Rewrite time

From the nature of convergence to the impact of the digital newsroom on professional journalistic identity. The emphasis of my research has shifted more substantially than I realised over the past year (mainly because I didn't look at my research questions for months on end but just kept on reading in the tiny cracks of time between teaching and marking).

When I looked yesterday at the research aims and objectives I wrote at the beginning of the year, they looked dull and shallow. So I've completely rewritten them to reflect my more recent reading and to focus on what for me is a far more interesting question than the nature of convergence - what it means as a journalist to be a professional and how that professionalism is being challenged now that readers can insult them in comment boxes and blog in a parallel universe.

Cue piles of books on sociology, ethnography and the workings of groups and organisations, all vast areas of scholarship, as I'm now starting to realise. I keep telling myself that I may not be a sociologist by training (or at all) but that journalism studies at Sheffield is in the Faculty of Social Sciences, which gives me what sociologists might call a "pseudo-legitimacy".

My next task after a week's holiday next week: to draft two chapters of 8,000 words each on the context of my research and a review of the literature. I've worked out that if I write 1,700 words a day I should be able to do it in two weeks. Just keep writing....

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.

Fast reading isn't always good reading

A welcome research week before the onslaught of semester 2 begins. It's so long since I had any sustained time to work on my PhD that it takes me a day to remind myself of some of the main themes of my research so far. I start reading through a stack of journal articles only to find that I must have already read them, because they're covered with underlining and my scribbled comments. Worryingly, I have no memory of any of the content of these articles, or even of having read them, so I go through them again and make notes on the main themes and arguments. Not exactly an efficient use of time but as I'm discovering, one of the most difficult aspects of doing a PhD in the gaps between the rest of my job is that the process of research is very disjointed. I read fast because I have limited time, but how useful is this if I can't remember what I've read? There must be a better way...

Flawed research methodology?

Back to the blog after more than a month's absence which is not good. For the last month, marking, one of the least exciting elements of a lecturer's job, has badly skewed my work-life balance. But I have managed to fit in writing my first academic assignment for more than six years - a critique of a the research methodology of a published paper on the links between media systems in four different countries and levels of public knowledge in those countries. The assignment was for the research methods module I have been doing as part of my PhD research training programme at Sheffield and I found it worryingly easy to critique the methodology of the paper. Worrying for two reasons: a) I may be wrong and my tutor will think I'm at best naive and at worst, stupid or b) I may be right and research papers get published regularly with flawed methodology. We'll see. I won't name the paper until I see what grade I get....



In the meantime, I'm catching up on what else is going on. The BBC hasn't been idle and has launched a new journalism training academy. The BBC Academy is not just for journalists but for all licence payers. All the BBC training materials I've seen are slick and expensive, as befits an organisation with plenty of licence fee money at its disposal. Will university journalism schools buckle under the competition?

It's 5am - it must be research methods

A sabbatical is a huge luxury as I'm now realising. After six weeks back at work, I've managed to read a grand total of three journal articles and have temporarily almost forgotten what my research is about. Almost, not quite, because I reread my draft contextual chapter last week and could hardly believe I'd written it.

Every Friday I get up at 5am to catch a train to Sheffield to atttend a Research Methods seminar. All very useful stuff but I'm so tired by the time I get there from London that I can hardly make my brain connect. My fellow PhD students are all full time and have the luxury of sitting in the library all day.

But. I have a full time job as an academic and they don't. Getting an academic job is the reason why most people do PhDs. I've just done things the other way round and I don't have to get a PhD to keep my job. I'm doing research because I want to, as I have to keep reminding myself. Will this be enough incentive to carry me through the next six years? It's going to have to be.

A good start....

A good start - my supervisor was pleased with my draft contextual chapter. This didn't mean she didn't have questions and comments about what I'd written. It would have been worrying (if flattering) if she'd told me everything was marvellous. Now I've got to get on with the next phase - formulating my main research questions. I did this at the very beginning, when I applied to Sheffield in the first place and submitted a research proposal. But as I formulated a series of questions off the top of my head in an hour between teaching first year Approaches to Journalism and second year Online Journalism, it's fair to say the questions need work. Just maybe not today. No pressure...

The first draft...of many

After three months of reading, I'm now going to force myself to write a draft (doubtless the first of many) of my "contextual" chapter, in which I try and make sense of everything I've read and link it to my research. I know it's going to be good for me when I start, like five-a-day, or going for a run before work. And it's not as if I'm not used to deadlines. Maybe what's putting me off is that every time I try to summon up some of the arguments and ideas from what I've read recently, it all slides out of my head. Maybe it's because my journalistic instinct would be to start by going into newsrooms and interviewing people about how their jobs are changing in an online environment, rather than reading what other people say about it. But academics clearly work the other way round - lots of reading, then some drafting, then the fieldwork, where you might start to find out something new. Sometime next year.

I never thought I'd say this but too much reading may not be a good thing. Order will come through writing. Or at least I hope so. Otherwise the next six years are going to be hard going.

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.

Time to take stock

Exactly half way through my sabbatical - eight weeks gone and eight weeks to go, so time to take stock. What have I learned about my research area? And just as important, what have I learned about the process of research? Part of the purpose of writing this blog was to explore what it feels like to be a full-time researcher for four months, probably the longest time I'll ever have free of other work commitments during my academic career.

From the beginning, I vowed to treat research as work and study from 9-5. and this, give or take a few childcare and school emergencies and holidays, is what I've done. It's worked well because if you don't have a work structure, you have to create one. Or at least I do.

Annoyingly, I've discovered that I find it very difficult to simply sit and read and take notes all day, although that's what I tell everyone I'm doing. So I've taken to breaking down reading tasks into small chunks so that I can tell myself that I've achieved something at the end of the day. Maybe there are people whose concentration span is so impressive that they can sit in the library the whole day and continue to engage with ideas and debates but I'm not one of them.

What I hadn't built into my study plan was time to engage with social media, especially Twitter. But it soon became obvious that this had to be a core part of my research. The only way to understand how journalists were using social media in their jobs was to sign up and follow people to see what they were doing. This led me to some excellent online blogs including the Online Journalism Blog, Teaching Online Journalism and journalism.co.uk and further insight into what's going on in online journalism.

The process of writing my own blog is an important way for me to clarify research ideas as I go along but I also blog about issues like phone hacking, identifying bloggers and coverage of Michael Jackson's death on Twitter, which are significant developments in new media. And blogging and tweeting are good for breaking up reading time, although sometimes I have to turn off my PC to force myself back to print. Otherwise I'd spend all day online, curtains closed, like an internet-obsessed teenager.

And what has emerged so far from my reading? Unsurprisingly, the main message is that the journalism industry is in the grip of huge upheaval technologically and culturally and the idea that journalists control news input and output is, if not dead, strongly challenged. The question: "What is news?" can no longer be answered with "What journalists say it is". Boundaries between roles in the newsroom are blurring as reporters find themselves subbing their own copy or shooting video. The buzzword is convergence although no-one seems to be able to agree on what this means. Is it the process of making journalists file to both web and paper in the newsroom (although some people refer to this as integration)? Or should convergence be more widely defined as the whole process of the changing relationship between journalist and journalist, journalist and reader, journalist and sources, journalist and media?

At the same time, some researchers are finding that under the surface, less has changed, with journalists still in editorial control in moderating blogs and comments and making news decisions. Looking at mainstream news websites (the Times, Guardian etc) as I am, what is interesting is possibly how traditionally structured they still are in terms of output. Newsrooms still have routines and deadlines and beats, even if the idea of a single daily deadline is irrelevant in a 24 hour digital newsroom. And power and control (concepts hotly debated by media sociologists) remain centred in and around the same groups and organisations internally and externally. Or do they? The research goes on.

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.

Braindump

Up at the University of Sheffield, where I'm doing my PhD. It's strange being a student again after several years of teaching in a university. I have to keep reminding myself not to get stroppy if people are talking in the library. But now I've discovered where the silent areas are (needless to say on the top floors, so too far for the chatterers to come), I'm getting a lot done. It's easier to work if other people are working around you. And you don't keep getting "courtesy calls" from banks or people wanting to come in and read the meter like I do working from home.

Tomorrow is my second monthly meeting with my supervisor, in which she wants me to give her a "braindump". I'm sure she wouldn't ask for this if she knew what the interior of my brain really feels like. I may be doing a PhD but the more I read, the more I realise I don't know. Apart from the occasional moment when I read something and think: "That wasn't written by anyone who's ever worked in a newsroom."

The start of it all

2015. 30 April 2015, to be precise. This is the date when I'm scheduled to finish my PhD. Six years away. People are already making faces of sympathy and so far I've only done two weeks.
Of course if you're an academic, you're happy to read all day, given the chance. Even if the sort of reading you're doing includes sentences like this: "....they [design changes] emerge from a dynamic media environment that is shaped by technological, social and cultural forces".... Or this: "Borrowing from ethnomethodological, phenomenological and symbolic interactionist perspectives, several studies within the last 10 years have taken a fresh look at news...."
I read both these today and I'm not going to argue - yet, but give me time. I need to get back into an academic mindset after 23 years in journalism and four as a journalism lecturer focusing on teaching students to pass their NCTJ newswriting exam.

Why do a PhD? Journalism is one of the few subjects which you can teach at university level without needing a doctorate. The students in my experience are much more interested in being taught by "real" journalists who have good contacts and industry knowledge than they are in lecturers with Dr in front of their name. I have a proper, permanent job in a university I like, working with colleagues who are also practitioners. My job doesn't depend on getting a PhD (unless my employer knows something I don't).

But even in journalism, and even in vocationally oriented universities like my own, there is growing pressure to carry out academic research. This is where the money comes from, as long as you're good at filling in endless forms and winkling out sometimes pathetically small sums of money from various grant-awarding bodies. The alternative is to take more students, which the government has realised it can't afford any more. Bizarre way of funding a university system....
Actually, my decision to do a PhD has nothing to do with pressure from management. I'm doing it because I want to (and my kind employer has given me a four month sabbatical in which to start). Saying you're doing a PhD in journalism gets a few raised eyebrows. Not exactly an academic subject.....? Maybe not traditionally but there is a growing body of critical literature, case studies and industry analysis and debate. To which I shall be adding with my research into the way UK journalists work in converged newsrooms. And letting my inner academic rip.