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Ethics and Values in a Creative Reconstruction of Journalism María Luengo And Susana Herrera-Damas
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Journalism and Truth in an Age of Social Media James E. Katz
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Alfred Hermida and Mary Lynn Young News Ethics and Emerging Journalistic Narratives 53
4 Ethics in 360-Degree Immersive Journalism 55
María José Benítez de Gracia, Sara Pérez-Seijo, and Susana Herrera-Damas
5 Quo Vadis, Newsgames? Ethical Boundaries Between Journalism and Games 73
Salvador Gómez-García and Juan Martín-Quevedo
6 Guiding the Adoption of News Storytelling Design Through Ethics: The Use of Stories in Google’s AMP Project 92
Mariché Navío-Navarro and Laura González-Díez
Interrogating Data, Algorithms, and Automatization Through Journalism Ethics 105
7 Data Journalism, Massive Leaks, and Investigation: What the Panama Papers Have Taught Us About Ethics 107
Helena Cortés and María Luengo
8 Semi-automated Journalism: Reinforcing Ethics to Make the Most of Artificial Intelligence for Writing News 124
José Luis Rojas Torrijos
9 Ethical Challenges in Incorporating Artificial Intelligence into Newsrooms 138
Teresa Barceló-Ugarte, José Manuel Pérez-Tornero, and Pere Vila-Fumàs
Journalistic Innovation at the Service of the Public 155
10 Journalism, Algorithms, and the People’s Right to Know 157
Michaëla Cancela-Kieffer
11 Ethical Dilemmas in the Personalization of News from Voice Interfaces 174
Luis Miguel Pedrero-Esteban and Beatriz Gas-Gozalbo
12 Transparency, Innovation, and Journalism 187
Rogério Christofoletti
13 Innovative Tools for Citizen Empowerment in the Fight Against Misinformation 202
Óscar Espíritusanto and Inès Dinant
Conclusion 222
Susana Herrera-Damas
Index 228
Introduction
Journalism’s Creative Reconstruction: How Innovation in News Is Embracing Enduring Professional and Civil Values
María Luengo
News media are suffering a Schumpeterian “creative destruction” (Schumpeter, 1975 [1942]). This has been the received wisdom among scholars and media watchers evaluating the impact of digital technology on journalism today. However, is “creative destruction” an appropriate term in this case? The use of it to explain this recent period of upheaval in journalism usually involves reductive techno-economic paradigms that overlook critical cultural and ethical dimensions.
This collective book aims to understand technological innovation as “creative reconstruction” (Alexander, 2016). The idea of creative reconstruction was coined by cultural sociologist Jeffrey C. Alexander around 2014, after he and a group of cultural sociologists and journalism scholars expressed frustration at how academics and pundits were narrowly theorizing in purely technological and economic terms the current “crisis of journalism” and the consequent changes and innovations in news. This perspective was crystalized in The Crisis of Journalism Reconsidered (Alexander, Breese, and Luengo, 2016), a book that shows how crisis and change in journalism are equally caused by cultural and ethical factors. The empirical investigations in The Crisis of Journalism Reconsidered demonstrate that intense alarm over digital change implies the strength of both journalistic ethics and democratic values (Carlson, 2016; Luengo, 2016). The book argues that the compulsion to defend these ethical and civil commitments actually energizes a search for new organizational and technological forms.
In line with this previous cultural sociological theorizing and research, this book focuses on the energizing of journalism’s ethical and civil ideals by looking at emerging journalistic practices and products such as 360-degree immersive journalism, newsgames, the automatization and personalization of news, artificial-intelligence news production, and data journalism. Our book theoretically and empirically explores new concepts, models, initiatives, and practices that show how forms of professional ethics that overlap notably with civil ideals—truth seeking, transparency, accuracy, accountability, and civic engagement, among other ethical values—are invigorating the innovative dimension of journalism. If Alexander, Breese, and Luengo’s cultural sociological perspective issued a significant challenge to the technological and economic view of a so-called “crisis” in the sector in a recent context of dramatic changes within journalism, this new collective book entails a fresh turn of the screw against reductive explanations, this time specifically within the area of news innovation.
News Media Innovation Reconsidered: Ethics and Values in a Creative Reconstruction of Journalism, First Edition. Edited by María Luengo and Susana Herrera-Damas.
It is becoming increasingly evident that new digital technologies and new forms of news production and distribution have gradually led to the emergence of innovative and consolidated journalistic organizations. Many pure digital media born more than a decade ago have survived the current crisis facing the news industry and now compete alongside major legacy media nationally and globally. On the other hand, many other initiatives have failed, and well-established national and local journalistic enterprises have cut jobs drastically or just disappeared from the market. And news media companies are continuing to suffer enormous hits to advertising as a result of COVID-19.
Media experts and scholars explain the emergence of new actors (and the erosion and digital reinvention of old ones) in the Schumpeterian economic terms of “creative destruction” (Bruno and Nielsen, 2012; Schlesinger and Doyle, 2014; Nee, 2013; García-Avilés, 2016; Negredo et al., 2020). Schlesinger and Doyle’s exploration of how major UK media groups have responded to the crisis in printed newspapers draws on this economic pattern. They argue that, because of advancing technology, “the value of large, dominant incumbent firms that fail to transform themselves eventually becomes eroded and, in some cases, completely destroyed” (Schlesinger and Doyle, 2014, p. 2). In Bruno and Nielsen’s pioneering report on journalistic online start-ups in Western Europe (2012), pure digital media players, which are first tentatively located on the “creative” side of this Schumpeterian process, are also seen as subjects of destruction in the same way as inherited business models are. Explanations of the rise, survival, success, or failure of new players and the destruction of old ones seem to reflect a process through which new technologies and new markets cause the “mutation” of journalistic organizations (Boczkowski, 2004) and the whole media system from within.
Just as technology and economics bring the “destructive” element, they also embody the “creative” one. Responses to the transformations of journalism include technological innovations, innovative ways to measure and analyze audience figures, and new business models (sources of revenues, ownership, and financial sustainability). The success or failure of new media are also measured and assessed according to technoeconomic factors. Through the process of creative destruction, technology and economics impose “a regime of trial and error and of making wagers,” as Jean-Gustave Padioleau puts it. The image of creative destruction establishes a present scenario and foresees a digital future in which new players are forced to compete with old ones, and new arrivals successfully win niche markets using up-to-the-minute technology. Padioleau observes that “under the guise of innovation, activities disappear to make room for newer, more ‘creative,’ more reliable/efficient ones. According to Schumpeter, creative destruction is at the heart of economic growth” (Padioleau, 2006, p. 110).
Schumpeter’s economic reductionism parallels a narrow technological understanding of journalism innovation. Drawing on research on journalism in Canada, Hermida and Young’s thought-provoking Chapter 3 in this book examines whether legacy newsrooms’ defensive adoption of innovation “as a technological-led solution” to economically navigate financial turbulence has been to their detriment. By entering into “the cycle of the never-ending pivots in the search for the killer innovation that will save the media,” Hermida and Young say, journalistic organizations get trapped in it.
And in times of survival, they argue, few can afford to adopt the latest shiny new technology.
Seeing Creative Destruction as Creative Reconstruction
Padioleau (2006, p. 10) is critical of the use of the term “creative destruction” in describing the crisis facing the media, on the basis that it is misleading. Is creative destruction a deceptive label? This terminology focuses mainly on economics and ignores the critical cultural and ethical component when explaining current changes in journalism. This book aims to put current technological innovations of journalism into the broader context of professional ethics and civil values. It examines journalism innovation from the energizing of ethics, looking at specific arenas of such innovation, from new forms and narratives to processes and ways of dissemination.
Without denying the tangible role played by digital technology and market conditions in reshaping the news today, this collaborative book takes a different angle to interpret recent changes in news media. Contrary to reductive techno-economic explanations, the contributors’ analyses of new journalistic forms and practices help show the power of journalistic and civil values for invigorating the profession. By looking at the ethical dimension of different initiatives and innovations in various countries, the chapters in this book seek to advance cultural and ethical insights into journalistic innovation. Alexander (2016, p. 2) points out that:
Recent technological change and the economic upheaval it has produced are coded by social meanings … Cultural codes not only trigger sharp anxiety about technological and economic changes; they also provide pathways to control them, so that the democratic practices of independent journalism, rather than being destroyed, can be sustained in new forms.
Following Alexander, contributors to this book were invited to look at news media innovations from the ethical values that make technological innovation sustainable. The various contributions to this book make it possible to identify the ethical and professional codes that are invigorating the profession through digital technologies. The selected innovations are characterized by an online-only or online-first approach, conveying the news via websites, mobile apps, or social networks. They integrate experienced journalists, journalistic entrepreneurs, reporters, and computer scientists.
The ethical perspective deployed to cross-examine the different innovations discussed also serves as the basis for the theoretical argument behind this book: ethics and values can be envisioned as pathways to a creative reconstruction of journalism. This new conceptualization transcends the economic logic of a creative destruction, which, according to Alexander (2016), would result in the destruction of the economic foundations of journalism. “Journalism would become Exhibit A of capitalist ‘creative destruction,’” he observes [p. 7]. In this vein, in the following two sections, I wish to briefly draw attention to the performative power of journalism for innovative repair by looking at the professional and civil values that may be generating and sustaining new entrants in the news media digital ecosystem. To what extent does the ethics of
journalism prevail and foster quality journalism through innovation within new disruptive digital scenarios? How are these ethical values shaped by new journalistic initiatives? To address these questions, I first use some of the closing remarks of Breese and Luengo’s (2016) “News Innovations and Enduring Commitments” chapter as scaffolding to semiotically map the arena of news media innovation as a symbolic place where journalism’s entrenched ethical codes are being re-signified. Then, I apply this theoretical framework performatively to new journalistic forms and practices at the intersection between ethics and technological innovation. This last section will serve as a more explicit introduction to the specific content of the chapters.
Mapping News Innovation Culturally
A cultural sociology insight into news media innovation allows us to reconsider how the core journalistic values of long-established new media organizations are now being re-signified by new technologies, work processes, and forms of news production and distribution. While the meanings of technologies and practices quickly change, the symbolic codes of journalism remain. Professional values such as “truth,” “accuracy,” “independence,” and “criticism” represent some of the cultural codes of professional journalism, while “falsehood,” “bias,” “inaccuracy,” and “dependence” often describe counter-values of professionalism (Breese and Luengo, 2016). When journalism entered the digital era, the printing press and legacy media had a monopoly over codes of professional journalism, whereas the Internet and new digital media have stood for opposing values. García-Avilés’s Chapter 1 reflects the way in which these values and counter-values of professionalism explain the initial uneasy relationship between ethics and digital technologies in journalism. From 2008, enduring journalistic values have been incorporated into a narrative of “crisis” (see Hermida and Young’s Chapter 3) shared by many practitioners, experts, and scholars (Alexander, Breese, and Luengo, 2016). The crisis narrative associated technologies, forms, and practices of traditional media, particularly printed newspapers, with professional journalism. Many forms, practices, and processes of well-established news organizations around the world had already become potent symbols of professionalism. Traditional media were “signifieds” (meanings) of a broader “signifier” professional journalism. As Figure I.1 shows, there is an ongoing relationship between signified and signifier. What was signified becomes possible signifier. By combining signifier and signified, many traditional forms of journalism became signs (symbols) of core journalistic and democratic values. Based on this signification, digital technologies have been coded as tangible sites of the threat to the profession.
Digitalization broke this monopoly power. In the recent context of rapid technological change and economic upheaval, new digital ventures have proliferated, and the pace of change in the signifieds associated with them has accelerated. The continuous work of re-signification progressively places digital technologies on the side of journalistic standards. As Breese and Luengo (2016, p. 284) explain,
When blogs, Twitter, online-only news, live-streaming news, and other technologies enter newsrooms as new avenues for presenting news to the public, they tend to be greeted with anxiety. At first, mainstream journalists distance
Print / legacy media
Signified
Independence
Truth-seeking
Fairness
Accuracy
Symbolic codes
Professional Journalism
Signifier
themselves from the technologies and related practices, dismissing them as antithetical to journalistic standards. Over time what had represented a threat to the news when it was “new” comes to successfully represent the civil codes of professional journalism.
Matthias Revers’s (2016) comparative analysis of how Twitter was adopted by journalists from the official press corps in New York and Bavaria shows the different ways in which digital media encounter specific journalism cultures “which draw from entrenched symbols and sacred discourses of journalism” (Revers, 2016, p. 231). Revers explains how these symbolic codes stand for boundary work that protects the journalistic profession against “competing occupations” as well as “deviant insiders.” He conceives the amalgamation of digital culture and professional journalism as a “cultural performance” (Alexander, 2004), “in which collective representations of professionalism provide the symbolic strength and substantive basis for scripts to act professionally in concrete situations” (Revers, 2016, p. 232).
This boundary process and cultural performance implies a symbolic struggle for newcomers to meet and assert journalistic standards so that they can be considered full players in themselves. New media have produced a discourse seeking to purify past negative characterizations that have positioned them as a threat to journalism. Thus, newly-founded ventures distance themselves from the polluting effects of the market and claims about the financial sustainability of their innovative business models. Once considered the cause of massive layoffs of journalists, falls in advertising revenues, drastic cuts in newsrooms, and other catastrophic consequences in the news business, digital technology is now presented as sustaining journalism. Online news start-ups, for example, have become for many the safety valve of journalism. Born-digital small companies successfully fill market niches of information, reaching where mainstream media cannot. The characterization of news websites, clicks, social networks, or web statistics has shifted from their being seen as sources of aggregative, superficial, sensational, and commodified news to their becoming tools for reporting original stories, breaking news, and conducting in-depth investigative journalism. Figure I.2 conveys this re-signification of the symbolic codes of professional journalism.
Figure I.1 The “Crisis in news narrative:” print/legacy media as meanings associated with professional journalism.
New Journalistic Performances on Stage: Ethics Vis-à-Vis Innovation
In Chapter 2, Ward offers the challenging notion of “democratically engaged journalism” to reconsidered journalism’s civil morals today. Ward contextualizes his conceptual proposal within a “toxic sphere of partisan, global media.” In many cases, digital technology has helped to feed our complex civil spheres with polarization and exclusion. In turbulent times of “irrational publics” (Ward, Chapter 2) and dizzying political shocks, the association of digital forms’ new meanings with the signifier of professional journalism must go through a cultural process in which moral values such as civil commitment, solidarity, social justice, dialog, and inclusion are highlighted (see Figure I.2). Contributions to this book show how, intermingled and reinforced by these civil and democratic values, truth seeking, fairness, independent reporting, and other enduring symbolic codes of journalism not only inspire new journalistic initiatives but also help to ensure journalism’s long-term survival.
The journalistic innovations examined in this book raise the value of engagement. In line with other recent studies on journalism’s immersive storytelling (Jones, 2017; Kukkakorpi and Pantti, 2020), Benitez, Pérez-Seijo, and Herrera (Chapter 4) emphasize audience engagement as one of the specific characteristics that makes 360-degree video journalism disruptive and innovative, along with first-person experience, the illusion of presence, and empathy. However, as Benitez et al. show, to be successfully incorporated into journalistic practices and organizations, immersive journalism needs to reflect more than the audience’s emotional engagement. It needs to become civil engagement by the way in which narratives cathartically bring compassion and solidarity into the audience experience. Social connectedness goes beyond empathy, and the feeling for others and putting oneself in the place of another person represent more than a mere illusion of presence recreated by technological effects. To foster civil engagement, 360-degree immersive journalism must be based
Figure I.2 The re-signification of professional journalism through new digital forms.
on credible stories that preserve the accuracy and integrity of spaces, images, and sounds and that are constructed using a careful search and selection of news sources. The case studies in this chapter show the way in which successful journalistic approaches to 360-degree news have been guided by professional codes of transparency, truthfulness, and responsibility.
Gómez-García and Martín-Quevedo’s Chapter 5 reflects a similar tension between the audience’s emotional engagement and accurate reporting of the facts. The authors describe successful performances of new forms of interactive journalism that incorporate gameplay. These performances involve an ongoing cultural struggle against the immorality of playing with real-world events, deaths, and suffering. In this struggle, entertainment and triviality give way to the design of relevant social and political simulations that progressively include more investigative sources and perspectives. Stories based on biased, personalized objectives, which guide the gamer by targeting groups and individuals, turn into innovative newsgaming projects that ensure transparency and responsibility without losing the engaging and emotional dimension of gameplay.
New journalistic narratives may reflect how journalistic institutions are producing news in a more engaged way. In their analysis of “stamp story” formats, Navío-Navarro and González-Díaz (Chapter 6) argue that this new way of disseminating the news helps to reach and engage with, for instance, Gen Z and Millennial audiences immersed in a digital culture, by maintaining journalism’s complexity and interpretation.
The use of big data has brought into journalism new ethical concerns in relation to transparency and the quality and bias of the data sets being used. These polluting effects of data available through digital technology, however, seem to have been partially overcome by some new forms of collaborative investigative journalism. Drawing on the metajournalistic discourses on the Panama Papers from different newspapers that investigated the leaked documents of Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, Cortés and Luengo (Chapter 7) observe that data journalists place themselves on an unpolluted side of new investigative reporting, in which, far from activism, data serve democratic-accountability journalism.
Other current ethical concerns specify the cultural performance of new journalistic forms, practices, and processes within the area of algorithms, bots, and automatization. Rojas Torrijos’s Chapter 8 focuses on the ethics of journalism generated by machines. Barceló-Ugarte et al.’s Chapter 9 explores the specific incorporation of artificial intelligence (AI) into Spanish public television’s workflows, emphasizing the ethical challenges posed by the different phases of newsgathering, documentation, writing, publishing, archiving, and audience analysis. As Chapters 8 and 9 explain, AI is changing the way in which news is created.
Most of these changes—to give an example, in May 2020, Microsoft was accused of sacking journalists working at its MSN website and replacing them with AI software (Waterson, The Guardian, May 30, 2020)—are interpreted as threats to journalism. Yet layoffs of journalists by digital publishers are not the only reason for seeing automated technology as foreshadowing journalism’s extinction. A few weeks after the layoffs at Microsoft, MSN.com published a news story about the mixed-race pop star Jade Thirlwall’s personal reflection on racism; the story was illustrated with the wrong mixed-race member of the singer’s band, Little Mix. Thirlwall had been attending a Black Lives Matter protest in London. The anecdote triggered widespread criticism
within the media of Microsoft’s employment of robots that cannot differentiate mixedrace individuals. More significantly, it echoed current ethical debates on alleged racist biases (and other types of human distortions) in AI software coding.
Rojas analysis of some of the best practices of AI journalism shows that a “semiautomated” journalism, in which human reporters and robots work together, might help to overcome criticism focused on software’s biases as well as another ethical challenges that AI poses to journalism. The selected initiatives show how algorithms and bots are used by leading journalistic organizations to broaden news media coverage and enhance high-quality reporting on public-interest issues, such as police information on homicides (Los Angeles Times) or earthquake warnings (Los Angeles Times and Oregon Public Broadcasting). These journalistic projects bring to the forefront of news media innovation the combination of old and “new guiding principles” for a new digital era of journalism (McBride and Rosenstiel, 2014)—for example, verification, rigor, depth, civil engagement, or community.
Taking the British Press Association’s automated news service RADAR (Reporters and Data Robots) as an example, Rojas Torrijos (Chapter 8) highlights the community value of algorithmic journalism, which is currently meeting “the increasing demand for fact-based news for local communities” by delivering datadriven localized versions of stories to the UK’s local newsrooms (PA Media Group, 2018). Likewise, in other countries around the world, semi-automated news is filling the gap left by the disappearance of local reporting, and consequently it is contributing to building a sense of community. The combining of speed and verification, as well as of reporting and investigation, and the providing of both public interest news and community-driven stories are, among other professional and civil values, the basis of journalism innovation achieved through AI. New semiautomated journalistic practices mirror the way in which journalism is, to quote Rojas Torrijos, “acquiring a new vision that can cope with change so as to make professional ethics the guiding thread that anchors and stimulates innovation” (Rojas Torrijos, Chapter 8).
This book ends with a section devoted to the public. Contributions to this section revisit core ethical debates on big data (Cancela-Kieffer, Chapter 10), the personalization of news (Pedrero-Esteban and Gas-Gozalbo, Chapter 11), transparency (Christofoletti, Chapter 12), and verification (Espíritusanto and Dinant, Chapter, 13), posed by the previous chapters, to reflect on journalism’s mission to inform the public in times of post-truth, distrust of institutions, echo chambers, big tech, and social and political shocks.
Christofoletti’s Chapter 12 questions transparency to rethink journalism’s professional culture. When promoting transparency, does journalism itself become more open and contextualize its own products, practices, and modus operandi? For Christofoletti, transparency in journalism “is not an end in itself, but a path” to replace arrogance with humility, narcissism with dialog, and to create and develop newsrooms that are more publicly exposed and more willing to review procedures. The author explores new civil and journalistic initiatives based on this new culture of transparency that are helping journalism to implement new trust-building strategies. By the same token, Espíritusanto and Dinant (Chapter 13) use verification and the question of how people can ascertain the truthfulness of a news story to explore innovative technological tools to empower citizens to fight against misinformation.
In Chapter 10, Cancela-Kieffer argues that the only way for journalism to navigate a disrupted data-driven society is to fully embrace its core mission: “safeguarding ‘the people’s right to know.’” She advocates for creativity and for a “radical collaborative journalism” involving other disciplines—for example, mathematics and coding. She appeals to a journalistic culture of objectivity (the separation of facts from opinion) and self-criticism to combat subjectivity and self-defensiveness. Cancela-Kieffer argues that technology allows journalists to bring “personalized experiences” into people’s lives. “Small data,” a simpler and more local form of data journalism, she observes, has demonstrated the significant contribution that the “granularity” of data (detailed demographic maps of neighborhoods, crime statistics, sensors, etc.) can make to “uncover disparities and inequalities.”
When journalists attempt to stand on the side of their public by choosing, preparing, and telling stories in a way that helps the public to be informed participants in democratic society, the ethics of news innovation become a real challenge. Too often media scholars offer only more reasons to despair. Overall, the reader will find grounds for optimism in these pages. This positive spirit was what inspired this collective book project.
Some of the texts in this book were first drafted for the IAMCR preconference “News Media Innovation Ethics: Activating Human and Civil Rights Through Core Professional Values,” held at Carlos III University (Madrid, July 6, 2019). An enriching dialog between participants (including scholars and practitioners specializing in news media innovation) and organizers (the editors of this book) started before the conference and kept going during and after it. Our book reflects this continuous conversation as well as the further engagement with each contributor that was undertaken by the editors to unify the various texts around the aim, themes, and scope of the book.
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Journalism, Ethics, and Innovation in Times of Digital Turbulence
An Inquiry into the Ethics of Innovation in Digital Journalism
José Alberto García-Avilés
Universidad Miguel Hernández
An Ethical Perspective on Journalism Innovation
Research into the evolution of journalism ethics from the perspective of innovation offers wonderful insights. Throughout the past decades, journalists have embraced the innovations implemented in many newsrooms and, at the same time, they have met the ethical challenges brought about by these innovations. In this process, we could establish a pattern. Initially, journalists tend to regard the new practices as a challenge to the established standards, that is, as something alien to the shared ethical guidelines and therefore, they tend to believe these new practices should be questioned on ethical grounds. This attitude often translated into a veiled rejection of those innovations that at first sight seemed to collide with the traditional professional practices. However, as the innovations gradually take hold in the newsrooms and the journalists accept them, ethical standards are adapted accordingly to this new reality.
In the digital media ecosystem, the boundaries between producers, audiences, content, technology, and business tend to fade away as the platforms and algorithms increasingly gather and distribute information through multiple channels, with a massive offering of news and entertainment that is seamlessly integrated into people’s lives (Ruotsalainen and Heinonen, 2015). Traditional sources of income based on advertising show symptoms of fatigue, and the competition between legacy media and digital pure players increases, as the business strategies that worked for decades have become obsolete (Küng, 2017).
After several stages of adaptation and integration into this digital ecosystem, the media are living up to constant change. However, what is new is not change itself but the pace and the degree of change in journalism: a constant and deep transformation accelerated by the simultaneous impact of different technologies (virtual reality, artificial intelligence, blockchain, voice, data mining, etc.) in the gathering, production, distribution, and commercialization of content. In addition, technological companies have burst into force, competing with the news outlets for users’ attention. These powerful players (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, etc.) monopolize a large percentage of advertising investment, as well as many successful live streaming platforms (Netflix, HBO, Disney+, Amazon Prime, Spotify, etc.).
In this complex scenario, aggravated by the worldwide crisis of COVID-19, the media have less control over how and where their contents are consumed, while
their relationship with audiences is weakened by a more interactive, horizontal, and collaborative communication. On the other hand, digital-only media have been able to fully understand the mobile, social, and global ecosystem and, what is more important, they have rapidly adapted to the consumption habits of hyperconnected users. Therefore, when facing disruptive competition, legacy media companies need to focus their strategies on sustainability, market penetration, and innovation.
In this context, media innovation has been invoked as a “mantra,” which offers a solution to the complex industry problems. However, innovation advocates often lack a clear conceptual background about how innovations are differentiated from change, when exactly is something considered to be innovative, and at what level of analysis (individual, organizational, product, or process) does innovation lie (Prenger and Deuze, 2017). As both authors argue (p. 235), “epistemological challenges further amplify these wide-ranging questions, as innovation is invariably a moving object, raising the issue of how to adequately study something so dynamic.”
Any kind of innovative journalism should also be an ethical one. Without the essential component of ethics, no journalism is capable of innovating because the very professional activity of reporting itself is based on the commitment to the truth. Accordingly, journalistic ethics and quality are synonymous terms since all quality journalism is necessarily ethical. In Tony Harcup’s words, “ethical journalism is crucial for the health and well-being of a society” (2006, p. 144).
Journalism ethics is the result of multiple and complementary forces. Ethical reasoning is a unique and indivisible reality, which is individually, institutionally, and culturally based. Professional ethics cannot be isolated from individual or social ethics. When news organizations face ethical quandaries, they often implement regulations, norms, and codes that soon tend to become obsolete (Whitehouse, 2010).
We can distinguish three problems when making ethical decisions in journalism:
(a) Technological determinism: When focusing on the role of technology, we can easily exaggerate the influence technology as the driving force of media innovation and overlook the impact that emerging journalistic practices have on the development of innovative technologies. Technology plays a role in facilitating change, but overall, we do not find sufficient evidence to conclude that it induces disruption in journalistic activity. Technologies must also be balanced with prevailing standards that have guided the journalistic field, for these standards play a role in how journalists conceive of and perform their social roles (Singer, 2003).
(b) What we might call “normative apriorism:” That is, to regard ethics just as the result of the application of a series of norms embodied in codes and regulations. Ethical guidelines often become an excuse for ineffectiveness and reflects managements’ short sightedness when facing the challenges of making the right decisions. A focus on prescriptive ethics tends to ignore that there are competing views on how to address moral questions within the context of ethical reasoning (von der Pfordten, 2012). Hence, an ethical examination should focus on the correlation of moral principles, rather than on the single norms and codes.
(c) Relativism: There are no universal or absolute ethical principles, so that performance depends on the conditions in production, social, cultural, political factors, etc., as well as the personal approach of everyone. Since this view considers that ethics is purely subjective, based on individual interpretations, any decision can be ethically correct if one justifies it according to their own beliefs.
My proposal about the ethics of journalistic innovation relies on three essential aspects that shape professional decision-making: the ethics of the ends, the ethics of the procedures, and the ethics of the values, following insights from scholars such as Friend and Singer (2007), von der Pfordten (2012), Ward (2018), and Ward and Wasserman (2010), among others.
The ethics of the ends are based on the question: Why do I do this?—that is, what do I intend to achieve with this project, product, or service? It could be a matter of investigating an issue, exposing corruption, expanding knowledge, acting in a responsible manner, or being accountable to society. Ethical goals could be related to the right to information, formulated in article 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The ends also relate to freedom of expression, the right to privacy and honor, professional secrecy, and public service, and they deal with ethical problems such as sensationalism, misinformation, and data manipulation (Suárez-Villegas and Cruz-Álvarez, 2016a, p. 7).
Procedural ethics focus on the question: How do I do it? What processes do I follow to carry it out? The ethics of the procedures raise the constant and recurring question of whether the end justifies or not the means that are used (von der Pfordten, 2012). Journalists’ practices include verification processes, collaboration with third parties, confidentiality with sources, digital image manipulation, etc., which demand transparency and accountability.
The ethics of values, ultimately, raises the question: What principles guide my work? The list of values is very broad: truth, respect, trust, credibility, justice, accuracy, equanimity, solidarity, dignity, honesty, professionalism, impartiality, etc. According to the work of Kovach and Rosenstiel (2001, p. 24), based on interviews with hundreds of journalists in the United States, these principles should rule in the profession:
Seeking the truth; loyalty with citizens; a verification discipline; independence in regard to those who are informed; exercise control of power; become a public forum for criticism and commentary; offer suggestive and relevant information, as well as comprehensive and proportionate; and respect the individual conscience of the professional.
How can we evaluate the ethical consequences of innovations? Moreover, how can media ethics help us in this task? The report “Good and bad innovation: what kind of theory and practice do we need to distinguish them?” by Geoff Mulgan (2016) deals with the ambivalence of innovations. For example, the use of surveillance technologies to increase productivity and safety in the workplace also can generate a high level of stress in the workforce, as well as limitations to their privacy. Examples of negative innovations, such as concentration camps for mass extermination, can be extreme but most innovations have both positive and negative consequences. We can better address this ambivalence if we define the concept of innovation in journalism and its practical implications.
Defining Journalism Innovation
Scholars are paying a growing attention to the culture of innovation in news organizations (Dal Zotto and van Kranenburg, 2008; Küng, 2013; Sádaba, García-Avilés, and Martínez-Costa, 2016). However, the literature on media innovation tends to focus on adoption, implementation, and diffusion of products and technologies, with little emphasis on the design, development, and management stages of innovation (Dogruel, 2014). Research has largely ignored the question of how journalists learn in the newsroom and how they implement innovation (Porcu, 2017). The role of newsroom managers in innovation strategies is usually invisible and empirical measurements of in-house innovation within the media are scarce (Bleyen et al., 2014). As Weiss and Domingo (2010, p. 1158) put it, a deeper theoretical framework is needed regarding “the actors, dynamics and factors involved in the processes, theories that acknowledge the changing nature of journalism.”
Innovation “combines discovering an opportunity, blueprinting an idea to seize that opportunity, and implementing that idea to achieve results” (Anthony, 2012, p. 17). Translated to the media industry, this means that innovation must involve something more than the repetitive cycle of everyday news production. For this study, we define journalism innovation as:
the capacity to react to changes in products, processes and services using creative skills that allow a problem or need to be identified, and to be solved through a solution that results in the introduction of something new that adds value to customers and to the media organization.
(García-Avilés et al., 2018, p. 29)
This definition, provided by a group of researchers from the Miguel Hernández University, was applied to the design of the Journalistic Innovation Index of Spanish media (De-Lara-González et al., 2015). We further analyzed how many newsrooms disseminate these innovations and what factors accelerate or slow their implementation (García-Avilés et al., 2019), also in particular case studies such as digital-only news outlet El Confidencial and the Spanish public broadcaster RTVE innovation lab (Zaragoza-Fuster and García-Avilés, 2020).
The brakes on innovation are mostly cultural, rooted in the newsroom as systemic practices and preferred work patterns (Ess, 2013). There is no successful single recipe of media transformation and adaptation to the new realities. Going from products to services, from hardware to software, and from audience to users, includes changing mindsets, unlearning the trade and experimenting with bold ideas (Storsul and Krumsvik, 2013). The individual mindset determines what ideas lead to innovation in the newsroom: “Inventions within a variety of newsroom structures support the general truth that innovation and change usually start with the ideas of individual creators” (Gynnild, 2014, p. 720). Experimentation produces mixed results on what works or could work when it comes to creating commercially successful services and products.
A holistic perspective on innovation must include the pre-phase of the innovation process, considering for example goal setting, customer research, or observation of competitors (Dal Zotto and van Kranenburg, 2008). Taking a step further, Bleyen et al.
(2014, p. 48) established a typology of media innovations based on five categories: business model, production and distribution, media consumption, inner form, and core product. The first three categories are related to innovation processes, and the latter two highlight product innovations, such as a groundbreaking television news program or an original podcast.
Therefore, media innovation encompasses complex processes that involve people’s motivations, strategy, structure, administrative processes, and systems that could create value for the organization, because the characteristics of the media sector differ from those of other industries (Küng, 2017). Specific features include the perishable commodity of the news product, creative employees, intricate organizational structures, and a public service role, among others. As Sádaba, García-Avilés, and MartínezCosta (2016) argue, strategic innovation leads to better services and increased responsiveness to users and, therefore, an increase in sales, subscriptions, or audiences. In Pavlik’s words (2013, p. 190), “innovation is the key to the viability of news media in the digital age.”
Innovation does not only relate to products and technologies but also relate to the reinvention of social processes and the creation of services that improve people’s lives (Fagerberg, Mowery, and Nelson, 2005). Innovating consists of providing a novel solution for a problem that is more effective, efficient, or sustainable than existing solutions. Innovation should not be reduced to technology. In fact, non-technological aspects such as storytelling, creativity, commercialization, or interaction with audiences are important areas of journalism innovation. If innovations emerge only through the reaction to the threats from the instability of the news market, technological disruption, and the competitive commercial environment, the change could be slow and erratic. However, when management takes the lead, innovations increase in number and quality. Incorporating new practices and experimenting with different ideas is essential for innovation to flourish in media companies (García-Avilés et al., 2019).
We argue for a holistic approach to research in this field by considering many aspects that influence journalism innovation processes, being aware of the conflicting tensions that emerge.
Innovations and Journalism Ethics: 2000–2020
In 2000, I began to explore the consequences of the digitalization of television newsrooms in the work of broadcast journalists. Between 2007 and 2014, I studied the convergence models implemented in several European media outlets. Since 2014, I research journalistic innovation, to find out where and how it occurs and what kinds of changes it brings about (De-Lara-González et al., 2015; García-Avilés et al., 2018). According to our findings in the Spanish market, most innovations take place in the areas of product and service, content distribution, and interaction with the audience. Most innovative initiatives were “incremental”: smaller advances or gradual improvements of existing products or services. A few “radical” innovations occurred, mostly within online-only sites. The number of technology-related innovations outweighed the non-technological, leading us to conclude that “while innovation is not necessarily associated with technology, it is an important driver of change” (GarcíaAvilés et al., 2018, p. 38).
Taking one further step, we analyzed how media companies implemented innovations in four main areas: production, distribution, organization, and commercialization (García-Avilés et al., 2019). Each area has its own goal within the company: launching innovative products, improving the distribution channels, innovating in the work structure and newsroom organization, and incorporating new sources of revenue. Within different historical media contexts, a combination of internal and external forces helped bring about change and resulted in the innovation of digital journalism.
A recurring theme in my conversations with journalists over the years has been the reaction to change. I have often discovered an attitude of distrust by most professionals. Before each wave of changes, many journalists invoked news quality and ethical principles to justify their willingness to stay out of innovation, because they regarded innovations as a problem, something that demanded a lot of time and work, or that could threaten their job stability. It is interesting to find out that journalism has traditionally been a profession reluctant to embrace change.
In this study, necessarily short due to space limitations, I present in chronological order some the ethical implications derived from the adoption of innovations in digital journalism.
The Emergence of Journalism in the Internet
Between 1995 and 2000, thousands of newspapers and television channels worldwide launched their websites and began generating content to feed them. The initial concerns of journalists with the advent of the Internet focused on privacy, falsehood, and loss of autonomy (Deuze and Yeshua, 2001). The new medium was quickly associated with a high potential for spreading falsehoods involuntarily or deliberately. It was difficult to differentiate the truth in the Internet content, since anyone could easily replicate the credibility indicators without taking any responsibility. Many journalists feared that instant dissemination of information would undermine the processes of journalistic verification that protects them against errors and lies, so that they would be accountable for their ethical standards (Eberwein, Fengler, and Karmasin, 2019).
The value of professional autonomy also went into crisis. Journalists defended their role as “independent gatekeepers,” based on their ability to make their own judgments about what news is and, therefore, reinforce their public interest service (SuárezVillegas and Cruz-Álvarez, 2016a). The argument was that a careful selection of news by professional gatekeepers would make it easier for citizens to receive truthful and relevant information on the issues that are supposed to be essential for democratic functioning: politics, international relations, economics, the performance of institutions and social agents, etc. However, from the beginning, the ability of users to select and access content directly was evident; journalists were losing their monopoly as providers of information in society, which caused them considerable frustration (Boczkowski, 2004).
Convergence and Multimedia Content
There were two main trends at the beginning of the new millennium: experimenting with convergence by combining news, products, and processes in separate newsrooms of print, television, and online media; and producing multimedia content for several
outlets (Singer, 2006). Convergence soon became a buzzword that shook most newsrooms: editors asked newspaper reporters to record videos at the scene or to make their own summaries of the news for radio or television. Managers commissioned broadcast journalists to write articles for the newspaper and to promote the stories included in the print media. Thus, journalism became “convergent” and journalists more versatile, as they had to generate content simultaneously for several platforms (García-Avilés, Meier, and Kaltenbrunner, 2016).
Regarding the production of multimedia content, there was a lot of resistance by journalists. Some of them admitted that this was due to fear of the unknown. However, others justified their fear on ethical grounds, emphasizing the detrimental effects on the news quality, the limited time available to produce more pieces, and the increasing pressure to develop pieces for radio, website, print, and/or television. Work overload often reduced journalistic quality and increased tensions among staff in multimedia newsrooms (Carvajal and García-Avilés, 2008).
Blogs and Bloggers
As the self-publishing platforms were easier to use, horizontal communication channels proliferated, and all kinds of blogs rapidly incorporated the voice of citizens into journalism. Bloggers claimed the professional territory of journalists: selecting events and topics for the audience and commenting on relevant issues through content aggregation. This led to further tensions between the possibilities afforded by innovations in news production and the normalizing force of established newsroom routines (Mitchelstein, Boczkowski, and Wagner, 2017). Professionals quickly drew the frontier between journalists who valued equity, accuracy, balance, and other ethical criteria, and content providers with their opinion blogs, which lacked a professional status (Singer, 2003).
One of the ways in which journalists differed from bloggers was their independence, based on neutrality, impartiality, or objectivity. Bloggers, on the other hand, published their personal views and raised ethical problems. “It is not a fair, impartial or objective journalism, nor does it intend to be. As they do not adhere to journalistic norms, bloggers do not have to be objective or politically correct,” protested one newspaper editor (Carlson, 2007, p. 268). The success of bloggers posed the question of which characteristics defined a digital journalist (Hayes, Singer, and Ceppos, 2007).
An ethical problem that journalists frequently criticized was that the material published on blogs was not verified and, therefore, was not reliable. An editor summed up this concern: “If something appears in The Washington Post or The New York Times, I know it has been reviewed by someone whose profession requires them to have it checked. With a blog, you have no idea. Bloggers don’t know how to verify the facts. Calling a blogger a journalist is like calling a photographer anybody who takes a snapshot” (Carlson, 2007, p. 274).
Criticisms related to impartiality and verification pointed to the emergence of a norm that was especially suitable for digital media: transparency. It was important for the disclosure of a blogger’s background, their personal interests and financial ties. Although the norms of objectivity and balance made it difficult for some journalists to adhere to blogging, blogs became an acceptable innovation by 2012 (Mitchelstein, Boczkowski, and Wagner, 2017).
User-Generated Content
Journalists had to face the consequences of user-generated content (UGC) and its influence on their professional routines. The spread of UGC implied that journalists could lose control over what they published, even as authors of the news and it soon threatened editorial values and news standards (Paulussen and Ugille, 2008). Ethical concerns about UGC focused on three aspects: accuracy, credibility, and civility. It increased the difficulty of verifying the information and checking whether something was true or were mere rumors or lies spread by people over whom journalists had no control. News professionals saw that their credibility was in the spotlight. Some experts criticized that users, unlike journalists, did not feel responsible for what they published and did not report accurately (Noguera Vivo, 2012).
Legal concerns about the use of UGC in the media, such as copyright ownership, were mixed with ethical ones. However, making sure that the material external to the newsroom was “legally safe to publish” consumed considerable time and energy in most newsrooms. According to one British editor, comments are “subject to lawsuits for defamation, slander, libel, or the prohibition of spreading the name of the victim of a violation: reading these things and supervising them involves tons of work” (Singer, 2003). In this way, journalists struggled to ethically accommodate the opportunities for dialog presented by UGC, while safeguarding their credibility and sense of responsibility. News professionals showed concerns about the value of user contributions, as well as the consequences of uncivil comments on personal and institutional credibility (Singer and Ashman, 2009, p. 18).
However, criticism of the use of UGC in the newsrooms was not universal; many journalists expressed support for user contributions (video, pictures, news tips, etc.), although warned about the actual costs versus the ideal benefits. As Singer (2003) points out, most media outlets established an ethical framework about the problems raised by this innovation and many newsrooms drew a line not to be trespassed.
Social Media
Platforms such as Twitter are essentially microblogs, but unlike users’ comments and other UGC that are produced after the journalist has published the story, social media material is a potential journalistic source (Noguera Vivo, 2012). Journalists initially disdained the potential of social media in their job because instant information combined mass distribution with an easy publishing process and the absence of editorial supervision. “A toy for boring celebrities and high school girls” is how a columnist described Twitter in 2009 (Hermida, 2012, p. 168).
Social media challenged traditional journalistic values such as impartiality and accuracy. According to one study, a high percentage of tweets by journalists themselves contained at least some expression of opinion and used them to share information about their work and their personal lives (Suárez-Villegas and Cruz-Álvarez, 2016b). Therefore, prestigious news outlets such as The New York Times, the BBC, and The Washington Post, issued guidelines about the use of social media by their employees. New ethical concerns arose as misinformation and fake news became a problem. Newsrooms used with caution the available content in Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or Instagram, and most journalists adopted social media more
quickly and with fewer complaints than the previous innovations (Suárez-Villegas and Cruz-Álvarez, 2016b).
Citizens and social media users were excluded from meaningful participation in the media ethics discourse. However, as Ward and Wasserman (2010) argued, new technologies and platforms were democratizing media globally and were rendering journalistic practices more flexible and fluid, facilitating an “open media ethics.”
Journalistic Production for the Internet
Digital journalism is instantaneous. Journalists publish news content as it happens, in a 7/24 cycle, with short time to check it. Journalism tends to be increasingly opinionated because the news content is presented from the “ideological trench,” and is becoming more entertaining, including a mix of spectacle, sensationalism, and clickbait elements. In addition, news content is gathered and distributed in social media, where sources, journalists, media consumers, and citizens participate almost at the same level.
Journalism innovations facilitated the production of content in multiple formats, contributed to forge a more attractive and accessible journalism for a greater number of people and, at the same time, broadened the focus of the ethical issues raised in the newsrooms. Table 1.1 summarizes some ethical issues debated by journalists between 2010 and 2015.
Table 1.1 Ethical issues for news professionals who work in digital newsrooms.
Production stages Ethical issues
Access-observation
● Verification of what is published on social media.
● Check the information with two or more sources.
● Journalists should not publish personal opinions in social media.
● Fight against misinformation and lies.
Selection-filtering
● Verify the accuracy of UGC.
● Label external content as such.
● Pressure to promote topics that increase online traffic.
● Transparency in accessing news sources.
Processing-editing
● Rejection of excessive multiskilling.
● Convergence as a costsaving operation.
● Low quality in production of multimedia content.
● Separation between advertising and editorial.
Distribution
Interpretation
● Value the journalist’s byline.
● Obsession to beat the competition.
● Immediacy of live coverage.
● Use of clickbait.
● Value of input from the users.
● Moderation of comments and insults.
● Correction of errors.
● Transparency.
Source: Author
Thus, the ethics of traditional journalism, with values based on the accuracy, rigor, precision, and verification, was gradually extended to digital journalism, where collaboration with users, transparency, and immediacy predominate (Suárez-Villegas and Cruz-Álvarez, 2016a).
Immersive Journalism
Immersive journalism tells stories through virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), or 360-degree video and allows the user to become part of the story through a great variety of experiences. These formats raise important ethical issues (Pérez-Seijo and López-García, 2019), such as:
● To what extent producers can modify the recorded content, altering elements of reality or making up scenes, so that the story works better.
● Users’ exposure to content of a sensitive nature, including the use of violence, emotional abuse, obscene language, or explicit sex scenes.
● The manipulation of emotions that influence the users and arouse feelings of adherence or rejection to ideas or institutions.
● Business interests of companies that produce VR content or finance immersive experiences.
VR environments could become incubators for manipulation and propaganda, and for this reason, being unaware of the journalist orchestrating highly persuasive content could undermine the credibility of VR narratives (Kool, 2016). The use of VR technology raises complex ethical questions that require careful consideration by the producers of these formats to preserve journalistic standards (Pérez-Seijo and López-García, 2019).
Journalism and Big Data
Big Data refers to the ability to process large amounts of information, analyze it, and draw relevant conclusions. Big Data raises their own ethical dilemmas about user privacy, information security, and data manipulation, among other issues, when journalists decide how to incorporate the use of massive data into their stories.
The process of making public a large volume of data helps rethink their ethical quandaries, as many journalists have embraced such openness as a professional norm, facilitating public scrutiny of complete data sets and open programming code (Lewis, 2015). This trend can improve some journalistic processes, as Lewis (2015) states, by integrating principles such as transparency and participation in newsrooms.
The use of massive data raises ethical dilemmas associated with the collection, analysis, and dissemination of such information. Just because a content is publicly accessible does not mean that the journalist had permission to make it public for everyone (Lewis and Westlund, 2015). Problems often arise with public data provided by governments and institutions or gathered through techniques such as crowdsourcing or data scraping. Such problems can go unnoticed, either by the size of the data involved or by its public dissemination, so journalists must weigh the benefits of publishing open data against the risk of personal injury, especially when private information can be easily shared (Lewis and Westlund, 2015).
Automated Journalism
Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are tools built by people to meet human needs and purposes. Data mining algorithms can influence the way journalists cover any topic, ranging from voting patterns to the spread of COVID-19 or the consumption of supermarket products. In addressing how journalists interact with AI, there is an opportunity for hybridization in the development of processes that involve journalists and technology. Algorithms often complement, but rarely replace the journalist. According to some studies (Dörr, 2016), an algorithm could replicate only 15% of the reporters’ time and 9% of the editors’ time.
To date, most news-writing robots have been used to provide news on topics such as stock market quotes, earthquake alerts, and sport. In the United States, The Associated Press leads the use of robots in business and sports news. The automated Heliograf system writes stories for The Washington Post, while the Swedish multimedia group MittMedia produces pieces written by robots on real estate issues, among others. Newsrooms are increasingly automated to track down breaking stories and trending issues. The rapid development of machine learning is likely to make journalism more speedy, efficient, and cost-effective (Diakopoulos and Koliska, 2017).
We must consider whether automated journalism can play a role of responsibility as humans do. There are concerns regarding the algorithmic strategies, personalization of contents, filtering, and transparency. As computers assume greater prominence in the evaluation of the news, encouraging a certain type of selection and consumption, how are they “taught” to act ethically? Is there an “algorithm ethic?”
Ethics must unravel numerous dilemmas about the selection, interpretation, and anticipation of news content, including how algorithms structure reality through machine learning. Therefore, it is necessary to study the codes, the “black boxes” of the algorithms, to discover “the power structures, biases and influences that computational artifacts exert in society” (Diakopoulos and Koliska, 2017, p. 815).
Newsrooms as Communities of Practice
Professional news practices, such as the proper transcription of a statement, the verification of the source of an amateur video, or the double-checking of the information provided by a source, always have an ethical dimension (Suárez-Villegas and CruzÁlvarez, 2016a). In this sense, the coherence of journalistic practices differentiates the professional activity from the amateur level. There are few shared values about the professional practices in journalism. The ethical decision depends on each professional, who is solely responsible for their own actions. Companies carry out the reporting activity, but specific individuals, men, and women with their beliefs and ethical convictions, are the ones who produce the news.
Journalists are continually transforming their traditions in the newsgathering, production, and distribution processes. News practitioners follow the criteria about what they consider appropriate, true, and fair, according to newsroom standards and professional culture. Through a process of trial and error, journalists incorporate the innovations as appropriate practices or dismiss them as unacceptable. The application of
