Indigenous Journalisms

Chapter 6 draws on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with Indigenous journalists in Canada and the United States who have been addressing colonialism, race, and gender in their journalism all along. Indigenous journalists articulate the challenges of working in and among mainstream media that has largely erased and misrepresented Indigenous voices, communities, and concerns on a range of issues. They undertake a differentiated set of approaches that draw on journalism ideals and get at deeper problems structurally such that transformation within journalism as profession, identity, and method might be possible. As a result, Indigenous journalists are using digital media to transform journalism methods, decolonizing journalism ideals like “fairness and balance” by drawing from Indigenous knowledge, histories, and relational frameworks. This chapter provides a bookend to Chapter 1 by offering a pathway into discussing not only new bases for ethical consideration but also provides examples of some of the multiple journalisms available through digital media.

Dominant Crisis Narratives and Changing Infrastructures

In Chapter 4, we examine efforts to address reckoning at one of Canada’s most respected legacy journalism organizations: the Toronto Star. Methodologically, we draw on a number of sets of data: public and policy discourse about the journalism crisis in Canada, recent events related to race and gender at the Star, and ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with Star journalists regarding the development of data journalism. Our analysis generates questions about how news organizations are wrestling concurrently with structural critique, economic challenges, and technological transformation. The gender, race, and colonial reckoning that we find in other chapters, we see internally at the Star where long-standing issues with “the view from nowhere,” the challenge of closed systems of journalism, and legacy organizations’ openness to change are conjoined with issues such as methodological interpretation, journalism’s colonial history and its systematic whiteness, and exclusion of Indigenous and minority journalists.

Battling for the Story

Social media has shifted the terrain for journalism, and offers platforms for counter-narratives, alternative views, and broader expertise. In Chapter 2, we focus on the social media response in three specific cases: (1) two separate trials for the murders of two Indigenous youth, Colten Boushie and Tina Fontaine, in central Canada, in which the two white men accused in their homicides were acquitted within a month of each other in early 2018; (2) the 2015 civil trial and discrimination case brought by Ellen Pao, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, who was forced out of her job; (3) a 2016 #MeToo related moment in which writer Kelly Oxford asked women to share their stories through #notokay. In all three cases, we find a “battle for the story” that plays out in a range of ways from a refusal to participate, to talking back and resisting journalism’s habit of “hoarding the mic.”

Opening up Journalism’s Crisis

Despite a wide range of concerns, the multiple overlapping crises in North American journalism have been largely circumscribed as stemming from either economic decline and/or technological disruption and change. This narrow lens has limited the possibility for discussion of wider and often prior challenges to the current state of journalism and their solutions. This introduction brings together wider conversations about journalism and complicates the notion of crisis, situating concerns about technology and economics alongside chronic issues related to power, structure, and epistemology in order to analyze gaps and exclusions. Understanding what journalism can and should do—its limits and possibilities—is essential to imagining new contours for how journalism might respond to the digital reckonings taking place at a time when good journalism is determined via an iterative process that is both internal to journalism (professional norms and practices) and external to journalism (taking into account audience experiences).

“Speculative” Memoir Fragments and Existential Dilemmas

In Chapter 3, we turn the tables from audiences back to journalists to examine how journalists are narrating their own professional identity through real-time “speculative” memoir fragments. This chapter explores how American and Canadian journalists are struggling with their own personal reckoning and existential crises with respect to issues of truth, subjectivity, and power and how to narrate oneself in a global journalism landscape with multiple colonial histories. Drawing on a range of memoir fragments from a series of behind-the-scenes, first-person animated graphic videos titled Correspondent Confidential that ran on Vice Media and exemplars of “quit lit” (where journalists publicly explain their rationale for leaving journalism or doing it differently), we argue that there is an emergent ethical meta genre concerning how journalists are dealing with the “view from nowhere” in a global journalism context that calls for increased location of identity and interests.

Conclusion

HOW DO JOURNALISTS KNOW what they know? Who gets to decide what good journalism is and when it’s done right? What kind of experts are journalists, and what role should (and do) they play in society? Until a couple decades ago, these questions were rarely asked by journalists. The assumption by most journalists about how good journalism was defined and who was credible and vital to society remained generally undisputed. When journalists were asked such questions by malcontented publics and critics, often they were easily ignored. Now, if you’re on social media, you’re likely to see multiple critiques of journalism and media on a weekly, if not daily or hourly, basis. It seems not only convenient but pragmatic to give most of the credit to new media technologies for changes to how journalism does what it does and how relationships between journalists and diverse audiences have changed....

Startup Life

Chapter 5 shifts the terrain to a prominent women-led journalism startup in an innovation context that has prioritized technological change over social structures and transformation. Science and technology studies frameworks for thinking about repair are necessary to explain how this commercial startup is not just innovating for the sake of saving journalism but to improve journalism as a tool for intervention and responsibility—to “move the needle” on what kinds of work journalism is able to do. These commitments are playing out particularly in fieldwork related to ownership and structuring, professional identity and innovations related to collaboration, and the deliberate focus of the startup on reconciliation as a public good in a settler-colonial society and media in Canada. We complicate the emerging focus in journalism studies on repair and reform as largely a function of the nonprofit and philanthropic journalism sector.

Reckoning with the “View From Nowhere”

Chapter 1 lays the conceptual groundwork for the book, bridging histories of journalism and science with particular attention to journalistic stance, objectivity, and representational critique. We start with why and how the tarnished ideal of objectivity—the view from nowhere—is still doing so much work, heavy lifting, and harm. We contend that journalism studies as a field has failed to address questions of power and decades of persistent criticism from media studies, critical race studies, science and technology studies, and feminist media studies. Instead, journalism scholarship has tended to focus on individual, ethical, and front-stage professional reputational concerns more than on journalism’s claims to speak truth to power—and its ability to talk about methods, expertise, and reliable knowledge claims. This focus has allowed journalists to deny their personal subjectivity and professional context as a white-dominated profession, which has left journalism open to yet more critique.