After nearly four decades of disciplinary divorce, there are signs of a rapprochement between the fields of journalism studies and general sociology, once the most fruitful area of intellectual overlap in the communication sciences. Signs of this can be seen not only in the job market (as communication scholars increasingly find positions in sociology departments, and as top-tier sociologists once again populate the elite communications programs), but also in the world of academic publishing. More than ten years ago, when I first attempted to find an academic press that might be interested in my Philadelphia ethnography of local newsrooms, multiple acquisition editors told me that the social sciences simply did not consider the study of journalism to be a relevant area of intellectual effort. But, happily, times have changed. Today, Columbia University Press, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, MIT, and Princeton University Press, to name only a few, have entire series dedicated to the study of media and news. Once something of a backwater, the sociological study of journalism has seen embraced as the importance of communicative power becomes increasingly obvious to observers of late-modern political and social spheres.
Definitive evidence of this shift is provided by the publication of Angèle Christin’s Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms. To my mind Metrics at Work, can now stand as the single most accomplished ethnography of digital news published since at least Boczkowski’s Making Online News in 2004. Across six substantive empirical chapters, an introduction, a conclusion, and a methodological appendix, Christin shines a sociological light on the manner by which the algorithmic understanding of audiences intersects with more traditional journalistic culture and habitus. The major methodological advance of Metrics at Work is its comparative lens, looking at the role of audience analytics in two newsrooms in France and the United States. Comparative ethnography of any kind in any field is rare, and we journalism studies scholars should be proud that this methodological innovation finds its focus in the analysis of newsrooms. The flow and structure of Christin’s work is intellectually straightforward. In Chapter One she provides an excellent summary of research contained in the broad intellectual field of the sociology of quantification, while in Chapter Two she turns to the history of her two field sites (anonymized as The Notebook and LaPlace) and the manner in which they are embedded in nationally specific journalistic fields. Chapter Three looks at how these organizations first game to grips with the chase for web traffic. Chapters Four, Five, and Six form the intellectual heart of the book, with Chapter Four looking at how metrics are understood and internalized, Chapter Five analyzing how these metrics affected editorial routines, and Chapter Six turning to the controversial question of how metrics affect worker compensation. A conclusion ties the arguments together, and the methodological appendix will be invaluable for PhD students and early career researchers attempting to understand how to conduct institutional ethnography in an era of “screenwork.”
The major conceptual advance of Metrics at Work is to reinterpret algorithmic work and algorithmic culture as part of larger sociological categories of analysis; namely, (1) the understanding of metrics as symbolic resources, and (2) the role played by metrics in the bureaucratic and disciplinary control of work. Christin pushes back on what she calls “technologically deterministic” arguments that see metrics in and of themselves as forcing newsrooms, whether in France or the United States, in particular directions. Rather, she argues, web analytics and algorithmic audiences are symbolically indeterminate resources which can be utilized for particular forms of professional validation and institutional control. This control, she argues, can be further divided into bureaucratic control and disciplinary control. Bureaucratic control, which is the most common mode of metric management in the American newsroom she studied, operates at the level of management. Disciplinary control, which was seen more in the French newsrooms, demonstrates how metrics and their values penetrate the very habitus of French reporters who internalize the values these algorithms carry. These, in turn, are related to the larger historical and structural contexts in which journalists find themselves in in these different countries.
This forms the foundation of some really excellent ethnographic analysis. But to truly understand the deep importance of Christin’s book—the way it helps re-establish a long dormant link between sociology and journalism studies while simultaneously integrating the study of technology into a previously materially agnostic subfield—it is helpful to take a step back and reexamine the classic tradition of which she is a part, namely, the newsroom ethnographies of the 1970s. By understanding this larger disciplinary context, the real value of Christin’s work becomes clear.
Rationalization in the Newsroom
The newsroom ethnographies of the 1970s were deeply concerned with how newsrooms were managed and controlled, while simultaneously not very concerned with the role played by technology in managing this control. The work of Herbert Gans, Gaye Tuchman and others were, in this regard, strongly influenced by Berger and Luckmann’s Social Construction of Reality (published in 1966) which argued that everyday knowledge about the world was socially situated and to a large part a “construction” rather than functioning as a one-to-one correspondence between perception and the worldFootnote 1. Not only does news produce part of the raw material that helps construct taken-for-granted reality, these first-generation newsroom ethnographers argued, but newsrooms themselves are socially constructed and can be studied according to ethnomethdological principles. News values shape and are shaped by newsroom routines which emphasize the importance of the regular, bureaucratic, patterned production of news content. These patterns can ultimately be seen as facilitating certain ideologically-oriented types of journalism (news that reifies opinions of elites in everyday matters but is simultaneously more hostile to government than capitalistic business, news that pays little attention to the lives and problems of the working class and labor, news that defers to the president on issues of foreign policy, and so on). And while technological affordances and the materiality of newsroom evidence may play a role in shaping these newsroom patterns, the primary factors shaping the driving construction of newsrooms are, not surprisingly, social in nature. Technology, in the classic account of newsrooms from the 1970s and 80s, is primarily an intensifier of trends and behaviors that already exist at the social, cultural, and ideological level.
In retrospect we can see that much of this classic journalism scholarship was the beneficiary of an apparently stable media production and consumption system, the stability of which fostered a powerful explanatory constellation of communication theories. These theories fused the granularity of ethnographic research, middle-range theorizing about professional newsroom culture, replicable content analysis that demonstrated relatively consistent patterns of news coverage across issues, platforms, and times, and a “realistically-critical” normative position about what all this meant for democracy and public life. From the ethnographic newsroom studies, scholars concluded that journalists were first and foremost bureaucratic employees, striving to rationalize the disorganized flow of news for the purposes of workplace stability and predictability. In cultural terms these news workers had become professionals, and consequently, their primary guiding allegiances were to their fellow journalists rather than to the market or to audiences. These qualitative findings neatly tied into more quantitative and experimental research that established key communication concepts such as framing, agenda-setting, and priming. All of this work, finally, could be summarized by the axiom that the media told people not what to think but rather what to think about and thus could be tied into macro-level theoretical perspectives as diverse as democratic pluralism and Gramscian hegemony theory, depending on the commitments and personality of the scholar in question.
The happy overlap of micro- and macro-level journalism research, the mutually shaping relationship between values, ideology, and routines, the relatively unproblematic nature of newsroom technology, and the wealthy, organizationally robust nature of news production companies thus allowed ethnographic research to import a structural timelessness into its findings that its methods alone could not justify. Ethnography, in the end, is epistemologically committed to the small-scale, the local, the cultural, and the in-depth case of one (or several). But the confluence between organizational and technological stability, on the one hand, and the emerging findings of political communication researchers, on the other, allowed newsroom researchers to look up—to embed their local, provisional, ethnographic findings in larger structural forces. The apparent stability of the news production system, in short, eased some of the methodological tensions between the descriptive and interpretive tendencies of ethnographic newsroom research and the more systematic research into the larger social and economic structures of which these newsrooms were a part. But this organizational stability was as much assumed as it was actual, with a series of technological, economic, political, and cultural changes in news in the early 2000s retrospectively shedding light on the fact that newsrooms and news audiences were not as changeless as they appeared to be even in the 1980s and 90s. These assumptions of stability stemmed in part from the relative disinterest of the first wave of newsroom ethnographers in placing the organizations they studied in time, as well as their disinterest in material and technological processes.
Conclusion: Where Does Control Come From?
Christin’s book, when placed inside this longer lineage of which it is a part, highlights the tricky theoretical relationship between innovation, news values, and media technology, as well as how a focus on newsroom technology comes with its own challenges for ethnographic research. Christin, like the classic sociological theorists, is concerned with the question of where newsroom control comes from. Unlike them, she has no choice but to take technology and material infrastructures seriously insofar as they undergird the very transformations she is studying. However, in the end, she remains true to her sociological heritage. Despite its occasional intersection with fields like Science and Technology Studies (STS), Metrics at Work places the primary locus of control within and between human beings themselves (in the form of disciplinary and bureaucratic power), and sees metrics as symbolic resources as much as she does material forces.
This is all correct, as far as it goes. However, it may lead to a degree of sanguinity when it comes to a normative evaluation of the impact of “metrics at work” insofar as the power of web analytics is, in this analysis, ultimately subordinate to the human beings who interpret, manage, and internalize them. In the end, control in the newsroom still comes from people, and cultural symbolic resources, and not machines. Nevertheless, it seems clear to me that, despite the continued primacy of the social, there have been very real changes in the autonomy of humans in newsrooms and in their subordination to the logic of market forces. The degree to which these more material (in both the economic and STS senses of the term) can be reconciled with the rebirth of a specific sociology of news remains an open question for future ethnographers to ponder.
