Aangifte

A profession exists to solve a hard problem, one that requires some sort of specialization. […] Most professions exist because there is a scarce resource that requires ongoing management: librarians are responsible for organising books on shelves, newspaper executives are responsible for deciding what goes on the front page. In these cases, the scarcity of the resource itself creates the need for a professional class – there are few libraries but many patrons, there are few channels but many viewers. In these cases professionals become gatekeepers, simultaneously providing and controlling access to informtion, entertainment, communication or other ephemeral goods. (Shirky 2008: 57)

Moreover, the celebrated genres of the American journalistic craft, particularly investigative reporting, long-term projects, and penetrating urban affairs work, have lost corporate support in all but the most elite publications because of their inefficiencies and the costs of production.

(Klinenberg 2005:60)

The penetration of market principles and marketing projects into the editorial divisions of news organizations is one of the most dramatic changes in the journalis tic field, and there is no question the mythical walls separating the editorial and advertising are mostly down. When Gans (1979) studied news organizations in the 1960s and 1970s, he found that editors would occasionally grant access to political officials and listen to their input for various stories and issues, but as a matter of journalistic principle not to advertisers or corporations. In the late 1990s, Times Mirror CEO and Los Angeles Times publisher Mark Willes generated professional outrage by announcing that advertisers should play a key role in shaping journalistic content. In the early 2000s, editorial meetings with advertisers and the internal marketing staff are routine, and the editors I met unabashedly reported that they worked hard to produce more marketable and profitable products.

(Klinenberg 2005:60)

The responsibility to produce content that can be used across platforms also places a different kind of pressure on editors and business managers. For them, directing a multimedia company requires ensuring that a sufficient level of content meets the needs of each medium, and this means that reporters assigned to key beats or stories have to produce even if they want more time to explore. According to one reporter, "Being productive means you’re gathering information that is short order…. Everything, all the incentives, come down to producing for tomorrow." One effect of this imperialism of the immediate is that Metro News, long renowned for serious and time-consuming investigative reports, has reduced the number of investigative stories. Between 1980 and 1995, the newspaper cut the number of investigative stories by 48 percent. One reporter explains his view of the change as follows: "The whole idea of giving reporters time and space to explore just doesn’t seem like an efficient way to do business." The core city reporting staff no longer has enough time to penetrate into the deep pockets of urban life and come up with surprising stories. Crime, local scandals, entertainment, all the events that are easy to cover have become more prominent in the city news. As one city editor told me,

The best way to blanket the city, and the most efficient way to blanket the city, is to cover the [big] institutions [with beats]. So, its hard to justify, from a resource standpoint, a more burdensome way of getting information, which is out on the streets. It’s not efficient at all. There are no press releases, no spokespeople, and if there are, there is a bunch of spokespeople [saying different things]. And to sort through that and weave through that and get a clear picture is just time-consuming and it’s harder to devote the resources to doing that.

(Klinenberg 2005: 56-7)

For reporters, though, the new regime creates real professional challenges: the more they work with different media, for example, the more they realize that content does not move easily from one medium to the next, and therefore they must develop techniques for translating work across platforms.

(Klinenberg 2005:55)

The Internet is unique because it integrates both different modalities of communication (reciprocal interaction, broadcasting, individual reference-searching, group discussion, person/machine interaction) and different kinds of content (text, video, visual images, audio) in a single medium. This versatility renders plausible claims that the technology will be implicated in many kinds of social change, perhaps more deeply than television or radio.

Social Implications of the Internet
Author(s): Paul DiMaggio, Eszter Hargittai, W. Russell Neuman, John P. Robinson
Source: Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 27 (2001), pp. 307-336
Published by: Annual Reviews
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2678624

Famous computer scientist Donald Knuth admits to reading Syntactic Structures during his honeymoon and being greatly influenced by it.

The industrialization of the press, with its accompanying rise in publishing costs, led to a progressive transfer of ownership and control of the popular press from the working class to wealthy businessmen, while dependance on advertising encouraged the absorption or elimination of the early radical press and stunted its subsequent development before the First World War.

(Curran 1991: 47)