“To know is to compare,” declare Mora Matassi and Pablo J. Boczkowski in their recent book of the same title.Footnote 1 But what is it precisely that we can know from comparisons? Three new and important books about journalism provide distinct answers to this question, and in so doing usefully broaden our understanding of the multifaceted dimensions of contemporary news media at a moment of crisis and potential renewal, simultaneously economic, technological, and civic.
All three of these books are qualitative and deeply contextualized “small-N” studies and, as it happens, all of them involve France—with comparisons to the United States in two of them, and to Italy and Sweden in the other. By going beyond a single nation-state, they all achieve the most fundamental contribution that comparative research can make: they help denaturalize taken-for-granted national understandings and make visible the otherwise-invisible constructedness of any given social reality. Otherwise, these three studies differ substantially in their research designs and purposes: whether in their testing of the generalizability versus specificity of national tendencies, their refinement of theoretical concepts, or their causal inference (with national differences or similarities as only one of many explanatory factors, not necessarily the strongest).Footnote 2
Not coincidentally, they also draw on different theoretical frameworks. Although the authors do not, for the most part, systematically compare theories, their research provides ample material with which to explore complementarities across theoretical schools, even when there are underlying epistemological differences. In this regard, Matassi and Boczkowski offer additional helpful advice. Inspired by the historian of science Peter Galison and his research on the productive exchanges between theorists, experimentalists, and instrument makers in modern physics, Matassi and Boczkowski insist that media scholars can likewise create intellectual “trading zones.” Such zones allow for the fruitful exchange of critical resources without requiring a consensus about larger intellectual puzzles.Footnote 3 In this review essay, I will attempt to put this thesis to the test.
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The first of the comparative books is Matthew Powers and Sandra Vera-Zambrano’s compelling and highly readable analysis of journalistic professional precarity in France and the United States. At a moment of worldwide crisis in journalism—a dramatic drop in the number of positions, demands to do more in less time for lower pay, and an increasingly mistrustful public—the authors ask the reasonable question: Why would anyone still want to be a journalist? The answer is that despite the increasing challenges, journalism still holds a distinct symbolic allure and prestigious civic function. The “journalist’s predicament” of the book’s title is the choice every journalist faces in terms of how to achieve a “personally acceptable balance” of costs and rewards between the often-at-odds commercial and civic/creative aspects of the profession.
In their research design, Powers and Vera-Zambrano proceed from an implicit adaptation of John Stuart Mill’s classic method of case selection, through what comparative political scientists have termed a “most similar systems” research design.Footnote 4 Beginning with countries (often Western industrial democracies) that are presumed to be broadly similar in their economic, political, and cultural histories and contemporary institutions, certain meso-level factors are held constant while others are varied, in order to identify which factors correlate most strongly with (and potentially explain) different outcomes—such as in news values, practices, and/or content. In these studies, qualitative analysis, via in-depth interviews or ethnography, is often used to trace the social structures and processes accompanying these correlations in a manner that, with some caution, may be interpreted as causal.Footnote 5
For Powers and Vera-Zambrano, France and the United States represent different state policy regimes. The authors hold constant the types of journalists being compared: regional rather than national journalists, and specifically, journalists working in two cities of roughly comparable size and relative distance from their countries’ centers of governmental and financial power—Seattle and Toulouse—both of them leading technology and aviation hubs in their own countries. Powers and Vera-Zambrano then draw a sample of journalists at each site; each group’s members are varied in terms of a number of “social properties,” such as parents’ professional background, highest educational degree, prestige of granting institution, and gender, as well as the size/prestige of their media employer, whether they have full-time or freelance status, and their years of experience. With this sample, the authors are thus in a position to systematically investigate two sets of differences—cross-national and cross-social properties—and how these differences tend to cluster with their respondents’ patterns of perceptions of the journalistic profession and their place in it.
Based on in-depth interviews with 66 journalists, with roughly equal numbers from each country, Powers and Vera-Zambrano examine journalists’ beliefs about the value of the journalistic profession and their modes of adjustment to that profession’s contemporary economic and symbolic transformations. Are their interviewees “living for” or “living off” journalism? The ability to do both, via the most prestigious and secure positions, is largely reserved for journalists with the most “favorable” social properties (professional parents, more education, more prestigious schools, male). How do the respondents define journalistic “excellence”? More privileged journalists tend to value the long-established forms of journalism that “discover” (uncover hidden facts) or “edify” (broaden understanding through in-depth, long-form coverage); journalists with less privileged backgrounds tend to embrace more commercialized forms of journalism, those that “decode” (translate complex information for broad audiences) or “dignify” (give “worth” to “socially vulnerable” individuals in an entertaining but not sensationalized way). How do journalists cope with increasing commercial and technological pressures to change their ways of doing journalism? At the top of the social hierarchy, journalists “conserve” their old way of doing things and feel little pressure to change. In the middle, a more socially diverse group (often including younger journalists trying to find a place for themselves in the field) “challenges” the dominant practices and ideals and tries to redefine the purpose of the profession in line with the commercially valuable digital skills it possesses. At the bottom of the hierarchy, working as freelancers or for less prestigious news beats, the least privileged journalists—feeling that they have little choice in the matter—simply “accede” and do whatever they need to do to keep their jobs.
Some European social scientists and media scholars may find these findings predictably consistent with the sociological approach of Pierre Bourdieu, and eminently worth challenging. Powers and Vera-Zambrano anticipate this challenge. They are careful to acknowledge “exceptions” and to deny that social properties operate in a mechanical fashion that leaves no room for choosing different paths. Nevertheless, their interviews identify consistent patterns and reveal that the strongest perceptions and experiences of agency go hand in hand with having the most privileged backgrounds; those who try to forge exceptional upward paths encounter significant resistance. In the United States, while Bourdieu has become a central reference in the sociology of journalism and journalism studies over the past two decades, the take-up has been highly selective: there has been far more discussion of “field” than of “habitus.”Footnote 6 Until now, the social class–focused Bourdieu of Distinction has scarcely been mined in U.S. journalism studies, but with their rigorous and systematic “sociology of journalists” (as opposed to the far more common organizationally driven sociology of journalism), Powers and Vera-Zambrano are single-handedly correcting this imbalance.
And where do national differences come in for the authors? France’s strong labor protections and relatively generous social welfare policies contrast sharply with the unfettered market of the United States. Buoyed by a lesser likelihood that employers will fire them at will, French journalists of diverse social backgrounds feel freer to resist pressures to adopt new technological practices. Knowing that they can lose their jobs at any moment, American journalists rightly fear that resisting will put them at the top of the list to be fired in the inevitable next economic downturn. However, these macrostructural differences have their greatest effect on the most well-established and relatively elite journalists. The growing ranks of part-time or freelance journalists in France face much the same highly precarious situation as their American counterparts. While the French state’s approach has its limitations and is not guaranteed to last in its current form, a cross-national comparison shows that there are indeed public policy alternatives—relevant for many other embattled cultural professionals as well—to a purely market-driven approach.
Throughout their book, Powers and Vera-Zambrano show that decisions made by journalists that may feel intensely personal and individual, and seem to be primarily about talent and hard work, are in fact deeply social and patterned. This is largely presented as a factual finding, but the unstated implication, of course, is that this is an injustice. Indeed, like any system of hierarchy and discrimination, it is. But there is a danger in conflating existing conceptions of prestige with actual civic worth, even if that’s how the journalists themselves see it. For example, journalism that accurately and accessibly “decodes” the news may not be the most prestigious work, but to the extent that it re-engages citizens, in a high-choice media environment, who would otherwise consume misinformation or give up on politics altogether, it is arguably the journalistic profession’s single most important civic contribution. This valuable book, with its sobering conclusions about inequalities within the profession, left me considering a question that I hope the authors will address in future research: What would it take not only to even the scales of access to long-standing prestigious and lucrative journalistic jobs, but also to reassess and transform the system of valuation to better align with what democracy actually needs from journalism today?
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Sylvain Parasie’s Computing the News offers an alternative model of comparative journalism research involving the United States and France. Drawing on historical sources and 75 in-depth interviews, Parasie documents and analyzes the rise of a particular journalistic group, a “segment” within the broader “profession”; specifically, the roughly 2,000 American and 200 French journalists with computer and data analysis skills who, since the turn of the century, have come to identify themselves as “data journalists.” Parasie presents this movement as a case study of what Michel Callon has termed a “hybrid community,” a collective that extends “beyond organizations, comprise[s] humans and nonhumans, and include[s] laymen, professionals, and experts from different areas” [93]. In this case, data journalism has brought together computer programmers, web designers, traditional journalists, and social scientists—and increasingly, journalists who combine these backgrounds—with a diverse set of databases, software, and other technologies.
Data journalism, Parasie argues, has at various moments bolstered journalism’s legitimacy and prestige, but it was never primarily about that (an argument that implicitly points to a way that prestige and civic aspirations may or may not align). From its earliest years in the United States, it has been a movement to find a more intellectually robust and technically efficient means of serving democracy (whether through systematic documentation of injustices, providing the public with more transparent access to information, or other projects). As the economic crisis of journalism has intensified, data journalism—as both a set of skills and a professional network—has also helped a new generation of journalists on both sides of the Atlantic “find a place for themselves in a highly competitive job market” [97].
Parasie devotes a chapter to French–American differences, notably the later adoption and more modest diffusion of data journalism practices in France than in the United States. He rejects claims that this divergent outcome is due to enduring cultural differences, such as a supposed French journalistic preference for “opinions” over “facts.” While true to the actor-network theory commitment to provide a detailed empirical description of the generation of human and nonhuman networks, his explanatory analysis is multi-causal but relatively parsimonious. He focuses on “the material, legal, and normative elements on which journalists can draw to assess the value of technological practices in journalism,” which in this case pertain to the “desirability, feasibility, and accountability of data journalism practices” [111]. Paralleling Powers and Vera-Zambrano’s analysis, he identifies state policies as one important differentiating factor: data journalism is less feasible in France because public access to government data is more limited, and there are fewer nongovernmental alternative data sources than in the United States.
Overall, though, identifying and explaining French–American differences are not Parasie’s central concerns. Instead, his primary comparisons are across time (tracing the development of the data journalism movement), groups (data vs. traditional journalists; journalists vs. technologists, academics, or various publics), and situations (public debates, particular data journalism projects). Including both France and the United States gives him not only more material to work with but also proof that the patterns he documents and the methods he uses can extend beyond a single national context.
Parasie begins the book with capsule histories of the early forerunners of data journalism, namely the social science–inflected “computer-assisted reporting” (CAR) movement led by Philip Meyer in the United States, as well as the commercially lucrative but professionally frowned-upon “ranker journalism,” which sought to list, for example, the best universities in the United States and the worst hospitals in France. Data journalism emerged in the mid-2000s as a project that constituted a technological, economic, and ethical “rebooting” of the profession. First in the United States and later in France (via British influence, especially The Guardian, more than American), this professional segment consisted of diverse constellations of journalists, programmers, data scientists, and web designers, working closely together as never before, as well as new hybrid job positions combining journalistic with technological skills and responsibilities.
Influenced by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot’s pragmatic sociology of critique, Parasie understands data journalism not (or not only) as the work of a collection of individuals motivated by prestige or economic success (or survival), but rather as a normatively motivated collective endeavor. Parasie provides an elegant and compelling definition of this sociological “pragmatic stance”: the reconstruction of “the processes that actors and organizations implement to mitigate the problems that arise while respecting the principles to which they are committed” [175]. As such, efforts to defend and implement normative ideals are part of what explains social action; such ideals also provide the horizon for the pragmatic sociologist’s “immanent critique” of journalistic practices. To his credit, however, Parasie doesn’t strictly limit his critical inquiry in this way. For example, in his analysis of a Los Angeles Times data journalistic project to “bring about” new publics, he draws on the writings of political thinkers such as Cass Sunstein and John Dewey.
Particularly compelling are Parasie’s final chapters on “Data Journalism in the Making,” consisting of three case studies of (largely) successful data journalism projects, each of which illustrate different kinds of journalist partnerships—between traditional and data journalists, between journalists and social scientists, and between journalists and various publics. I really appreciated this detailed attention to “what works,” which is all too rare in academics’ assessments of journalism. The Los Angeles Times data journalism project, just noted, was created in response to the critique that journalists only report on a tiny fraction of homicides, favoring those whose victims were well-off and White over those in which they were poor and Black or Latino. By creating a database of all homicides in the Los Angeles region, with a “story for every victim,” the Los Angeles Times’s “Homicide Report” corrected this bias. But its ambition was more than informational, as Parasie documents in his own impressive computer-assisted statistical analysis (conducted with Jean-Philippe Cointet): Through a journalist-moderated comments section, the website actively facilitated the formation of a public capable not only of mourning personal losses but also of actively engaging with one another in debate about homicides writ large and their causes and potential solutions.
While the book’s historical research and analysis are impeccably executed, there are occasionally passages that suggest potential blind spots and limits to the pragmatic sociological project. In his account of the French magazine Paris Match’s partnership with academic linguists to analyze, in near real time, the language deployed in speeches by presidential candidates, Parasie defends the need for journalists to retain their full professional autonomy in their interactions with academic researchers: “The success of the social sciences in journalism requires social scientists to accept that their practices must be adjusted to the constraints of journalistic work” [200]. In a sense, of course, he is quite right. Most academic prose is in dire need of journalistic translation before it is capable of speaking to a broader public. Yet in always accepting whatever momentary standard “constraints” a given profession has set for itself as its normative horizon, pragmatic sociology risks reifying the status quo. As Parasie shows throughout the book, data journalism has rebooted the journalistic imaginary in large part because of its willingness to listen to and try to incorporate criticism arising from beyond the profession, often, if not chiefly, from the social sciences. Indeed, this passage aside, Parasie’s concluding advocacy of an “ethics of reflexivity” is a call for an all-around intellectual humility and mutual respect in the interactions between various types of journalists, experts, and publics. His model is none other than Galison’s “trading zones.”
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Elena Raviola’s Organizing Independence is a rich ethnographic account of the diverse means contemporary news organizations are employing to keep economically afloat at a moment of widespread financial crisis. Raviola’s three newsroom studies are from three different countries—Italy, Sweden, and France—but her interest does not lie in cross-national differences. Instead, drawing on her impressive range of personal and professional contacts and language fluencies, she mines the variation afforded by her three countries to find cases that illustrate three distinct ways of managing “compromises” between the competing imperatives of staying in business and satisfying the civic/ethical demands of the journalistic profession. Inspired (like Parasie, but in a slightly different way) by the pragmatic sociology of critique and actor-network theory, she digs deep into the highly localized circumstances and internal dynamics of her chosen individual newsrooms. At each of the news organizations she studies, she focuses on moments of internal conflict when journalists, business managers, and other employees are forced to articulate and justify their positions in the search for workable—if always tenuous—compromises.
Italy’s Il Sole-24 Ore captures the traditional dichotomy “News vs. Money.” As technological and economic transformations make such a strict opposition increasingly difficult to maintain, her other two case studies capture alternative formulations: “News for Money” at the Swedish regional newspaper group Stampen (primarily via its largest newspaper, Göteborgs-Posten), which engaged in a debt-fueled expansion to increase profits through economies of scale, and “Money for News” at France’s Rue89, a digital startup founded by idealistic journalists dedicated to creating innovative forms of publicly engaged journalism. The two chapters devoted to Rue89 are especially compelling and provide a fascinating account of the startup’s early financial model, organizational culture, and unique journalistic practices, notably its efforts to deeply involve its readers in news selection and production (projects of making publics, in Parasie’s terms).
Consistent with Boltanski and Thévenot’s approach, Raviola comprehensively maps, without judging, the multiple conventions of worth articulated in moments of overt conflict by all the actors involved in each of the three journalistic enterprises. She contrasts this more “pluralist” approach with Bourdieu’s depiction of fields of cultural production organized around the conflict between an internal “pure legitimation,” provided by one’s peers, and the external “commercial legitimation” provided by market success. For Raviola, this opposition is reductionist, at best relevant for some cases but not others. Bourdieu’s model does seem to fit the enforcement of a strict “wall” between editorial journalism and business at Il Sole-24 Ore. But at Stampen newspapers, according to Raviola, that wall disappeared, with journalists as well as business managers defining good journalism in purely market terms.
At Rue89 during its early years, when professional roles were blurred and the financial precarity of the enterprise was made clear to all, conflicts did not pit journalistic aspirations against those of the market. Instead, arguments were about the best ways to reconcile the two, often referring to other orders of worth, whether of efficiency, renown, inspiration, or democracy. In contrast to Stampen, where the dominant family shareholder was driven to increase profits to the going rate in a competitive market, Rue89’s journalist founders settled on simply “breaking even,” ensuring that revenues exceeded costs. And yet, even this modest market goal was more than Rue89 could manage to achieve, as the promise of abundant digital advertising revenues never materialized. In the end, its founding editors sold the company and cashed in their shares for handsome profits, sharing nothing with most of their employees (many of whom had worked overtime and voluntarily paid their own expenses, motivated by their commitment to the “cause”). Afterwards, one Rue89 journalist ruefully reflected: “We are all the same, but we are not” [132]. Indeed! Enter the critical sociologists, Powers and Vera-Zambrano—if not to say “we told you so,” then to ask, very usefully: What were the social differences between those who gained and those who lost in the sale? And in the leadup to the sale, were all these debates and compromises simply ideological mystification? Surely not. But something else was likely going on inside the organization, whether the people involved could—or were willing to—see it or not. It may be that anybody can potentially say anything—mobilize any kind of argument beyond what would be predictable based on their social properties, potentially influencing what goes on inside the organization—but Raviola provides evidence (despite her expressed intentions otherwise) similar to that of Powers and Vera-Zambrano. Rewards and penalties for words and actions are neither equally shared nor randomly distributed. Yet Rue89’s history also suggests that a more equitable allocation of ownership shares, salaries, or job positions would have likely made little impact, positive or negative, on the enterprise’s ability to attain long-term sustainability. The sociology of critique and critical sociology should thus be seen as complementary; neither is wholly sufficient to provide a comprehensive account or explanation.
In sum, Raviola’s study usefully demonstrates the pluralistic complexity of newsroom dynamics. She is not a systematic explanatory comparativist in the same way as Parasie or Powers and Vera-Zambrano. Rather she uses her diverse cases in the service of concept development and to marshal evidence of similar interactional dynamics across diverse situational contexts. Her typology of three possible understandings of the relation between news and money is quite useful. Although she does not provide a deep exploration of how or why ownership or funding models lead organizations to adopt one or the other of these stances, or what kind of variation one might find within each of them (e.g., the example of Rue89 surely does not exhaust the ways one might seek “money for news”), the categories provide a useful guide for future research. And I heartily concur with Raviola’s claim that “independence” should be “conceptualized as a continuous process of seeking compromise between the values of journalism and the values of business management—and possibly among other orders of worth” [152].
This final caveat is especially important and potentially generative. Raviola is most interested in the contingency and fragility of these arrangements, but her argument for a focus on compromises is also compatible with systematic comparative research of different constellations of orders of worth, fields, or “institutional logics” (a framework that arguably partially bridges the divide between Boltanski and Bourdieu).Footnote 7 What about the compromise between philanthropy and news at ProPublica, between digital subscribers and news at the New York Times or Mediapart, between a church and news at the Christian Science Monitor or La Croix, between the state (at arm’s length) and news at Sweden’s public broadcaster SVT? Even if the particulars of any given organizational compromise may differ and change over time, certain of them share enough characteristics in common to support generalizable comparisons. In fact, all of these types of compromise, reflected in distinct “ownership complexes” consisting of ownership forms and funding–audience adjustment strategies, have been shown to generate meaningful differences in journalistic practices and content.Footnote 8
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Powers and Vera-Zambrano, Parasie, and Raviola, despite some passing remarks they make to the contrary, complement more than contradict one another. Their theoretical approaches lead them to focus on different facets of similar empirical phenomena. They provide different models of comparative sociological research—how it can be designed, what it can reveal—each of them valuable in their own way. All three studies also produce findings with insights extending beyond the study of journalism. Powers and Vera-Zambrano’s analysis is relevant to understanding the increasing precarity across the cultural professions. Parasie connects research on journalism to a broader sociology of knowledge, making clear the normative stakes as few other studies have done. And Raviola takes us inside organizations of cultural production, revealing how professional autonomy is constructed not against, but rather through constructive alliances with various business (but also implicitly nonprofit or public sector) management strategies. If there were still any doubt, these three books provide ample proof that to compare is, indeed, to know.
