Jewels out of jargon

Back to research (and this blog) after weeks of hellish marking and exam boards. Nothing to do but read. Judging by the emptiness of my inbox, my colleagues are all doing the same. Let's make the most of it before the slash and burn of higher education starts in earnest in the autumn.

Osbourne and co may not realise it but reading is hard work, not least because some academics seem to think that writing a book or article full of jargon somehow makes them cleverer. So what if no-one understands it? Only a handful of people are going to read it anyway and they're all peers to whom you need to do a bit of showing off. This is what academic research means, as my colleagues and I are quickly discovering. The only journals which seem to count in research assessments are peer-reviewed journals with a tiny readership, often written in inpenetrable language. Never mind if you're a journalism professor like my colleague Brian Cathcart who has written some scorching exposes on the deaths at Deepcut barracks, which attracted widespread praise and high readership numbers. This is journalism, not research, he was told by our new "Associate Dean for Research and Enterprise". Isn't it a bit enterprising to carry out a major piece of investigative journalism which exposes a giant cover-up? Clearly not.

At least Times Higher Education isn't afraid to point out that much academic writing is, frankly, terrible, driven by the requirements of the RAE, and now the REF. "Much academic writing would never be read for pleasure and decidedly fits into the have-to rather than the want-to category", the paper says today. Too right.

Back to my pile of books on the sociology of the professions. Will I find any answers to my questions about challenges to journalistic professionalism in a digital age? They may be in there somewhere but prising the jewels out of the jargon is another matter.

Journalists under the microscope

One surprise to me when I started my research was how big the gap was between what academics wrote about journalism and journalistic practice and what I knew from experience actually happened in a newsroom. I've blogged about this before but I'm coming back to it because I've spent the last week reading the small number of ethnographic studies carried out in newsrooms, in which academics actually spend significant amounts of time in a newsroom absorbing and questioning what goes on, as opposed to just dropping in and carrying out interviews. Valuable though the latter is (and I'll be doing interviews as part of my field work later), ethnographic studies must provide a deeper insight, especially for academics who have never worked as journalists. As ethnographers suggest, such studies provide important insights into the process of journalism, as opposed to the end product.

But with a few honourable exceptions, including my colleague at Brunel University, Sarah Niblock, ethnographies seem thin on the ground, especially in the UK. Why is this? Money, possibly. It's pretty difficult to spend months in a newsroom if you have to earn a living at the same time (a problem I'm already confronting when thinking about the shape of my research). A generous chunk of external funding, of the sort US academics seem to be able to access, is very helpful. Time, definitely. And access. Many academics haven't had the newsroom contacts necessary to persuade journalists to let them observe and interrogate them for long periods of time. But as Niblock and Machin (2006) suggest, this is changing as more journalists move into the academy bringing with them useful contact books and access to newsrooms

This must be a good thing.

In with chaos, out with control

We are living in an era of cultural chaos. Traditional boundaries between journalists and readers are eroding, old certainties of left and right and control of the news agenda by elite groups have disappeared and technology makes communication, comment and dissent possible for anyone with a PC and a broadband connection. Not completely new territory for a journalism academic over the past few years but what makes Brian McNair's book entertaining as well as interesting is his obvious delight in attacking the traditional obsession of sociologists with the idea that the media are part of a ruling-class conspiracy to feed propaganda and dumbed-down pap to the downtrodden masses -what McNair calls the "control model".

This might have made sense when the world was divided into capitalist and communist spheres of influence and debate took place against an ideological backdrop of competing social and economic systems, says McNair, but no longer. The new era of cultural chaos opens the way for a new flourishing of democratic accountability and vigorous debate.

Hints that his bouncy enthusiasm isn't universally popular with his fellow-academics surface most clearly at the end of the book. What is left for scholars to critique, one academic asks, if his cultural optimism is justified? Or to put it more journalistically, what are we going to write about if bad news is no longer good news?

Journalists and academics - we need both

As soon as I uploaded my last blog post, I started feeling guilty. Was I being arrogant (or simply thick) in criticising the work of doubtless highly intellectual academics who have spent years analysing journalistic processes and output? Should I just stick to journalistic practice, keep writing and uploading, and let others do the reflecting? No, I don't think so. As Sarah Niblock and David Machin say, the big change in journalism studies (I hate the word "studies" but I'll use it for want of a better one) over the past few years is that more and more practising journalists have crossed the divide to academia as university journalism courses proliferate.

Journalism research is now increasingly carried out by people who have actually worked in a newsroom. They know, for example, that the pressures when you're on deadline are multiple and you're not just quoting a source because they're official and you have some kind of agenda to tow a corporate line but because he or she is the only useful person you can find to give you a quote before the deadline.

This understanding must be a good thing and allow researchers with a background in journalism rather than academia to provide new insights into what drives journalists and journalism.

But it works both ways. In common with, I suspect, most of my colleagues, I spent precious little time in newsrooms reflecting on what I was doing. I certainly developed an instinct for what made a story and what constituted a "good story" for my publication. But I don't kid myself that I thought deeply about issues like proprietorial interference or the fact that my publishers, R. Maxwell followed by R. Murdoch, owned vast swathes of newspapers and TV stations across the UK. It wasn't until I changed careers for academia that I realised people had written whole shelves of books about concentration of ownership. And that this is an area of serious concern.

The industry needs commentators who are distanced from the "do it now" culture of the newsroom. Just as much as it needs journalists who do more than churn out another press release.

Back with the sociologists

Back with the sociologists and more reading about theories of production and consumption of news. Sociologists seem to like nothing better than to create a neat theory and try to fit the facts to the theory (I thought scientists preferred to work from the facts but still...) So you argue that media coverage is totally shaped by economic forces and proprietors bent on making profits. Or you analyse the workings of the newsroom as a series of routines and meetings with sources as journalists working hand in glove with officials, bureaucrats and big corporations. News is a "social construct", dominated by the opinions of "elites".

Or, breaking away from the dead hand of Marxism and elitism, you argue that the way journalists cover stories is underpinned by "cultural givens" which journalists themselves don't realise they're drawing on when they write a story. Media stereotypes of ethnic minorities and gays are "cultural givens", as is journalists' "news sense", which journalists seem unable to define to the satisfaction of the sociologists.

Much of what academics write about news and news values has an element of truth but many of the theories are just too neat. Maybe academics need to spend more time in newsrooms and they'd realise how chaotic and random it often is when news is breaking. And more than ever when online sources of information are proliferating and you don't just have to worry about what the midday Evening Standard is saying (those were the days) but also who's saying what on Twitter, blogs, other news sites. As one journalist told sociologist Graham Murdock: "News and news programmes could almost be called random reactions to random events. " In other words, news is event-driven. Which even the sociologists are admitting is an interesting research area.