The Hybrid Media System
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Despite Abell’s attempts to narrate how the PCC’s older rationale has been effortlessly extended as the digital era has progressed, as he recounts these episodes it is clear that there are deeper uncertainties about how to deal with the realities of the hybrid media system. The Jan Moir case in particular provided the PCC with a missed opportunity to side with the online activist networks and bloggers that sought not only to make a point about intolerance, prejudice, and dubious ethics at tabloid papers, but also to push the PCC toward acting as a conduit for public pressure calling for better standards of journalism in general. In this sense, while Abell is keen to stress how the PCC had already adapted to the challenge of online news, in fact, it is these new dynamics in the online environment, as news becomes increasingly contested by online activist networks, that added to the climate of hostility toward the PCC by the time the Leveson Inquiry into British press standards opened in 2012.
Conclusion
The overarching theme that emerges from this fieldwork is that political newsmaking in Britain is now characterized by incessant processes of boundary drawing, boundary blurring, and boundary crossing, as the logics of older and newer media interact, compete, and coevolve. The fact that these actors constantly engage in rhetorically asserting the importance of “where they draw the line” between older and newer media practices is an important symptom of this underlying flux. The secret world of the Westminster lobby system, very much a bastion of older media practice, is to some extent under challenge from the more fluid context of political journalism that has been encouraged by the rise of the internet. Yet lobby journalists are adapting. They are building personal brands and transposing the practices of filtering and judgment-making that buttressed their professional status in broadcasting and print lobby journalism into the newer domain of online social media. Lobby journalists are also becoming attuned to the new ways in which political elites now seek to use online media to communicate directly with the public and news makers outside the lobby. In turn, those political elites are transposing strategies to control the flow of political information as they also operate across older and newer media—a development I consider in more detail in the next chapter.
These processes of boundary drawing, boundary blurring, and boundary crossing are prevalent among bloggers and professional journalists, and often in surprising ways. Bloggers and activists can adopt what they consider to be the “genuine” norms of old-style, professional journalism as a way of asserting their identity and power. Professional journalists, meanwhile, can adopt some of the norms of the new-style “amateur” online domain, though with some reservations about standards and accountability, not to mention some understandable fears about ceding their power to new competitors. Some bloggers occupy hybrid liminal spaces as semi-professional or semi-amateur journalist-activist-experts, and this enables them to occasionally intervene to break important political news and to interact with politicians and professional journalists in sometimes decisive ways. Such actors can maintain close links with the world of Westminster journalism and are able to tap insider sources for information on the grounds that, since the emergence of social media, a blog post can quickly circulate and become the subject of a professional journalist’s story. Hybrid news spaces like the Guardian’s Comment Is Free network often provide an organizational focus for what is mostly networked action, though it is important to stress that the professionals often react negatively to increased competition and the growing status of online players. Some journalists have developed norms of resistance inside “print” newsrooms, even though they are increasingly drawn into the unremitting logic of hypercompetition in online news.
Despite these forces of integration, the position of political bloggers is still precarious. They are often marginalized, for example, by professional media stories that frame blogging in general as being about new technologies in politics rather than about the substantive news that bloggers themselves may unearth and the new standards of probity and monitorial accountability that bloggers contribute to the hybrid media system. And bloggers and online activists on social media sites are also increasingly outflanked by broadcasters who have integrated the quick temporal rhythms and conversational genres of the online news and social media domains into their routine practices, while still retaining their credibility and prestige as “investigative” journalists who have the organizational status, the resources, and the access required to hold politicians to account, even in the context of a rapidly pluralizing and fragmenting media system. Regulatory agencies like OFCOM and the PCC (which was unraveling as this fieldwork was conducted) may claim that they have adapted to the new media environment, but they are increasingly drawn into a new politics that is about the symbolic differences between the logics of a fast-fading era, in which print and broadcast media ruled the roost, and a newer era of online networked activism that points to a more egalitarian but also more ethical set of norms for organizing the production, consumption, and regulation of political news.
Still, in the hybrid media system there is always another line to be drawn, some more terrain to be staked. I close this chapter with a final, particularly poignant illustration of boundary drawing through establishing norms of resistance. This comes from an interview with “Jim,” a former very senior journalist at the BBC. Jim ends our wide-ranging interview by arguing that a secure future for professional journalism lies in its asserting itself as something entirely distinct from what he calls the “insane Jeff Jarvis route where you have a fucking free-for-all and nothing actually emerges from it” (Interview 28, June 2011). As Jim explains, “You need to say, hang on a minute, new media is doing this over here, mainstream media, big media, whatever you want to call it, is doing this over here.” The remainder is worth quoting at length, because it illustrates very vividly what I mean by boundary-drawing as a response to the threat of newer media logics:
Unless journalists start to wake up to what it is that differentiates them from the rest of the information universe we’ll probably be exactly where we are now but slightly more confused and a bit more frayed at the edges … Because we’re so neurotic about journalism—all journalists are neurotic about the trade—we’ve found it really, really difficult as each new web onslaught has hit us. First of all it was just search engines, for Christ’s sake, which started to blow everything apart. Then it was news aggregators. Then it was Twitter. Then it was Facebook. Then it was YouTube. As each thing has hit us, we’ve been so neurotic about what it is we do, or the fact that we don’t really know what we do or we’ve never really thought about it. Most practitioners don’t really think about it. We thought, well, shit, we need to get a piece of this. This is going to change us. This is changing everything we do. ‘Oh, we must change.’ And of course you have the web gurus telling you you’ve got to change. At the same time, you look at some of the worst of journalism. You look at the Madeleine McCann case [of the reporting of the abduction of a British child during a family vacation in Portugal in 2007], where 106 times the Daily Express and the Daily Star just made things up about the McCanns. You look at phone hacking. And you think, actually, if I want to defend journalism as a distinct and discrete part of this universe, everybody’s going to laugh at me because we’re shit at things. News International, who own the News of the World, they see rumor and gossip as a revenue stream for them. Therefore for them gossip and rumor is what their business is all about. Now, when people like me stand up and say we must defend the rights of journalists in Syria and China and Zimbabwe because if you don’t have journalists all you have is gossip and rumor, then you think, oh shit, hang on a minute, what about the News of the World? So we’ve got this kind of neurosis about who we are, what we are, what we can do … Real-time searching … You click real-time results. The first things you’re getting are going to be the last things put out there. Someone retweets it, someone blogs it, and you think, yes, this is getting a head of steam behind it and it’s all in real time. That looks like news. It
looks like news. I think unless we can define journalism much more closely than we have, we’ll be where we are now but worse … I think we’ve got to shape up now. We’ve got to get our act together, because the weight of stuff that’s out there now is just too great … . It’s about getting a very clear understanding of what journalism is and how it’s different from everything else” (Interview 28, June 2011).
Here, Jim makes the case that political journalism should become a unique and specialized professional domain based upon rigorous ethical standards, where the line of separation between itself and other, non-journalistic practice—the online information that “looks like” news—is supposedly made clear.
9
Hybrid Norms in Activism, Parties, and Government
You have to master the grid, you have to master the agenda … but unless you’re mastering it in old media you can’t master it in new media.
—“Mary,” senior campaign official, the British Labour Party1
In this chapter we move from sense making in the field of British news and journalism to that in the fields of political activism, election campaigning, and government communications. I begin by analyzing how things work at 38 Degrees, a well-known British activist movement that rose to prominence in the late 2000s and by 2012 had more than a million members. I show how 38 Degrees has created a distinctive space for itself by hybridizing norms of mobilization associated with older and newer media logics. Then I move on to explore evidence I gathered from interviews with senior campaign staff in the Conservative and Labour parties in the aftermath of the 2010 British general election, and from a number of senior officials in British government, including those who have worked at the very top, in the Office of the Prime Minister. Finally, I explore practices at the London office of an international public relations agency specializing in political campaigns.2 Here, too, though the issues and contexts differ from those in the previous chapter, the fieldwork uncovered a variety of different sense-making strategies based upon the hybridity of older and newer media logics.
From “Building the Actions” to “Being in the Moment” in a Hybrid Mobilization Movement
The British movement 38 Degrees provides an excellent illustration of how political activists increasingly hybridize older and newer media logics in their attempts to shape news and policy agendas. Modeled in part upon America’s MoveOn (see Chadwick, 2007; Karpf, 2012) and Australia’s GetUp!, 38 Degrees has run several highly visible campaigns in a wide range of areas, including the environment, the National Health Service, media reform, and constitutional reform. By November 2012 it had a membership of over one million.
38 Degrees is best understood as a hybrid mobilization movement (Chadwick, 2007), but it has extended this organizational type in important ways. It emerged in 2009 from an international network coordinated by British career activists David Babbs and Hannah Lownsbrough. Ben Brandzel, who played a pivotal role in establishing MoveOn, and Jeremy Heimans, who co-founded GetUp!, performed outside advisory roles. Startup funding came from Gordon Roddick, husband of the late Dame Anita Roddick, the businesswoman and lifelong environmentalist behind the successful Body Shop retail brand. Hannah Lownsbrough had worked for several NGOs before joining 38 Degrees but had most recently helped found the London office of Avaaz, the transnational campaigning organization that has taken the MoveOn/GetUp! hybrid model of online–offline organizing and applied it internationally. Babbs, meanwhile, had previously organized Friends of the Earth’s “Big Ask,” which in 2006 was part of a successful broad-based campaign to introduce Britain’s first significant climate change legislation. Significantly, Babbs describes Friends of the Earth as “a very traditionally constituted NGO with a very different feel” from 38 Degrees.
The third founding leader, Johnny Chatterton, arrived via a less conventional route, one highly revealing of 38 Degrees’ organizational culture. Chatterton had been hired by the Burma Campaign U.K. after he “helped seed,” as he puts it, one of the early examples of political activism in social media: the Support the Monks Protest Facebook group that was set up in 2007 to highlight the Burmese state’s crackdown on anti-government protests led by the country’s Buddhist monasteries. This experience of being a young, technologically literate online activist was important in shaping Chatterton’s attitudes to organizing and mobilizing, but it was not only the power of Facebook for quickly raising awareness of international human rights abuses that fascinated him, but also how the interactions among internet and broadcast media went on to shape the evolution of that campaign. “The Support the Monks protest was incredible,” he says, “because of these blurred boundaries. We had the BBC giving me a special number to call and an e-mail address to e-mail if I heard anything out of Burma, so I could pass the news straight on to these” (Interview 12, May 2010). Established NGOs such as Amnesty International also joined forces with the Facebook group activists and together they launched a Global Day of Action to raise awareness of Burma. Chatterton left to become 38 Degrees’ digital campaigns manager soon afterward.
Internet-enabled experimentalism combined with efficient and strategic organizational leadership animates all 38 Degrees’ activity. Babbs speaks of the need to get the technical details of the website “absolutely right” and of how important it is that the leadership provide a coherent and efficient set of mechanisms enabling members to have an influence on emerging policy agendas. There are repeated references to “providing a service” and “high standards” for members while trying to strike a balance between being “disciplined and professional” and “relaxed and experimental.” Without strong strategic leadership from above and “an agenda of some sort,” says Babbs, it “gets ragged and falls to bits—you lose focus and everyone feels dispirited” (Interview 12, May 2010).
A key element of this leadership-driven “service” to members is what constitutes the key organizational resource of 38 Degrees: the “actions.” The organization has only four paid staff and around a dozen unpaid interns who undergo short periods of volunteering in its central London headquarters. When I visited, headquarters consisted of a couple of rooms in a slightly scruffy but functional office building off Kingsway. A small advisory board comprising its original startup funders and some staff from other campaign organizations meets once a month for a couple of hours. 38 Degrees does not hold real-space conferences open to members and there are no formal bureaucratic means by which members can expect to influence the leadership’s decision making. The leaders even acknowledge that the decision to call those on its e-mail list “members” was a deliberate attempt to encourage a sense of shared identity in the absence of organizational mechanisms, though there is also an awareness that becoming a member of a political organization raises the bar too high for many, so they talk about people “being involved” or “joining in.”
But it is the “actions” that move 38 Degrees. Actions is a totemic word because it provides identity and collective meaning. And the construction of actions rests upon the hybridization of older and newer media logics.
The 38 Degrees headquarters team speaks of “building the actions,” “trying out the actions,” and “getting members to do the actions.” On one level, actions has a simple meaning: they are specific activities that the leadership aims to structure for its members to enable them to exert influence on the mainstream news media, online networks, and the policy agenda. On another level, actions form the entire organizational basis of the movement. Actions are technological enablers but they often combine online and real-space behaviors and impacts. The website, the e-mail list, the social media presence on Facebook and Twitter, together with the leadership team’s interactions with, and judgments about, emerging news stories are the mechanisms through which actions are developed. Actions go beyond the simple expression of opinion in online environments; they are constructed by the leadership team to have specific and definable outcomes. Members are asked to sign online petitions or send e-mails and make phone calls to their MP
s. They are asked to show up physically at lunchtimes to protest in front of buildings around the country, as they did in 2010 against proposed cuts to the BBC. They are asked to organize flash mobs at parties’ local constituency campaign gatherings, as they did in several targeted seats during the 2010 general election, to raise awareness of the lobbying industry (Interview 15, May 2010). The 38 Degrees website enables these actions by providing form e-mails and online petitions that may or may not be personalized by individual members, together with information generated from tailored web databases. Alternatively, members may be asked to very quickly contribute donations to pay for prominent newspaper and billboard advertising. These ads suddenly migrate messages across media settings and are designed to put pressure on elite media and policymakers; in other words, those more likely to pay attention to a full-page ad in a national newspaper and be spurred to call the 38 Degrees office for more information or interview David Babbs for a television or radio package. The ultimate aim of the actions is to send coherent, legitimized, and representative messages to government and legislators at Westminster. Only through the ongoing construction and modification of actions can 38 Degrees lay claim to being an “organization” in any meaningful sense of the word.