial violence as unique and surprising, and produce coverage that was systemically unaware.6 Despite the growth in newsroom diversity, journalists did not vote racial violence among the top ten most important stories until after Ferguson. For example, the 2009 murder of Oscar Grant in Oakland was the subject of the 2013 biographical drama Fruitvale Station, which won the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and Best First Film at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival. Grant was shot in the back as he lay handcuffed on the floor of a subway car. The story received less attention than Ferguson. But in 2014, 2015, and 2016, journalists voted issues of racial violence as among the ten most important stories of the year. In that time, newsroom diversity rates declined.7 In the two years that the American Society of News Editors has been taking a census of “minorities” in newsroom leadership roles, the percentage of people of color in newsroom management roles dropped to 12 percent in 2015, which is 3 percent lower than it was in 2014.8 Reporters and newsroom managers who are people of color have lost numbers and influence in newsrooms. Yet, journalists paid increased attention to racial violence, and coverage became more systemically aware. As The Undefeated’s Soraya McDonald noted, hiring reporters who are people of color is not enough to change newsroom culture. Code Switch’s Gene Demby said people of color shouldn’t be pigeonholed to cover issues of race because, for some, “They want to write about everything… They want to be brown people who talk about boring Senate judiciary hearings.”9 Thus, newsroom diversity plays an important role in bringing lived experience into the newsroom and providing non-hegemonic perspectives, but newsroom diversity alone cannot account for, and should not be made responsible for improving racial coverage in Traditional journalism.
Interactive Race Beat newsrooms are staffed entirely or almost entirely by people of color—particularly in leadership positions. Many reporters in this paradigm came from Traditional newsrooms. The two reporters interviewed in this analysis both identified a lack of newsroom diversity as one reason they left Traditional journalism. Both focused on intersectionality and the multi-faceted identities of the people with whom they now worked as important to providing depth, breadth, and nuance in their coverage. In this paradigm, newsroom diversity strongly influenced sameness and was cited by interviewees as essential to producing this type of coverage.
Newsroom diversity also helps explain the sameness of Journalism 3.0. In 2014, BuzzFeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith, who is a white man, posted a “manifesto” on the website that stated, “Diversity in BuzzFeed’s editorial operation isn’t a side project or a special initiative. It’s core to how we operate and how we hire.”10 BuzzFeed’s report on editorial staff diversity shows it to be more than twice as racially diverse as Traditional newsrooms. The value of diversity was specifically noted by the only two white respondents in this study, both of whom worked in Journalism 3.0. Colin Daileda of Mashable and Evan McMorris-Santoro, formerly of BuzzFeed, both cited the importance of diversity on their staffs as essential to covering stories of lived experiences. Both also noted vetting story ideas with colleagues who were people of color. Thus, newsroom diversity seems to plausibly be a contributing factor to Journalism 3.0’s consistency.
Mobile Digital Technology
This study also considered mobile digital technology, especially smartphones and Twitter, as possibly influencing sameness or change in the three different models of journalism. Traditional journalists have been reluctant to interact with the audience via technology.11 In the two emerging paradigms, engaging with the audience via digital technologies is part of their mission, but how they interact with the audience via technology is not a given. Whether journalists would carry Traditional values into new paradigms was an important question.
In Traditional journalism, the influence of technology alone was not enough to explain the shifts in coverage and journalists’ values. The level of influence of technology depends on the user, which in this case includes the journalists and their audience. The Traditional journalists interviewed described embracing technology—but only for some uses. Traditional journalists said that they use social media primarily to read the work of other journalists, to monitor popular conversations on Twitter, and to distribute their own work. Analysis of their work shows that they do not, for example, quote sources from Twitter or curate Twitter content into their articles as Journalism 3.0 journalists do. The Times’s John Eligon said his editor encourages him to use Twitter to promote his own expertise in covering racial issues,12 which mirrors a Traditional value of using technology as just another publishing platform rather than as a way to engage with readers. Eligon noted that he sees journalists using social media “to really see more upfront what’s going on in terms of some of the injustices”13 and to pay attention to what goes viral. Thus, the influence of technology was present, but not significant in influencing the shift in Traditional journalism.
In Interactive Race Beat journalism coverage, technology was a factor influencing consistency. Code Switch seeks to carry on a conversation with its audiences about diversity issues. When NPR shut down online comments on its website, the conversation space simply moved. The conversation continued and, according to Demby, flourished more robustly on Twitter because Twitter was where Code Switch’s audience already was living. Interactive Race Beat reporters said they use social media to monitor the larger conversations taking place about racial issues. They then leverage social media to begin a dialogue about those issues by digging deeply into their complexity rather than providing daily chronicling of ongoing events.
Interactive Race Beat coverage is not so much seeking to push back against Traditional coverage as it is trying to expand the conversation by including more context and viewpoints. Technology plays a strong role in maintaining that Discursive element. Technology in Journalism 3.0 serves as a key influence in maintaining its Constructionist approach. Reporters said they are leveraging technology to know what the conversations are, to find the people who are having them, to curate social media posts of the voices of the oppressed, and also to do something very non-technological: to go talk to people in person. Journalism 3.0 journalists use technology, but value going into the field to interview everyday people in the places where the news is happening. This is a more grassroots approach than the other two paradigms took. Thus, technology is a strong influence in consistently keeping Journalism 3.0 in the Constructionist paradigm both because journalists are leveraging and because they are not relying on it alone.
The Election of President Barack Obama
The election of the nation’s first African American president is best addressed in the Traditional paradigm because the Interactive Race Beat paradigm did not exist until several years into Obama’s presidency and Journalism 3.0 was not yet covering racial issues when Obama ran. That said, there are insights across all three paradigms about the post-racial question that emerged with Obama’s candidacy. Obama’s election appears to have influenced how journalists cover race, but in a way I had not considered: generationally. The journalists I interviewed were mostly in their 20s and 30s, meaning they entered the field in the Obama era, where politics and race were always considered together.
Early Traditional coverage of Obama labeled him unquestioningly as “post-racial,” later began debating whether the nation was post-racial, then finally made a sharp turn in declaring that was not the case. As the civil unrest in Ferguson flared and sustained, the question all but disappeared from the Traditional news narrative. In this way, Obama’s election brought racial issues to the fore, at first in a narrative that asked if the nation was now past racial issues being a factor, but later in a way that showed racism remained and the systems that maintained it deserved critical scrutiny. Thus, the post-racial question that emerged with Obama’s candidacy and election represented a strong influence of change in Traditional journalism. If the question had never emerged, its complexities might not have been questioned with the same vehemence.
Interactive Race Beat journalism seems to have emerged almost in response to the post-racial question that emerged with Obama’s election. The project was funded by a Knight Foundation grant in response to a need for more attention by news media to racial issues.
Three years later, ESPN launched The Undefeated to address what it saw as missing from Traditional coverage. Thus, the post-racial question was a factor underpinning not only Interactive Race Beat coverage but the existence of the paradigm. Without the post-racial question, or the attention brought to issues of race after Obama was elected, it is conceivable that such attention to racial issues might not have risen to the level it did. It would seem, in the case of Code Switch, that the existence of the question showed a need for more thoughtful coverage of racial issues. The subsequent development of ESPN’s The Undefeated is not enough evidence to constitute a trend, but it does show growth in this paradigm.
Journalism 3.0 didn’t pay much time or attention to the post-racial question. That is likely partially because BuzzFeed was still focused on cat videos and Mashable was covering only high-tech issues at the time Obama was first elected. Journalism 3.0 outlets never took up the post-racial question, even as Traditional outlets were popularizing the narrative and explaining how the US had “not yet” achieved post-racialism. It’s possible Journalism 3.0 never took up the issue because it considered that question unworthy of addressing. The influence of the post-racial question on Journalism 3.0 could be considered in two ways: it had minimal influence because it wasn’t covered, or it had strong influence because Journalism 3.0 refused to pick up on a prevalent narrative in Traditional journalism. My interpretation bends toward the latter, with Journalism 3.0 showing editorial independence in ignoring the post-racial question.
The Black Lives Matter Movement
The influence of the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement is difficult to determine because it was always covered in the context of other issues, from Ferguson to the presidential election—though not, notably, in the context of the killing of Trayvon Martin, which was the catalyst for its formation. As of May 1, 2018, the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag had been used 30 million times and persisted over five years, spiking when racial violence made headlines.14 Initially, the movement received little attention in any paradigm. After Ferguson, however, it received a substantial amount of coverage, mostly in Journalism 3.0 coverage.
The Black Lives Matter movement didn’t make Traditional news headlines until the killing of Michael Brown, Jr., in Ferguson, when coverage often misattributed the birth of the movement as a reaction to Brown’s death. Traditional journalism initially portrayed the movement as rowdy, ineffectual, disorganized, and divisive and compared it to the more well-established NAACP. The movement gained respect in Traditional coverage when it began to interact with more official systems, such as the presidential primary. The Post’s Lowery attributed this to Traditional journalism values of “order” and said Traditional journalists “like covering people who have spokespeople” and hierarchy. When the movement was just “people in the streets yelling things,”15 it was not legitimized in Traditional coverage. Only after it began intersecting with institutions journalists knew well, like campaigns, did it receive serious coverage. Lowery’s sentiments aligned with the findings in the narrative analysis. It appears that the Black Lives Matter movement was only influential in the context of Ferguson and the presidential election. So, although sourcing, narratives, and systemic awareness of racism in Black Lives Matter coverage all shifted from Representative Liberal to Constructionist, this occurred largely in terms of other newsworthy events. In that way, the Black Lives Matter movement seems to have contributed only slightly to the shift in Traditional journalism because it was influential only in the context of other “official” events.
In the Interactive Race Beat paradigm, the Black Lives Matter movement presented an ideal opportunity for the kind of multi-faceted dialogue the Discursive paradigm values. Interactive Race Beat coverage was the only paradigm to focus on the movement itself and the only one to examine its intersectional roots and goals. A decentered movement with a complex mission fit well with the Discursive paradigm’s desire to explore complex, non-binary issues. Code Switch covered the movement in a way that went beyond Traditional coverage of competition among civil rights groups, questioning whether the movement was effective, questioning what the movement’s next steps might be, or covering events. Code Switch covered the movement more from a historical and philosophical perspective by focusing on its roots and also how it was different from previous civil rights movements in that it was intersectional and decentered. Interactive Race Beat coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement did not seek to debate whether it was effective, focus on arguments over identity politics, or question the movement’s lack of hierarchy. Instead, it focused on the fact the movement existed—that there was a need for a decentered, intersectional, reinvigorated civil rights movement that was more inclusive, more grassroots, and more radical. Interactive Race Beat coverage focused on the concerns of the movement itself, showing how racial oppression persisted and how the understanding of the struggle for civil rights has grown to encompass issues of gender, sexuality, class, and citizenship. In Interactive Race Beat coverage, the onus was not on the movement to make change, but to bring awareness of and debate about these issues. Thus, the Black Lives Matter movement influenced consistency in the Interactive Race Beat paradigm.
Journalism 3.0 coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement was the most substantive.
The Post’s Lowery said he admired Sands’s coverage of the movement in BuzzFeed and felt Sands covered it like a political story or a political campaign—in other words, with a sense of legitimacy, rather than as a series of protests. The narrative analysis and the interviews both showed that reporters in Journalism 3.0 valued and included “everyday” people at the grassroots, even curating rather than filtering and paraphrasing protestors’ social media posts. Unlike Traditional coverage, which questioned the legitimacy and efficacy of the movement, and Interactive Race Beat coverage, which focused on the broadness and inclusiveness of the movement, Journalism 3.0 coverage focused on the power of the movement as a disruptive force, particularly in political contexts. In that way, it was the opposite of early Traditional coverage. Journalism 3.0 coverage of the movement consistently showed Black Lives Matter as an actor on a presidential political stage while also focusing on how the movement’s power came from widespread, prolific, grassroots support. In this way, it was shown as empowering the disenfranchised to earn the attention of presidential candidates and other powerful elites. The Black Lives Matter movement influenced sameness in Journalism 3.0.
Ferguson
Finally, I turn to the influence of the coverage of Ferguson, which is the site of confluence of all the factors I considered. The events in Ferguson represented the largest civil unrest to be covered using new technologies that allowed everyday people with smartphones (particularly a younger, more racially diverse audience that is more attuned to public-affairs news) to broadcast live feeds on Twitter and to participate in hashtag activism. The unrest in Ferguson happened during the Obama presidency, after the creation of the Black Lives Matter movement, after the creation of new journalism paradigms devoted to national coverage of racial issues, and was reported on by more diverse newsroom staffs than seen in previous decades.
Ferguson was the ideal moment to examine what influenced reporting about racial issues across all three paradigms. Both the narrative analysis and the interview responses of the journalists show significant changes in Traditional journalism after the people of Ferguson took to the streets, and that this change in coverage remained long after protesters disappeared. Although Traditional coverage of Ferguson initially reflected the same old problematic ways racial issues had been covered, this quickly and dramatically changed. The Post’s Lowery described his regret at initially not listening or giving credence to the accounts of everyday protesters complaining about racial profiling, something which he later corrected. Other Traditional reporters described relying on their own lived experiences to help their reporting. The Post’s Krissah Thompson first contacted the African American-oriented newspaper in St. Louis to learn the lay of the land because she had worked for an African American-oriented newspaper in her hometown of Houston and knew where to find that voice. Eligon wrote about stories of motorists who couldn’t pay traffic fines being thrown in jail in part because he had a family member with a similar experience.
Traditional reporters relied on technology to find the voices of the people to talk to, to know where to go to interview “everyday” people. And although they began covering Ferguson as a rare place where racism had inexplicably flared, they abruptly switched to document a history of systemic oppression, not just in Ferguson but also in communities across the country. Coverage of Ferguson brought together all aspects of influence not only to tell the stories of August 2014 but to tell the larger stories that followed not just for months but for more than a year afterward. Thus, the events in Ferguson strongly contributed to shifts in Traditional coverage.
Interactive Race Beat coverage showed a slight shift in coverage of Ferguson in that it privileged the voices of the oppressed in ways it did not across the other events, but the shift was relatively small. In coverage of Ferguson, Interactive Race Beat journalists used technology to curate social media responses of protesters. They also produced a considerable amount of first-person coverage in which they discussed their experiences as people of color covering issues of race. For the most part, however, Interactive Race Beat coverage of Ferguson was part of an ongoing Discursive conversation about racial issues. It did not substantially influence Interactive Race Beat coverage. This sameness is significant because it shows the strength of paradigmatic values and identity within the Interactive Race Beat paradigm and its reluctance to reflect the Traditional values that house them.
Journalism 3.0 remained strictly Constructionist in response to Ferguson, which is interpreted as Ferguson being an influence of sameness for this paradigm. Because Journalism 3.0 has not been widely studied in regard to coverage of racial issues, this study presents an important benchmark for future research. What is noteworthy, though, is how much Traditional coverage began to take on the values of Journalism 3.0 and that Traditional journalists also espoused Constructionist values.
Ferguson Compelled a Movement
This research shows a movement, not a moment, in Traditional journalism. The shift in coverage after Ferguson and the ways Traditional reporters who cover racial issues described rejecting Traditional values represents a new trajectory. Both narrative analysis and interviews with journalists show how news coverage after Ferguson was different in terms of what was produced and how Traditional journalists thought about their coverage. That said, the shift was a movement that built slowly over time, beginning with the election of Barack Obama, enabled by smartphones and Twitter, moved only minimally by gains in newsroom diversity that later receded, aided somewhat by the voice—both online and in the streets—of the Black Lives Matter movement. When taken together, this convergence of influences facilitated a movement in journalism about race.
Journalism history shows us Traditional journalism doesn’t change easily. Its patterns, norms, habits, and values have endured through numerous technological revolutions from the advent of TV news to computers in the newsroom to electronic pagination. Therefore, I believe new paradigms such as Interactive Race Beat and Journalism 3.0 did not “push” Traditional journalism to be different, nor was Traditional journalism responding to the emerging paradigms. Rather, Traditional journalism changed because it was responding to changing demographics, technology that enabled that more racially diverse demographic, and the political landscape. To return to Columbia University Political Science Professor Fredrick Harris’s Washington Post column, which asked whether Ferguson would be a “moment or a movement,” Ferguson crystallized a movement in journalism. The movement was characterized not only by changes in Traditional news coverage but also by changes in the way reporters viewed and conducted their work to better reflect the lived experiences of people experiencing oppression and to contextualize those experiences into a larger narrative of widespread racism. Journalists shifted away from reliance on elite voices, detachment, and questioning of “Was X racist?” to privileging the voices of the oppressed, an empowerment narrative, and a greater degree of systemic awareness.
Why toward Constructionist rather than Discursive? I hypothesize that this is because Traditional journalism is still largely about telling a story rather than beginning a discussion. In this case, the sourcing shifted from elites talking about people to “everyday” people talking about their own experiences. The narrative is the most important in the Constructionist paradigm, which values those everyday voices.16 People who live the issue and people who study the issue offer different types of expertise, but both largely speak to specific issues rather than opening theoretical debates.
Ferguson also represented a movement in terms of a widening news media ecology that now includes Interactive Race Beat and Journalism 3.0. Because Journalism 3.0 has a larger, younger, and growing audience share, I posit that the public is embracing this new type of Constructionist coverage and will continue to do so. The younger audiences who are the largest consumers of this coverage imbued with Constructionist values may come to demand those values in their news coverage and may quickly abandon news that does not reflect them. That demand would take the form of a younger audience increasingly migrating away from Traditional journalism if it continues to embrace Representative Liberal values. News organizations such as BuzzFeed may still be struggling to be seen as serious, but are becoming increasingly legitimized because of the quality of their coverage, the rate of their growth, and because they have captured the elusive and desirable 18- to 25-year-old demographic—and not just with cat videos but with hard news coverage constructed and delivered in new ways.
Interactive Race Beat journalism has a less certain future, but at least for the time being has started new conversations that widen understanding of complex issues. Interactive Race Beat journalism has less in common with the other two paradigms, and only time will tell if this new kind of journalism about race will continue to grow or will be viewed as more niche-oriented. One advantage for news organizations such as Code Switch and The Undefeated is that they are housed within Traditional outlets and thus have access to the larger NPR and ESPN audiences that trend older and whiter than Journalism 3.0 audiences. This means they are less likely to be seen as verticals produced for niche audiences and more likely to be seen as part of the overall news priorities of their parent organizations. Given this broader journalism ecology of news about race, the values of the reporters producing it, the growing diversity in Journalism 3.0 newsrooms, and the younger, more racially diverse, more socially aware audience’s ability to bring attention to issues via social media, I predict this trend toward increased and Constructionist coverage of racial issues will continue.
Going Forward: New Institutionalism Erodes
Critical Race Theory tells us that showing the lived experiences of people who experience oppression has the power to rupture stereotypes.17 One of the tenets added in 2014 to the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics seems to have been a harbinger of the change. SPJ called on journalists to “Boldly tell the story of the diversity and magnitude of the human experience. Seek sources whose voices we seldom hear.” In the wake of Ferguson, Traditional journalism shifted to honor that tenet. The Interactive Race Beat paradigm provides daily examples of that type of coverage. Journalism 3.0 coverage prioritizes hearing from the oppressed. Because news narratives play an important role in shaping how audiences understand people whose lived experiences are different from their own,18 these new narratives have the potential to influence larger conversations about racial issues, to interrogate systems, and to disrupt stereotypes. As this understanding becomes more widespread, it has the potential to affect policy decisions and to weaken systems and institutions that have for decades served to reinforce institutionalized racism.
But what about journalism as an institution—one that was called out by the Ferguson Commission as needing anti-bias training? For decades, new institutionalism has maintained journalism’s organizational culture and unofficial rules. That culture and those rules have been shown to play a role in facilitating problematic coverage of racial issues in Traditional journalism. This study showed something quite different. Journalists’ coverage of racial issues and the ways in which they described their work routines and values broke away from old rules. The new paradigms appear to have isolated themselves from the old ways; this is true even of Interactive Race Beat journalism, which is housed within Traditional news organizations.
Journalists working in the new paradigms are establishing new rules, newsroom culture, values, and routines. In all cases, these new cultures are critical, self-aware, explicit, questioning, and less hierarchical than those of journalism’s past. Technology has played a role in those changes, both in enabling the new paradigms and enabling the ways in which they interact with the audience. Because technology can have a democratizing influence, because mobile digital technology is widely available, because the nation and newsrooms (some more than others) are becoming increasingly diverse, this transformation is likely to continue. It may lead to coverage of racial issues that is more democratic, more representational, and more systemically aware than anything we have seen in US journalism.
Objectivity Becoming Obsolete?
Although this study focuses on news about racial issues and the reporters who cover it, some of the journalism norms, habits, and values it explores stretch across topics of coverage. The devaluing of long-held norms might affect other types of coverage and the field more generally. Foremost is reporters’, across paradigms, strong rejection of the idea of objectivity in reportage. Among reporters who cover racial issues, objectivity ties directly to identity and lived experience. But some research has shown cracks in this norm in other beats, such as coverage of environmental issues. Race is socially constructed, making it easier to view in subjective terms. But science journalism, a beat dedicated to facticity, has also struggled with what a Columbia Journalism Review article described as “our tortured relationship with objectivity.”19 “Balance equals bias” has become a popular phrase in environmental journalism, where field norms compel reporters to give “both sides.”20 This “false balance” has been the cause of significant debate, since the early 2000s, among journalists who cover environmental issues.21 If the field as a whole is ready to acknowledge the fundamental problems with objectivity as a goal, the effect on coverage would be more of a sea change than a ripple.
Conclusion
Journalism as a field is in transition. New paradigms are emerging and beliefs and practices that have been entrenched for decades are evolving into new ways of understanding and doing. How these changes might continue to manifest—or not—has the power to shape our society. The shifts in journalism suggested in this research may indicate societal changes or the emergence of new belief systems. Journalism serves a larger cultural role than simply documenting daily events. News coverage feeds conversations at dinner tables and in the halls of power. It helps create deeper understanding around the most important issues of the day, and it raises awareness about what is at stake and for whom.
Journalism reflects and investigates what is going on in society, but society also influences journalism. This iterative loop has multiplied with the advent of social media. How journalists understand their roles, how their beliefs are situated within the field, how they interact with or resist interaction with their audiences, the pressures within their news organizations, and the type of coverage that results from all of that contribute to wider discourses that have the power to influence change or the maintenance of the status quo. Decades of previous studies have overwhelmingly found that news coverage has worked to preserve the status quo. This study found something different. Deeper examination into reporters’ values and the coverage they produce moves us toward a better understanding of how the field is transitioning, what is influencing those shifts, and how that might shape the future of journalism, and what that might mean for larger public discourse.