Inside online newsrooms: what ethnography can do
Two recent journalistic articles offer a nice amount of data on the internal functioning of online newsrooms and are a good background to make the case for ethnographic observation:
- Talk to the Newsroom: Deputy Managing Editor Jonathan Landman, at NYTimes.com.
- No Casual Operation: Inside a Citizen Journalism Newsroom, by Geoff Dougherty, Editor of Chi-Town Daily News, at Poynter Online.
The first piece is a conversation of readers with the top editor of the online newsroom of the New York Times. His answers shed some light on the relationships between the print and online operations, news production routines for the web or the redefinition of newsworthiness based on audience stats.
The second story is a report on the working routines of a citizen media operation in Chicago. The editor explains how they recruit, coordinate and motivate over thirty citizen reporters, how software for customer-relationship management helped build a virtual newsroom and what expectations they have about the role of participatory journalism.
Both articles are first-person accounts of the new routines and challenges of Internet journalism. They are extraordinarily valuable but, at the same time, lack what an ethnographer could offer observing these newsrooms herself: the thoroughness and fairness of an independent observer; the analytical ability to trace factors and constraints of current practices and to compare cases; or the systematic nature of research guided by powerful theoretical tools.
