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....

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?

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.