What I’m Doing (1): The Big Picture

Since I’ve been enrolled in the Columbia University Communications PhD program, I’ve had four general areas of interest:

First: What do journalists know? What is journalistic knowledge, both in a formal sense, and in a practical professional sense (i.e., what are journalists taught?) In pursuit of this question, I spent most of 2007-2008 conducting ethnographic fieldwork in journalism school classrooms and reviewing curricular documents.

Second: What do journalists do? What is journalistic work? In approaching this question, I’ve tried not to define “journalists” ahead of time, but keep an open definition and let journalists define themselves. This is my current focus: I’m in Philadelphia to study journalistic work in one mid-sized metropolitan area.

Third: (and this is where interests one and two unite) … how is journalistic authority maintained by enacting journalistic knowledge through journalistic work? Basically, I take the line that occupations maintain their cultrual authority by displaying their “special,” “unique” knowledge in the work they do.

This third topic ties into to my fourth and broadest area of interest: how are power and authority maintained in our (pre/post/a)modern world, how do power and authority relate to each other, how can power and authority be legitimized democratically, and how is the structure of power / authority changing? This interest goes beyond “journalism,” per se, though journalism is an interesting case study inside these broader questions.

[As a side note: questions of knowledge and authority are currently being overwhelmed by the massive amount of data I'm getting this summer regarding journalistic work. Basically, I could write three dissertations about my fieldwork in Philadelphia alone. I want to maintain questions of journalistic authority-- at least in the background-- but I'm becoming pretty certain that my time in j-school classrooms might be more useful for another, later project. We'll see]

Blogging My Fieldwork

Take recent burblings in the blogosphere. Add in a couple of really smart posts about the relationship between ethnographic fieldwork, keeping a journal, and keeping a blog. Multiply by a desire on my part to start getting feedback on my own fieldwork in Philadelphia, and factor in the understanding that the academic publishing cycle is in no way compatible with the changes currently buffeting the world of journalism. What do you get? Possibly, a return to active blogging, a practice foresaken since I started teaching in earnest back in 2007. We’ll see.

My own interest in local news seems prescient, as all sorts of metro daily business models are crumbling, both in Philadelphia and elsewhere. So there’s been a surge of interest in the metro newspaper in the journalistic blogosphere, with two of the best posts coming from Jay Rosen (“Big Daddy Newspaper Has Gone and Left Journalism,”) and Jeff Jarvis (“Newsroom economics: Where would you put your money in a newsroom?”) I’m hoping that some of my own on the ground work this summer can contribute to the conversation.

The problem, of course, is that none of this will be done for close to a year — and that’s not even counting the extra 2-5 years it will take to turn my dissertation into a publishable book. I know that on some level, the work I’m doing in Philadelphia amounts to a history of a particular moment in journalism at a particular time– that hopefully, it will be read by people who want to learn “what things were like ‘back then’”– but that doesn’t make it any easier to feel relevant sometimes.

As always, C. Wright Mills to the rescue. “On Intellectual Craftsmanship,” the most brilliant methodological appendix ever written, is full of insights into how to organize your files, keep a journal, and generally keep your mind fresh while you’re engaging in the lonely process of scholarship. Rex over at Savage Minds had the brilliant idea of taking the places where Mills writes journal and file and replacing them with website and blog. So you get something like this:

By keeping an adequate blog and thus developing self-reflective habits, you learn how to keep your inner world awake. Whenever you feel strongly about events or ideas you must try not to let them pass from your mind, but instead to formulate them on your blog and in so doing draw out their implications, show yourself either how foolish these feelings or ideas are, or how they might be articulated into productive shape.

All in all, I’ve been developing a fairly self-reflexive approach to my ethnographic work in Philadelphia anyway. My plan was to share by written memos or parts of chapters with my key research informants, both for ethical and reflexive reasons, so they can play a part in shaping my final results (this is an approach emphasized by both Pablo Boczkowski in Digitizing the News and Bruno Latour in Reassembling the Social but it’s been a mainstay of most Anthropology and qualitiative sociology for a long time. So possibly the next step is to start putting some of the more comprehensive parts of my field notes online, telling everyone about them, and letting them comment on them at will.

My only real concern at this point is ethical– many of my informants have basically given me permission to quote  them by name, and it’s clear that I will be allowed to use the names of the organizations I’m examining. BUT … putting something up on a blog is a lot different than publishing it years from now in an unread doctoral thesis. I’ve gotten amazing access, and I don’t want to rock the boat.

What do people think? Right now, my going plan is to not quote or mention anyone by name, but beyond that, just go ahead and put relevant things up here. Is that enough? I’m curious to hear people’s feedback.

Wait a second … I just realized that many of you may not have any idea what my “fieldwork” is, who I am, or what the hell I’m doing in Philadelphia! That, at least, I can tell you about, along with some other bits and pieces of things. So, stay tuned for some upcoming posts.