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Prologue
Crossing the Gap
‘We need more bodies!’, yells a Programme Editor. ‘… and make sure you can’t make out
their faces … just bodies! I don’t want disgured body parts, just bodies and body bags!’ I
stay on target, working alongside my colleagues. We all look stern, staring into the screen.
We have been covering the tsunami for almost a week now. Today, video feeds of corpses
are coming in. e bodies have been laying in tropical climate waiting to be identied.
By now I should be used to the sight. But tears are welling up. I cut the last images for the
next news bulletin, which goes on in a few minutes, then I hurry to the bathroom. You
do not cry in the newsroom.
To my surprise, hiding inside the toilet cubicles I nd both a reporter and a producer
with mascara running down their cheeks. We laugh. en we cry and talk about the
tragic pictures. Dry our eyes and walk hurriedly, professionally, into the newsroom. And
we keep on working, without mentioning our emotions.
– January 2005, inside the ITV Newsroom, Kings Cross, London
e morning meeting has just begun and we are discussing the stories to run today. ere
is an excited mood in the newsroom. Journalists, Programme Editors and producers
are all sat in a semi-circle, relaxed, leaning back on their chairs, coee in hand. Some
reporters share a joke about yesterday’s news programme. Our News Editor has had a
cake designed with the Olympic rings on it, and it has just arrived for us to enjoy during
the meeting. Yesterday, London was chosen to be the host city for the Olympic Games in
2012. Today we are celebrating.
Suddenly, the bright neon light in the room ickers. e computer screens go black for
a moment. Our constant newswire on the computer goes still. One editor starts swearing,
tells us to check out the system and get the newswire up again. ere’s a top line ashing
on the wire when it starts again. e London underground, just below us, has had a
power failure, it says.
Moments aer, we realise the scale of what is happening. Bombs have exploded in the
underground. And then the whole room starts moving at a much quicker speed. ere
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Inside the TV Newsroom: Profession Under Pressure
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is yelling across the room, orders are given fast. But most people don’t need orders, they
know where to go, what to do. As if on autopilot, all sta start their routines around the
room, and out of it. We are a beehive of action. We are running around all of us together,
to nd out and tell in simple terms exactly what has happened. We work like that for the
next 24 hours. Constantly with the competitors’ news on, so we can keep track of who gets
the right news out rst.
7 July 2005, inside the ITV Newsroom, Kings Cross, London
e two above experiences were crucial in making me want to explore the shared values
of journalists at play in everyday work inside the TV newsroom. Many other experiences
inside this and other newsrooms came before, but these two particularly made me stop, look
and think about the way journalists work. It was in the middle of this day, in July 2005, while
being immersed in the job of cutting a disaster video, that I remember rst feeling conscious
of being part of a tribe. I felt that all of us instinctively worked as one unit, always knowing
what to do and how to work together.
At that moment in the toilets of ITN, I was surprised and relieved when I found that I
was not the only journalist in the newsroom to be suppressing my emotions in order to
act as I thought it most professional. e day of the London bombings was the most busy
news day I have ever worked on; it was also the working day where I felt the most worried
about the events I covered, as bombs exploded so near me. As the attacks happened in my
neighbourhood, there was an entirely new sense of reality behind the stories of tragedy
we covered that day. On the 7 July 2005, inside the newsroom I sensed a feeling among us
all, stronger than usual, that our work was necessary and important and that, together, we
were working towards making a positive change to what took place outside our windows.
From the day of the London bombings, I began to look at the news division I had worked
in for years as an object of study. As my rst degree was in anthropology, I began to consider
how a newsroom and our everyday practices could be of interest to an anthropologist. I
began to consider that what we shape as news might turn into other people’s truths. And
therefore, I thought, how we come about creating such ‘truths’ needed to be explored. I
started wondering why we do as we do, and how we have all come to know exactly what to
do and not do inside the newsroom.
ough I continued working as a journalist and producer at ITN, from this day on I felt
like an anthropologist in the newsroom. I started thinking about our everyday practices,
and talking to colleagues about how we work in ways I had not done before. is mind-
change happened involuntarily and seemed to be a process that I could not stop. Aer
having begun to reect on the way we journalists work, it seemed as if I could not stop
reecting. Getting the idea to do this project was thus the rst step I took in crossing what
I later felt to be a gap between the practice of journalism and theories about journalism
(omsen 2008).
In time, I decided to make a proposal to study the practice of TV news journalism
from a cultural anthropological perspective. Two years later I received a Ph.D. stipend and
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Prologue
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embarked on a study of newsrooms, doing eldwork in the TV newsrooms of the largest
national news broadcasters in the UK (BBC and ITV) and in Denmark (DR and TV2) (see
omsen 2013). is book is largely based on that Ph.D., with updates and amendments
from a 2017 perspective.
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Part I
Journalists and Newsrooms as Objects of Research
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Introduction
An introduction to the project and to the guiding research questions
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01_08838_Introduction_p1-18.indd 3 12/26/17 12:44 PM
01_08838_Introduction_p1-18.indd 4 12/26/17 12:44 PM
Today, the free, instantly available news accessible through your mobile phone
is challenging traditional media like never before. In 2007, as this study began,
traditional TV news journalists were sensing this threat more and more.
Recently, values of the journalism profession have been under public scrutiny. With
a number of high-prole controversies in Denmark and the UK, particularly the Public
Service Broadcasters DR and BBC have been in the public eye. Aer Brexit in the UK, the
partisanship of British public service media has been questioned (see for instance Preston
2016). In Denmark, most of the press reported that PM Lars Løkke would stay in his position,
while in fact he stepped down – causing a huge public debate about the press partisanship
and bias (see for instance Ringgaard 2014). While in the US, biased media coverage of the
Trump vs Clinton election caused both journalists and readers to suggest that ‘the American
journalism is collapsing before our eyes’ (Goodwin 2016).
In the wake of the News International phone hacking scandal, the Leveson inquiry into
the culture, practices and ethics of the British press made professional values of journalism
front-page material.1 In the UK, in the autumn of 2012, incidents involving agship news
programme BBC Newsnight’s reporting (and lack thereof) of high-prole child abuse cases
were the centre of public discussions surrounding BBC’s editorial values.2 Following these
controversies, BBC Director General George Entwistle resigned, the director of news and
her deputy stepped aside and an enquiry into the chain of command inside the BBC news
division was initiated.3 Commenting on the controversy, Culture Secretary Maria Miller
wrote to the BBC Trust Chairman Lord Patten urging him to become more personally
involved because ‘very real concerns are being raised about public trust and condence in
the BBC’ (according to Holton and Holden 2012).
Similarly, in January 2013, when a lm crew employed by Danish public broadcaster DR
were found to have constructed a demonstration in front of a local bank in Denmark in order
to use footage of the demonstration in a news story, trust and condence were highlighted
as being at risk. e broadcast of a staged demonstration created public discussion of the
ethical values not only of DR sta but the journalism profession as a whole.
Now that journalists are more outspoken than ever on social media, both news sta and
news viewers oen give their personal and uncensored reections on the values of their
profession. us, this study has been conducted at a time where journalists and the public
are engaging in heated debates over values of the journalism profession.
While culture secretary Maria Miller’s quote above appears concerned with trust in BBC
as an institution, these and other similar cases have not only impacted on the dierent
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Inside the TV Newsroom: Profession Under Pressure
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journalistic institutions but on the profession of journalism as a whole. As Freidson
writes of professionalism, one of the key dening elements is ‘an ideology serving some
transcendent value and asserting greater devotion to doing good work than to economic
reward’ (2001: 180). e recent controversies involving BBC and DR have questioned the
very core of expectations of journalism’s professional values. From this perspective, the
recent high-prole controversies at BBC, DR and other media institutions concern not only
the institutions but the notion of journalistic professionalism as a whole.
In this book, I investigate the values of journalism professionalism today. I observe how
ideal-typical values matter to the daily work, and through eldwork I analyse how journalists
strive towards shared goals.
Key questions: Dierences and similarities
is book is the result of intensive eldwork and constant contact with four newsrooms.
e study began with 18 months of eldwork inside the TV newsrooms of the four largest
broadcasters in the UK and in Denmark, commencing in early 2007 and ending in 2008.
Aer this, I have kept in constant touch with each of the newsrooms until 2017.4 Of the four
broadcasters two are licence funded – the BBC and DR – and two are funded commercially
but still have public service obligations – ITV and TV2. e specic interest fuelling my
research was to study the everyday work of TV journalists and news workers at national
newscasters.5
As research began, I expected to meet dierences rather than similarities between the
newsrooms that I visited. is expectation was founded on both experience of being a
journalist and research of organisations. First, the private experience of being a journalist
in a given newsroom where the newsrooms of other organisations were talked about as
being dierent made me arguably socialised (cf. Harrison 2000) into believing that these
dierences do indeed exist. As I had a practice experience working within a newsroom,
which dened itself by being dierent, I strongly believed in the ideology of this practice
community. is arguably practice-stubborn approach can act as an example of how
journalists dene their values by those shared within the practice community (I return to
the value of practice communities in Chapter 6). As it will be illustrated, journalists at the
dierent broadcasters talk of their own way of working as very dierent compared to the
ways of working at competing broadcasters.
Secondly, from an institutional perspective, I found it interesting to explore how
dierences in funding aected news production routines. As Helland (1995: 53–54) has
pointed out, economic and political factors of the two dierent models of broadcasting can
be assumed to reect on the way of working and presenting reality. Particularly at a time
where traditional broadcasters are challenged by an ever-increasing media market, I was
keen to study how the two dierent models of broadcasting, public service and commercial,
approached the challenge in their everyday work.
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Introduction
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Within each broadcaster, I met journalists who told me that their way of working was
dierent and better than the way they worked at competing broadcasters. Exploring how
sta dened themselves and their way of working as dierent to competing broadcasters
therefore became one of my rst interests. From the articulated dierences, my interest
turned to what I found to be fundamental similarities between the newsrooms.
During eldwork at the four dierent newsrooms, I was struck by how similar the working
routines and ideals of news workers were. Moreover, eldwork showed a remarkable cultural
similarity between the newsrooms, a similarity which seemed to encompass what news
workers described as ‘a family-relation’ across the four dierent newsrooms. I therefore
decided to abandon the focus on dierences between broadcasters in favour of an exploration
of the myriads of ways in which I found the newsrooms and news divisions to be connected
and similar. us, the project turned from a study of many institutions to the study of
one profession. In moving from studying dierences to similarities between newsrooms,
I thus moved from what Soloski (1989: 218) terms the intraorganisational policies to the
transorganisational ideology and professional norms of journalists (see Chapter 1.2.).
When I le the newsrooms, the overall sense I returned with was that the news journalists
I had studied perceived themselves to be constantly struggling to reach an ideal of being a
‘good journalist’. e two primary similarities between journalists in one broadcast newsroom
and others I have found to be: the sense of struggle and tension between ideals and everyday
working condition, and the denition of ideal values of the profession. is ideal-typical value
carried with it key concepts, such as objectivity, individualism and the idea of ‘doing good’,
which I found central to the everyday work of all the journalists I worked alongside. e notion
of all journalists across broadcasters working towards a shared ideal suggested that I should
view journalists as distinguished by shared professional values rather than institutional or
organisational ones. us, I came to agree with researchers of journalism who contend that it
is possible to talk of a ‘shared culture’ of journalists (Harrison 2000), in a sense that journalists
can even be talked about as sharing ‘family resemblance’ (Ryfe 2017), making it possible to give
a ‘portrait of a European Journalist’ (O’Sullivan and Heinonen 2008). In order to accommodate
the ndings I made during eldwork, I posed the following dierent research question:
TV news journalists at both licence-funded and commercial broadcasters understand
their work to be a constant struggle towards being a ‘good journalist’. How are these
struggles played out in everyday life inside the newsrooms?
To answer this question, I rely on my own experience as a participant observer as well as
many other collected sources of data, such as interviews and materials collected in the
eld. In analysing the observations I made during eldwork, I employ theories from within
studies of professions and studies of work (Brante 2010; Evetts 1999; with emphasis on
Freidson 2001) as well as journalism research focusing on professionalism (such as Deuze
2005; Alridge and Evetts 2003; Singer 2003, 2004; Witschge and Nygren 2009; Witschge
2013) and communities of practice (see Wenger 1998a, 1998b).
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Inside the TV Newsroom: Profession Under Pressure
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Inspired by Freidson (2001), I have found ideal typical values during the study such
as denitions of the good news story and ideals of public service to be important for
understanding journalists’ notion of professionalism. However, as emphasised by Larson
(1977: xii) discussing the professional project: ‘ideal-typical constructions do not tell us
what a profession is, only what it pretends to be’. Rather, Larson argues, researchers should
ask ‘what professions actually do in their everyday life to negotiate this special position’
(1977: xii). Inspired by this approach, it is the aim of this study to both consider the way
professions talk about their work and the way they are observed to work. During participant
observation, I kept a particular interest in the social and the cultural. Culture here is best
seen as a series of processes, actions, beliefs, rituals and rhetoric of a group. Inspired by
Frederik Barth (1989), this study treats culture not as a bounded entity, but as the interface
between groups and the inter-relatedness of news workers in a newsroom.
Why study the news media?
An important point of departure for this study has been the idea that news are crucial in
shaping the world and public debate – a view much heralded by various strands within social
sciences and humanities, such as cultural studies and media communication studies (see for
instance Giddens 1991; Gauntlett and Hill 1999: 54; Lewis 1991; Schudson 1982). us, I
believe the Danish minister of Culture, Bertel Haarder, had a point when he lamented in
a reader’s letter in a national Danish newspaper that ‘DR has much more inuence than
a political party does’ (Haarder 2011, my translation from Danish).6 As Knut Helland has
expressed it: ‘[…] the television as a medium is both shaped by, part of shaping and passes
on a kind of ideological foundation for how the world should be understood’ (2001: 231, my
translation from Norwegian).
Today, news media has made it possible for anyone with an Internet connection to make
news stories, thus enabling both amateurs and professionals to compete in the constant ow
of information and news. e possibility for anyone to be a journalist has been expressed
by journalists and researchers alike as a threat to the profession. In this vein, Deuze warned
that ‘a profession of journalism without journalists cannot bode well for the necessary
checks and balances on a future global capitalist democracy’ (Deuze 2009: 317). At a time
where it is possible for people, whether trained in journalism or not, to be journalists, I nd
it worthwhile to explore the values and ideals of journalists employed at traditional public
service media broadcasters. According to Witschge, there is a ‘need to be creative and think
of how we can inject new life into public-service journalism, acknowledging the value this
has for democracy’ (2013: 171). In order to think up ways of injecting new life into public
service journalism, it may be useful to explore the core values of public-service journalism
today. With this study I hope to begin such exploration.
rough an increasing amount of platforms, news are a primary information source for
what takes place in the world around us. In this sense, the media has what Danish media
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Introduction
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researcher Anker Brink Lund (2002) calls editorial power over the information that the
public receives and how this is dened and presented. us, news frames the reality and
constructs debate. National news plays a crucial role in creating the nation’s shared memory,
history, knowledge and identity. Further, I agree with the idea that through televising ‘media
events’, such as a terror attack, the death of a cultural icon, an election, reporting from sports
events such as the Olympics, the media creates a ‘We-feeling’ among viewers (Curran and
Gurevitch 1996: 27; Lund 2000). is rhythmic ordering of news can be seen as a continual
rearmation process, a part of what Giddens (1990) terms the project of ‘ontological
security’, strengthening the national idea of ‘Us’ and ‘em’ (Bonde 1998). Particularly at
a time when the audiences are ‘ever-fragmenting’ (Broersma and Peters 2013: 1), there is a
need to reconsider the role of the journalist at work today.
Why study the TV profession today?
Newsrooms and news workers have been studied by interdisciplinary scholars since the
mid-1950s and the dominating literature stems from the late 1970s (see e.g. Epstein 1973;
Tuchman 1973, 1978; Schlesinger 1978; Gans 1979; Fishman 1980). is rst wave of
newsroom studies agreed to a remarkable extent that news is the outcome of routine, largely
implicit, organisational rules that all news workers follow. From this perspective, news
workers and the entire news industry in general work and function rather mechanically
by doing what Tuchman calls ‘routinizing the unexpected’ (Tuchman 1973). Since then,
newsrooms have changed considerably, and thus there is a need to re-enter the newsroom if
we want to include the lived experience and perception of the journalists at work in debates
of news, journalism and media practices today.
e working situation inside TV newsrooms today is very dierent from how it was only a
couple of years ago. As I have seen during the last decade of studying newsrooms, the everyday
working routines are changing rapidly. As Cottle (2000) has argued in his article ‘New(s)
times: Towards a “second wave” of news ethnography’, the change in media ecology means
that it is now crucial to bring audiences up-to-date and revise the rst wave’s earlier ndings
and theory by using empirical observations as the main foundation for conducting research.
Being in touch with the same four newsrooms over a period of 10 years has given me in-
depth insights, a shared history with my informants and a near-experience of the struggles
faced by news workers over a longer period. One of the crucial struggles that the newsrooms
have all battled with over the last 10 years is economic: how to make money from TV news
bulletins in an ever more competitive market? In early 2007, as I begun this study, market
logic was beginning to matter more and more in the everyday work. Today, 10 years later,
the need to generate money is even more talked about at all levels of the newsrooms. Various
dierent business plans, paywalls and selling of video feeds have been set up by newscasters,
but today as viewer gures on TV are dwindling, all four newsrooms studied are still
struggling to nd ways of making money. As Head of News at TV2 Nyhederne Jacob Kwon
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Inside the TV Newsroom: Profession Under Pressure
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told me in 2016: ‘e biggest challenge for us today is guring out what we shall live from in
ve years. is is a nut that we have yet to crack. I do not know of any newscaster who has
found a solution to this problem – yet’ (interviewed 27 October 2016).
Since the rst wave of newsroom studies, the reality of newsrooms and news has changed
dramatically. e newsrooms of today have much more competition than 30 years ago: both
from an increasing amount of possible news outlets, nationally, globally and digitally, and from
ever-increasing platforms of alternative news media (Atton 2002, 2009; Atton and Hamilton
2008), bringing news not at the same hourly bulletin but as-it-happens. is competition
puts new demands on news workers and on each news outlet to be exible and innovative
in keeping the audiences, which has been said to leave some of the basic rules of journalism
today in a state of profound ux (see for instance Preston 2009: 1; Steensen 2011). With this
increased amount of new news providers, a new criticism of the national TV news in general
and Public Service Broadcasting in particular has emerged, arguing that the national news
is no longer as useful or as necessary as it used to be. A critique against which defenders
such as the Chairman of the BBC Trust, Lord Patten, has argued that ‘the case for Public
Service Broadcasting is stronger than ever in the digital age, given the plethora of distribution
channels available today’ (Patten in BBC Trust 2011). At a time when news and journalism
are challenged like never before by economic and commercial needs, and an audience that is
less and less dependent on the broadcaster, the traditional public service newsrooms face a
new reality, which makes for a renewed need to enter the newsroom.
From its very beginning, this project has been interdisciplinary. Not only in the sense that
I am both a journalist and a researcher of journalism, but also in that this study has relied
on theories and practices of both journalism studies and anthropology. While working
in the interpretive tradition of anthropology I aim to add to and engage with the eld of
journalism studies.
e methodological approach is anthropological enquiry based on participant observation
eldwork. In order to analyse and explore the ndings of eldwork this study makes use
of dierent theories of journalism studies, practice theory, theories of organisation and
theories of professions. Using such dierently founded theories is risky of course; but it is
my rm conviction that research should not be governed by theory; rather, it should be the
other way around. As Goman has put it: ‘a multitude of myopias limit the glimpse we get
of our subject matter. To dene one source of blindness and bias is engagingly optimistic’
(1983: 2). From this perspective, framing a study before the study is commenced may limit
results. With the same argument, however, I have no doubt, knowingly or unknowingly,
limited my eld in the very way I have chosen to present it (see Chapter 2).
Why study the newsroom?
With this study I hope to introduce a new way of exploring newsrooms. I have chosen to
focus on studying the national TV newsmakers, as I believe these to be particularly relevant
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Introduction
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for the shaping of public debate today, even despite the increase in competing distribution
channels. us, my aim is to contribute to the current discussions of the journalistic
profession through ethnographic accounts of the inside workings of a TV news organisation,
the room and the mechanism by which it functions. rough this ethnographic approach,
I hope to create new knowledge on current journalistic practices and cultures of practice in
national TV newsrooms.
Media Studies consists of much research and analysis of the content of news and its
reception and eects on audiences and users. e aim of this study, however, is to explore
media dierently, namely through venturing into the content-creating newsroom. Recently,
a wave of researchers has taken an interest in studying news production. As I will highlight
in the following chapter, I see this study as both a part of this wave but also dierent from it.
e reason why I set out to do this project is that I wanted to study the everyday working life
of TV news journalists at national news broadcasters and provide space for reection on the
factors that are important for the everyday work of TV news workers. I thought it important
to not only study one newsroom as I wanted to explore how news work diers inside the
newsroom of a national licence-funded broadcast news division compared to the inside of a
national commercial broadcaster.
Commencing this study, I particularly wanted to study the production of news, as my time
as a journalist inside one of these newsrooms showed that there is very little time to reect
on the ways that news journalists work. A saying was oen shared among the journalists
studied, which reinforced a constant pacing towards the future, and a constant closing up
for evaluation of the past. I heard this saying expressed in all four of the newsrooms, phrased
almost exactly the same: ‘You are only as good as your next news story!’. As one of the
journalists I met during eldwork expressed bluntly: ‘Of course we don’t have the time to
reect much about what we do’.7 e lack of reection over everyday work among colleagues
I see as a lack of open discussion of professional values and ideals. With this study, I hope
to engage in such discussions by applying theories of the profession to studies of journalism
practice. In doing so, my aim is explicitly to view the newsroom from within rather than from
without. In focusing on practice, this study deliberately does not include content analysis. I
see the inside approach, enabled through a unique access to the newsrooms, as the primary
force of this study. us, my argument for studying the culture of news making is simple,
however crucial. With this project, I would like to provide space and time for reection on
how TV journalists work today, thereby highlighting some of the cultural factors, which
arguably aect what we see on the TV news every day.
New challenges for the old media
When the Grenfell Tower in Kensington, London, burned down in June 2017, the news hit
Twitter and Facebook with live commentating and pictures long before national TV had
arrived to the scene. at evening, BBC reported there to be only 17 people dead aer the
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Inside the TV Newsroom: Profession Under Pressure
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sudden blaze burnt down an entire building block housing approximately 600 inhabitants.
‘e BBC are not reporting the truth! ere’s bound to be hundreds dead – look, how can
anyone survive this?!’, an angry young woman living nearby said while holding her mobile
phone camera to show the burnt down building. She posted this video on her Instagram
account @DjIsla_, and within hours her post had over 100,000 views. e day aer, the
young angry woman was invited to report her side of the story live on Sky News. Weeks aer
the re, the re services have revealed that the number of casualties are likely to be much
more than a hundred. is is just one of many examples of how mobile phones have made it
possible for anyone to be a journalist and to broadcast news instantly – at times with gures
and facts that are more true than those reported by national media.
First, there was a clear monopoly of news broadcasting, later there was duopoly. Today,
news is available from a multitude of platforms at all times. Recent international reports
suggest that 54% of people with online access use social media as a news source (see
Reuters Institute 2017). is trend and the rising use of mobile phones to access news are
undermining traditional business models and challenging old news media such as the daily
TV news bulletins. is study began at a time where editors, management and all news sta
where still nding ways to make use of the Internet as a news platform. As eldwork began
in 2007, editors were keen to encourage journalist and reporters to post blogs on the Internet
as a teaser to upcoming news items. Now, 10 years later, journalists are still nding new
ways of using the Internet to highlight news pieces on the evening news bulletin. Selected
reporters and correspondents now have the so-called Social Media Field Producers with
them, who make sure that behind the scenes clips are out on Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter or
Facebook before the TV bulletin (see for instance Claus Borg Reinholdt in Bruun-Hansen
2016). So before viewers turn on the TV, they may have already seen the making of a TV clip
on Snapchat, or they have seen the reporter ‘go live’ on Facebook or do a ‘360-degree video’
with a behind the scene shot.
But the Internet is now seen as more than a way to promote the TV bulletin. Rather,
broadcasters today use social media as a way of presenting news – oen breaking a
news story online before they do so on TV. Indeed, as the media manager at ITV News,
Lincoln Hooper, describes it today, the newsrooms are primarily chasing changing
media use:
e main challenge for our newsroom is keeping up with the changing ways our audience
consumes their news. Social media is gradually taking the lion’s share of consumers. We
are constantly expanding that team and looking for new and innovative ways of attracting
new viewers on mobile devices.
(Lincoln Hooper, ITV News Media Manager, Interview, 5 September 2016)
First, Public Service Broadcasting was broadcast on one media platform only; today, the BBC
is responsible for eight dierent TV services, ten national and dozens of local radio stations,
not forgetting BBC news sites, Twitter feeds and Facebook pages. At the time of press, the
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Introduction
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BBC News Facebook page has over 45 million followers. In the early days of BBC’s online
presence, the corporation was responsible for one of the most watched websites worldwide;
today the BBC is still dominating UK digital news by generating a 30% market share
(according to Similarweb 2016 in e Guardian 2016). However, the news site bbc.co.uk is
placed lower than 100th on the ranking of most visited websites worldwide, surpassed by
sites such as Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Twitter and Google.8
In Denmark, though the audience is news-interested, the Public Service Broadcasters
are facing a very similar challenge. Recent research has found that the Danes watch more
news programmes today than at the turn of the Millennium. According to the gures, 40.3%
of overall TV-viewing in the year 2011 was shared between the categories ‘news actuality
and debate’ and ‘education, information and culture’.9 While more keen on watching news
programming, today’s audiences receive their news updates from many more platforms
than before. Statistics point to the news bulletins at DR and TV2 being among the most
watched news programmes, though still accounting for only 12% and 7% of all TV news
viewing (see TNS Gallup TV-Meter 2016). Critics of the news media have argued that the
rst casualty of the Internet will be old media (see Barnhurst 2013: 214):
Providing a service to publics in a multimedia and multicultural environment is not the
same safe value to hide behind like it used to be in the days of print and broadcast mass
media. Aer all this is the age of individualization, audience fragmentation and attention
spans ranging from minutes while watching to seconds while surng.
(Deuze 2005: 455)
As Deuze describes above, public expectations to the news media is very dierent today as
compared to the days when Public Service Broadcasters and a handful of print news had a
near-monopoly of providing the news. is change in expectation and attention among the
public has led newscasters to change both the presentation of news and structural routines
within the newsroom. us, the journalists I have studied are asked to work dierently. It is
the aim of this project to discover what these challenges to professional values and ideals of
journalists mean to their everyday work.
At the time of my eldwork, the news workers I spent time with all appeared aware of
an added pressure, both economically and from an ever fragmented audience. ere was a
notion that this pressure was shared among all Public Service Broadcasters. Sta at DR TV
Avisen and TV2 Nyhederne in Denmark expressed the idea that they were under a shared
pressure, just as sta at BBC News expressed themselves to be under a pressure similar to
ITV News in Britain. At DR, this was expressed in an email sent to all news sta as early
as 2006 by the internal media research unit, warning that now the ‘big channels in Britain
are being pressured’ (Hedegaard 2006). e email submitted a warning that ‘other channels
than the “big ve” are continuing to take a greater and greater share of the British people’s
TV viewing. A crucial part of the explanation is that more and more households in Britain
get access to Freeview and thereby a host of new channels. e same picture is emerging
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Inside the TV Newsroom: Profession Under Pressure
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in Denmark […]’ (Hedegaard 2006).10 While Freeview may have been one of the rst
challenges to the national Public Service Broadcasters, today᾽s competition to the traditional
media comes through the new and ever-expanding media platforms such as blogs and social
media news feeds or news sites suited to specic interests on the Internet. I nd it crucial
for understanding the media landscape today to explore the impact on journalistic ideals
and professional values that the current challenges may have on journalists in their everyday
work at traditional broadcasters.
Why study these specic four news divisions?
I initially aimed to stay in dierent newsrooms so as to study the culture of TV news
workers in dierent organisations, and I was interested in whether there was a dierence
between news workers at licence-funded institutions and those of commercial broadcasters.
I thought it important to commence the study with the founder of public service, the BBC
News, before returning to ITV News.
As a previous sta member of ITV News, I was aware of a connection and competition
with BBC News. While working at ITV, news workers always kept a constant glance at the
screens showing the output of the BBC News, and among ITV news workers there was
constant comparison to the BBC: We wondered what kind of equipment they had, how
they would cover a certain story, whether they already had a certain story and if they did,
who would get it rst on air – us or ‘them’? So, although I found the notion of returning to
a newsroom in which I had previously worked as a researcher challenging, it was crucial
to include both the BBC and ITV in my study if I was to follow TV news workers and
move beyond the stigmatising of how dierent TV news workers view each other towards a
comparison of public service news divisions.
In order to compare these two dierent groups of news workers, I wanted to include
two similarly positioned groups of news workers in Denmark, namely, those at Denmark’s
licence-funded broadcaster DR, and at DR’s closest rival in broadcast news, the commercially
funded TV2. is choice was made due to two primary factors: rstly, the funding for my
research was sought from the Danish Public Service fund; secondly, because of the ease of
understanding I felt I had being Danish and already having an understanding of the Danish
language, culture and the history of DR and TV2.
e journalism that the newsrooms in these two dierent countries produce is by
denition dierent, not only because news stories and the interests of the people in the
dierent countries dier, but also because the journalists themselves present the news in
a way, shape and form that best suit their respective national audiences. Indeed, as Park
observed already in 1940, ‘journalism is a cra of place; it works by the light of local
knowledge’ (Park quoted in Carey 2007: 4).
Choosing these specic news divisions, it has not been my aim to study journalism
content but journalism working structure, ideals and values inside licence-funded versus
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Introduction
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commercially funded newsrooms. To do so, I have found it crucial to include the founder
of public service, BBC, as well as its rst direct competitor, ITV. In order to compare the
relationship between these two news divisions, I have included the two Danish news
divisions positioned historically and competitively in a similar relationship, DR and TV2.
e everyday struggle towards being a good journalist
A dening method behind of this study has been to move in a circular fashion from
theories of the eld to observations in the eld and then back to re-considerations of
theories of the eld and so forth (see Chapter 2). is method meant that the study began
with one focus, and ended up with another one as I found that the rst research focus did
not adequately suit what I found most important during my participant observations in
the newsrooms.
e title of my research as I set out on eldwork was Editorial Culture in Journalistic TV
News Production, with Focus on Public Service. But in order to match focus with what was
found in the newsrooms, this research question was changed a few times during eldwork.
As I found the similarities between the newsrooms more curious than the dierences
among them, I began to consider what makes the newsrooms I visited appear so similar:
What do the newsrooms and the journalists have in common? What do the journalists
and fellow news workers themselves perceive to have in common? And what did I, as a
participant observer in the dierent newsrooms, perceive to constitute similarities? One
subject that appeared to be on all news workers’ mind, in all newsrooms I visited, was the
idea of a ‘good news story’. During the morning meeting, a news story would be introduced
with the words: ‘THIS is a good news story!’ while other stories would be dropped because
they were deemed ‘not a good news story’. e notion of the ‘good news story’ was thus
mentioned many times a day, and appears as a guideline for what to cover and what not to
cover.11 In practice, when the notion of a ‘good news story’ was not verbally used to argue
for the covering of an event, it appeared that two central aims would steer a journalist to
work in a certain way: rstly, the notion of what other colleagues from within a similar
practice community would deem ‘good work’ was important; secondly, the idea of doing
good work in the sense that one’s work would help ‘better the world’ was also of great
importance. us, I have come to see the ideal of making ‘good news stories’ as closely
linked to a moral, democratic ideal. is ideal is illustrated as important to licence-funded
news sta but equally important to commercial broadcast news sta. In exploring the
everyday ideals of journalists, I identify Eight Key Factors, which were expressed as key
to making a ‘good news story’. roughout this book, the focus therefore is on conveying,
theorising and exploring this constant ideal and the challenges it faces in the everyday
work. As will be shown, the ideal of being ‘good’ is not one that the journalists consider
to be a new one; what is new today, however, is the challenges that the journalists face in
reaching this ideal.
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Inside the TV Newsroom: Profession Under Pressure
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Chapter outline
During the initial 18 months of conducting eldwork, and the following years of being in
constant touch with the newsrooms, I have come to view the institutions studied as dierent
but above all connected by the journalistic profession and by everyday practices striving
towards ideals of their profession. I have encountered a number of clashes between what can
be viewed as a shared professional ideal and a new structure of news work. roughout this
book, a number of these clashes and negotiations between ideal and reality are outlined. e
juxtaposition of ideal values and structures of work are particularly interesting as it portrays
a clash between the ideal and the real within which journalists work in the everyday. While
the word ‘clash’ alludes to a violent conict, I have found sta primarily able to negotiate the
struggle to the point where a mismatch of ideal and reality is talked about as ‘a struggle’ or
as ‘problematic’ rather than a violent confrontation.
In studying journalists at work, I have found newsroom sta across dierent newsrooms
a part of a strong bonded practice community, which has at its core one shared ideal, namely
that of making what they term as ‘good work’ and ‘good news stories’. e more sta work
together, the stronger this shared ideal becomes. I have aimed to structure the book as a
journey towards nding out what this shared ideal consists of and what challenges the ideal
brings to the everyday work of news journalists today. In Chapter 1, as the rst step of
the research journey, I describe what I brought with me into the newsroom: the historical
framework and theoretical approaches with which the study commenced and which have
developed during eldwork analysis. One key approach introduced is that of theories of the
profession. In Chapter 2, the methodological approach is explored. Placing the study in the
recently emerged subeld of anthropology, Media Anthropology, I describe and dene what
I see as the strong points of studying journalists through participant observation. Moreover,
methodological issues and challenges of doing eldwork among TV news journalists are
introduced.
In Chapter 3, I introduce briey the history of the four news divisions studied, and proceed
to characterise the relationship between the broadcasters as one of constant competition.
In introducing the four news divisions, I focus on how sta members at dierent news
divisions dene each other. In this introduction of how members of sta dene their news
division, it becomes apparent that sta members at each one of them think the way they
work entirely dierent from how the sta works at the competitor’s news division, with
sta at each broadcaster talking of their organisation as ‘being best’. I end this chapter by
discussing the current economic challenge facing all four newsrooms and begin exploring
how organisations work to combat this challenge in similar ways at all four public service
broadcast news divisions.
In Chapters 4 and 5, I further explore the similar organisation of news work at the
four dierent news divisions from two dierent perspectives. Inspired by Wenger (1998a:
241), I analyse the news division as seen from two perspectives: the designed organisation
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Introduction
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and the practice within the organisation. In Chapter 4, the newsroom is introduced with
a focus on how the organisation is designed, structured and organised.12 I describe the
scene, the newsroom, the structure of work and meetings in the everyday inside the room.
During my analysis of the newsroom, it is illustrated how the newsroom can be seen as
a stage, already set with expected behaviour set up by the very structure of the design
of the newsroom area. One of the consequences of the new, circular-shaped newsroom
is that sta members feel more observed and can observe other colleagues more easily
than in the square, divided newsroom. is, I argue, makes for increasing potential for
collaboration between members of sta, but it also makes sta feel that they are always
‘on’, with little personal space and possibility to act dierently to how the structure
prescribes. rough interviews and my personal experiences from the newsrooms,
analysis throughout Chapter 5 focuses on how design aects the practice of work within
the four news divisions studied. One of the primary critiques of the new structure of
working expressed by journalists is that the idea of multi-skilling is challenging to
making a ‘good’ journalistic product. e perception among journalists that management
demand something dierent to what journalists view as a professional ideal is explored as
a mismatch between professional and market logic.
Exploring the connections between each news division further, in Chapter 6 I illustrate
how the journalism profession can be viewed as a practice community with bonds that
are perceived as stronger than the divisions of competition between the broadcasters. As
I discuss throughout this chapter, the feeling of camaraderie and strong practice bonds
functions to instigate bonds with other journalists and as a way of creating distance
between journalists and the Others. us, I venture behind the apparent ‘fronts’ of
dierences and into what I see as a very similar shared ideology of journalism. Finally,
in Chapter 7 I discuss what I have found to be a shared ideal among all news workers
from all four news divisions. e idea for this chapter came at the end of eldwork, when
I began to notice how all news workers have very similar arguments for working as a
journalist. One of the key shared ideals among sta that I noticed is whether something
is ‘good’. Being a good journalist, making ‘good news stories’ and doing ‘good work’ are
some of the most explicit ideals referred to in the everyday work. e tension between
the ideal of doing ‘good work’ and the everyday reality for each individual news worker is
what forces journalists, as I have observed it, to engage in a seemingly constant struggle.
Each tension, I argue, leads to a negotiating struggle between professional and personal
identity. Returning to the example of feeling emotional towards events one has to cover
as a journalist, one of the ideals of a good journalist is to be objective at all times, while
one of the realities of journalists is that at times they become emotionally aected by
the news stories they cover. In order to suit the ideal of being a good journalist, emotions
are therefore hidden in a place situated outside of the newsroom, for instance, by crying
in the toilets. In Chapter 8, the main points are briey summarised and implications for
research ndings are discussed.
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Inside the TV Newsroom: Profession Under Pressure
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Notes
1 Recommendations of the eight-month long Leveson Inquiry, presented 28 November 2012,
were that the British press should be regulated by an independent law-backed regulation-
model.
2 In October 2012, it became clear that Newsnight shelved a documentary that investigated
BBC presenter Jimmy Savile’s involvement in sexual abuse. In another controversy in
November 2012, BBC’s Newsnight was found to have wrongly reported that Lord McAlpine
had been involved in underage child abuse.
3 e Newsnight Enquiry began in November 2012.
4 Aer eldwork, I have kept in touch with informants through additional visits to the
newsrooms, face-to-face interviews, meetings with journalists outside the newsroom,
emails and phone conversations.
5 I use the term ‘news workers’ to describe all the dierent positions of members of sta who
work to produce news. e long list of workers that t into this description covers but is
not limited to journalists, producers, cameramen, News Editors, Programme Editors, heads
of news, stringers, graphic designers, guest bookers and planners. All can be employed as
either freelance, permanent or contract position.
6 Pitts puts this point more boldly when he says: ‘In a world where media set the public
agenda and drive the dialogue those things media ignore may as well not exist’ (quoted in
Gravengaard 2010: 11).
7 All interviews in Danish have been translated into English by the author.
8 Figures according to the list of most visited websites, 4 September 2016 (Alexa Internet).
9 is gure is an increase from 2010 when the gure was 37%, according to analysis of gures
by Danmarks Statistik in Børsen (23 March 2012).
10 Freeview is the name for the collection of free-to-air services on the Digital Terrestrial
Television platform in the UK. e service is jointly run by its ve equal shareholders: BBC,
ITV, Channel 4, Sky and transmitter operator Arqiva. Britain’s ‘Big Five’ are BBC1, BBC2,
ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5.
11 e word ‘good’ is in this sense not used to denote positive or happy connotations, but
quality (see Chapter 10.1).
12 My focus on the shape of the room is inspired by theorists such as Creswell (2004), who
states that ‘[p]lace provides a template for practice – an unstable stage for performance […]
Place provides the conditions of possibility for creative social practice’ (2004: 39). With this
denition of the meaning of place in mind, I nd it relevant to the study of actions within
a room to include a discussion of the layout of the physical place for these actions, the
newsroom.
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