The Hybrid Media System

by Andrew Chadwick

  It is clear that there has been a concerted editorial push from the very top at the Guardian to adapt to the multiple challenges of online news. Over recent years this has gone beyond making journalists aware that they should be publishing their stories to the web, toward a more holistic approach in which staff are strongly encouraged to reach out to the audience in real time using social media. Twitter has been a particularly important part of this transition. Almost all of the Guardian’s reporters use the service. What has been the impact of this shift on the news production process?

  Early examples of journalists sourcing from Twitter led to it becoming quickly embedded in routine practice at the Guardian, not only as a way of disseminating stories but also as a mechanism for sourcing. A key early moment came in April 2009 when, in an exposé of alleged police brutality, investigative reporter Paul Lewis used Twitter to source eyewitness accounts of the death of an innocent bystander, Ian Tomlinson, during the G20 protests in London. Within a matter of a few days Lewis had spoken to twenty reliable witnesses and had secured controversial video footage from an American tourist showing that a police officer had struck Tomlinson with a baton, causing him to fall to the ground and injure himself. (The officer was later charged with manslaughter and was acquitted in July 2012.)

  Carol speaks of Twitter as meshing with the Guardian’s “comfort with breaking stories during the daytime” and she argues that it has increased the visibility of news editors, primarily because it is they who preside over the streams of information entering and exiting the newsroom. But there is a more significant underlying shift here, and it is one that is very much about positioning the Guardian as a more powerful actor in shaping the news agenda in the hybrid media system. The belief is that far from weakening its position, the website, when integrated with social media, can serve to enhance (former) print journalists’ influence. Not only can traditional print outlets now adapt in order to outdo new online news players like bloggers and web-only news sites, they can also start to compete more closely with the old enemy: broadcasters. Carol explains how this has started to shape strategic decisions in particularly powerful ways, with scoops such as the July 2011 revelation by veteran investigative reporter Nick Davies that News of the World journalists had illegally hacked the voicemail of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler during the police investigation of her disappearance in 2002. Davies’ Milly Dowler story, which won the 2011 Paul Foot award for investigative journalism, was published in the late afternoon and immediately spread via a Twitter campaign that was seeded by Guardian journalists. The story set off a series of reverberations that led, a few days later, to News Corporation boss Rupert Murdoch deciding to close down the 168-year-old News of the World after alleged evidence of widespread illegal phone hacking was revealed among some of its journalists. The Guardian editorial team knew that this was a major new development in their ongoing investigation of the phone-hacking scandal and they saw publishing to the web first as a way of gaining an upper hand over broadcast news. But only through the mechanism of Twitter did the story have the immediacy they sought—an indication of how social media networks have only very recently reshaped the context of online journalism. “We broke it at 4:29 p.m.,” Carol says. “You’re doing it at a point in time where we could drop it and probably cause mayhem in other peoples’ newsrooms when they had everything sorted out and then there was ‘oh God, the Guardian have gone and done this.’ That ability to put it out helps us … People then identify that story as being something that is the Guardian’s because that’s how the TV stations are reporting it. So the next day they probably go out and buy the paper … It’s allowed us to compete in ways we never could before.”

  Although dependent upon resource-intensive background investigations to produce the big stories in the first place, the expectation emerging here is that if former print media organizations can adapt to the new temporal rhythms of the web they can gain new advantages over the twenty-four-hour television news channels that have been preeminent in breaking news since they emerged in the 1980s. Here, the web emerges as savior of what were once just print media by putting newspapers in the same temporal real-time game as broadcast media.

  WIKILEAKS AND THE “SONNY AND CHER THEORY”

  If enhancing former print media’s power in relation to broadcast media has helped spur the Guardian’s adoption of digital tools, there have recently been more radical changes in the organization of journalism at the paper. As I argued in my interpretation of WikiLeaks in chapter 5, the key to understanding that entity is to avoid reducing it to a simple case of how professional journalists used an online activist movement as “just another source.” At the same time, however, WikiLeaks is a movement whose ability to act with meaningful power has been fundamentally shaped by its negotiated interdependence with the logics of professional older media. James Ball is one of only a few individuals in the world to have experienced both sides of this stormy collaborative relationship—what he half-jokingly described to me as the “Sonny and Cher Theory,” in honor of the tempestuous creative tension inside pop music’s famous “power couple” of the 1960s and 1970s.

  Ball worked directly for WikiLeaks from late 2010 to early 2011 and was an assistant to Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks core team during the release of the embassy cables in December 2010. Prior to that, he had spent several months assisting WikiLeaks as a volunteer during the busy summer leading up to the release of the Iraq War logs in October 2010. Ball also performed some public duties for WikiLeaks while Assange was briefly imprisoned in December 2010 after the allegations of sexual misconduct against Assange by the Swedish prosecutor. When he left WikiLeaks in early 2011, Ball landed a full-time job as a journalist in the Guardian’s investigations team, working with David Leigh, the longstanding investigative reporter who played a major role in the Guardian’s WikiLeaks team (for more on WikiLeaks see chapter 5). (After our interview Ball went on to co-author a book about WikiLeaks with journalism scholar Charlie Beckett (Beckett & Ball, 2012)). I was keen to learn more about the practices inside WikiLeaks, as well as the alliance between WikiLeaks and its media partners. Due to his experience of crossing the boundary between activism and professional journalism, Ball was well-positioned to act as an informant.

  Ball’s role inside WikiLeaks speaks further to the organization’s complex and contradictory nature, which I discussed in chapter 5. A large part of his work involved making the data releases accessible and usable as story material for WikiLeaks’ extended network of partners around the world. This included journalists in the formal alliances Assange forged during 2010, but it also encompassed a bigger, distributed global network of writers and activists (Interview 29, September 2011). Ball spent a great deal of time sifting through the material, helping volunteer engineers test the computerized redaction systems, and suggesting stories to a wide range of media partners. The existing accounts of WikiLeaks make little of these informal connections, but Ball tells me how Assange would ask staff to give “sneaky first looks” to those outside the formal partnerships, “to try to keep them on side.” Although WikiLeaks was chaotic in most respects, it had a fairly sophisticated view of its own precarious position in the hybrid media system and of how to enhance its own influence. Its aim was to try to play professional media companies off against each other, in the hope that it would avoid becoming over-dependent on any single organization. But this was also about minimizing a potential competitive backlash among those frozen out of the big-leak “exclusivity” deals that had been struck with the Guardian, the New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, and El País. Fearing that a broader media backlash would reduce the impact of the big leaks, there were “little rogue side deals … done to keep other outlets interested.” For example, Ball gave Channel 4 News a “five-hour heads-up” on a cable revealing that the U.S. Government believed that President Rajapakse of Sri Lanka was allegedly guilty of war crimes (Interview 29, September 2011). Channel 4 News has a strong tradition of reporting on Sri La
nka, so it leapt at the opportunity to craft a scoop package for its television news and website (Channel 4 News, 2010e). WikiLeaks also gave basic hints to inquiring journalists about what the next day’s cables stories would feature and Assange sent “bunches of cables to an Australian newspaper” with which he had informal links.

  This approach may have made sense to WikiLeaks but it infuriated those on the other side of the agreement. There was a conflict of norms, as the long-term relationships built on reciprocity and trust that are seen as essential for “good” political journalism were severely weakened by that fact that, in Ball’s words, “You couldn’t trust what WikiLeaks said. You really couldn’t” (Interview 29, September 2011). After all, the professional journalists were providing their expertise, without which they thought WikiLeaks would flounder.

  Having said that, it is also clear from Ball’s account that despite Assange’s view that simply putting unannounced data releases on the WikiLeaks website would not garner the impact he craved, and despite the important role of professional journalists in crafting stories on the basis of often-impenetrable collections of data, some of this work was done in advance by Assange, his core team, and the broader network of WikiLeaks volunteers. This came “probably as a relief more for mainstream journalists than anyone else because the impact of just dropping the stuff is nowhere near [what you have] when you’ve had a team of people with some privileged access doing [spending] the time,” says Ball. For example, Ball and his colleagues at the Bureau for Investigative Journalism were responsible for finding and then cataloging over several weeks the war logs that revealed that the United States had turned a blind eye to systematic torture and abuse inside the Iraqi military. The Bureau found twelve hundred cases. This proved to be an important story for the professional media during the official launch of the war logs in the autumn of 2010. Such details put something of a dent in the stories of heroic newspaper journalists spending weeks combing through huge databases from scratch. The “professionals” clearly had pointers from the WikiLeaks “amateurs”; indeed, given the role of the wider global network of professional journalists who were pulled in at various times to assist WikiLeaks, “amateurs” is not the most appropriate term.

  The distinctions between journalism and activism, and the broader question of whether WikiLeaks constitutes a fundamental rupture with previous traditions of political reporting provokes some intriguing reflections. Ball’s move to the Guardian changed his impression of WikiLeaks and it was clear during our interview that he was eager to draw boundaries between the norms of professional practice and those of renegades like Assange. WikiLeaks was very able in technical terms but it had an unclear grasp of its own stated principles. Ball stressed that he was a paid member of staff at WikiLeaks; he invoiced for his time and expenses as he does for all freelance work: “I’m a journalist, not an activist,” he says. He feels more accountable to the public at the Guardian than he ever did at WikiLeaks, due to established ethical and organizational norms such as internal editorial oversight, giving individuals the right to reply in advance of publication, and responding to complaints when stories are factually incorrect: “With WikiLeaks it was transparency for everyone except itself,” he says.

  Ball is dubious about WikiLeaks’s future following its decision to release the entire embassy cables database in unredacted form in late 2011. He sees a role for online “uncensorable publishers,” but only if they work as sources that supply journalists with information. Partnerships of the kind established in 2010 are too fraught with difficulties, but if “leaks came on the quiet from newspapers trying to avoid various laws, it would do alright and someone like Julian Assange could cheerfully take credit for the scoops,” he adds. In other words, this would be a return to the basis on which WikiLeaks operated in its initial guise from 2006 to 2009.

  Ball reveals the latest installment in the evolution of the “Sonny and Cher Theory” of interdependence among WikiLeaks and professional media. The Guardian’s “open journalism” initiative launched in 2011 “actually tallies incredibly closely with Julian Assange’s ‘scientific journalism,’ ” he says. Linking to the sources of stories such as official documents, publishing databases for others to mine, and incorporating online contributions into article narratives are all aspects of this. The Reading the Riots project, which brought together journalists from the paper and scholars from a range of universities in Britain and America to explain the London riots of summer 2011 is a good example. In such cases the Guardian will “publish the data before we’ve even worked on it ourselves,” says Ball. But then he adds a telling qualifier, revealing professional journalism’s power in the context of online volunteerism—“we keep bits back.”

  The New Politics of Regulation

  I move, finally, to the field of media regulation in Britain. Here, unsurprisingly, there is much uncertainty surrounding the development of online media. Part of the problem for actors in this domain is that the understandings originally developed for print and broadcast media only partially apply to online media, and online media has evolved a great deal since internet use first started to diffuse in the 1990s. Ed Richards, the chief executive of the Office of Communications (OFCOM), which is the closest thing Britain has to a unified broadcast media regulator, describes his agency as a “converged regulator,” but explains that “government more broadly probably has a long way to go to understand the opportunities and the consequences of convergence” (Interview 4, April 2010). Britain’s 2003 Communications Act was hatched during a period when the internet was only just beginning to reach the levels of popularity that have necessitated responses from policymakers over issues such as intellectual property rights and harmful online content. Yet despite this uncertainty there is also the view that OFCOM has adapted to the online media environment, in large part because it was created at the end of a long period of deregulation in broadcasting. “Jay,” a former senior official at OFCOM is keen to stress that “don’t forget that we license 2,000 broadcasters here” (Interview 22, July 2010). Experience gained during the era of multi-channel television is here seen as providing guidance for the future regulation of the internet.

  Whether this is a convincing argument remains to be seen, but it is one that finds similar expression at the center of what was, at the time of this research (2012), the closest thing Britain had to a print media “regulator”: the Press Complaints Commission (PCC). The PCC was derided by critics as a toothless body from its beginnings in 1991 as a means of forestalling a then-emerging government agenda to regulate newspaper media. Lacking statutory powers, the PCC was essentially a system of self-regulation sanctioned by those news organizations that chose to join it—principally the tabloid-dominated national newspaper and magazine sector. As such, it had a reputation for regulatory capture. In 2012, the PCC was thrust into the spotlight as one of the players in the News Corporation phone-hacking scandal when, during witness hearings in Lord Justice Leveson’s inquiry into press standards, it came under heavy criticism for failing to properly investigate previously alleged malpractice at the News of the World. I interviewed Stephen Abell, then the PCC’s director, in April 2010. Abell joined the organization in January 2010 and moved on to work for a public relations company in February 2012.

  Like the senior staff at broadcast regulator OFCOM, Abell argues that the principles developed in the pre-internet era are being transposed now that newspapers are online. In fact, he suggests that the PCC’s model of self-regulation is even better suited to the online realm because it is based upon “cooperation and collaboration” and “flexibility and transparency.” He continues: “we offer a model of self-regulation where people voluntarily buy into it. Now that model actually fits online very well because of shifting jurisdictions, because of the ease of self-publication. Any form of top-down regulation doesn’t really fit … The model of self-regulation fits new media really, really well” (Interview 6, April 2010).

  Despite this perceived fit between the
older principles of press self-regulation and what he sees as the organizing culture of online news, Abell is very keen to draw boundaries around the PCC’s regulatory domains. Only those organizations that are paid-up members of the PCC are subject to its code of practice, so this rules out almost the entirety of the blogosphere. When the Huffington Post established its British organization in 2011 it asked to join the PCC, but that is the only exception to date, and it said more of the Post’s desire to blend “amateur” online news with “professional” journalism than it does of the PCC’s remit. Only the online editions of the PCC’s members are of interest to the PCC, which rules out vast swathes of online content.

  Abell speaks of how, as newspapers and magazines moved online during the 2000s, the PCC developed a rough consensus on how it would seek to apply the principles of self-regulation to the internet; but, he adds, it has trodden gingerly during a time when print media are under commercial threat. As the interview with Abel progresses, it becomes clear that these boundaries are becoming more difficult to maintain due to the increasingly hybrid character of the production and consumption of news and the campaigns by online activists eager to score points against what is seen as a protective bastion of not only “old” media in general, but also a British newspaper sector dominated by right-wing tabloids.

  In 2009, for example, there was a concerted campaign by bloggers who sought to expose unethical practice at Express Group newspapers after journalists there sourced material, including pictures, from the Facebook profiles of survivors of the Dunblane shootings of 1996. The PCC issued a ruling critical of the way the Scottish Sunday Express handled online sourcing. Also in 2009, the PCC received numerous complaints about an article on the Spectator magazine’s blog by a columnist, Rod Liddle. Liddle had argued that “the overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community,” but the PCC found that there was insufficient evidence for this assertion. This was the first time that the PCC had sought to directly regulate a blog. The Spectator, sensing that it might avoid censure, argued that its blog should not be treated in the same way as the other sections of the publication (both web and print) because a blog was “conversational” in nature and the editor permitted critical comments to be published under the original article. That same year an article by Daily Mail journalist Jan Moir speculated that drug abuse may have been responsible for the death of gay musician Stephen Gateley, formerly of the popular group Boyzone, even though an inquest indicated that he died of an untreated heart defect. Moir’s article sparked outrage among equal rights activists and led quickly to an online campaign to have the Mail withdraw the piece. Twitter and Facebook played important roles in coordinating the activists’ protests and their subsequent complaints—twenty-five thousand of them—to the PCC. But the PCC’s investigation eventually rejected the complaints and upheld Moir’s right as a journalist to comment on matters of public concern. This in turn sparked another online campaign, this time against the PCC on the grounds that it was in the pocket of the Mail, one of Britain’s most popular papers and now by far Britain’s most popular news website.