Abstract
Journalism has confronted a number of economic challenges in the digital age, thrusting the institution into a state of ‘crisis’. As Schapals notes in his second chapter, ‘Journalism revisited’, this is visible in the closure of newsrooms, especially at the level of local journalism, redundancies and precarious employment, outdated business models and falling advertising revenue, and low subscription levels. The crisis narrative commonly targets peripheral journalistic actors – those on the boundary of the field of traditional journalism, who provide journalistic products and value and thus call into question traditional journalism's societal or democratic function. Rather than a threat, however, Schapals argues these actors and the work they do present an opportunity to move beyond the crisis lens, to see journalism as evolving and becoming something new.
To explore this, the rest of the book is divided into three key chapters, centred around three questions: who are these peripheral journalistic actors, what do they do and what motivates them, and finally, why their role is important for democratic function? Drawing on nearly 100 interviews with journalistic actors across a broad spectrum of ‘peripheral’ outlets in Australia, Germany, and the United Kingdom, collected over three years, in chapter 4, Schapals maps these actors across a broad spectrum of novel formats and outlets, ranging from the more established Buzzfeed to the newer Junkee. Chapter 5 is where the bulk of Schapals's rich qualitative findings are presented, exploring how journalistic the work of these peripheral actors is, and what their motivations are, by examining their qualifications and professional access to journalism; their daily work routines, influences, and levels of autonomy; and, professional views, role perceptions, and ethics.
Schapals finds peripheral journalistic actors share professional views similar to those of traditional journalists (holding the powerful accountable, speaking truth to power), but also discovers differences in their daily routines (ad-hoc and less hierarchical), and in innovative business models that reflect the broader state of precarity in journalism, but also tap into novel revenue streams.
Among its strengths, this book offers a concise introduction to key scholarly voices engaging with journalism's boundary struggles (e.g. Eldridge, 2018; Carlson and Lewis, 2015, among others), and offers empirical insights into how we can continue to go beyond core-periphery dichotomies – a call Schapals reiterates in the final chapter. In doing so, we are invited to consider these trends as indicative of a ‘move from journalism to journalisms’, which on the one hand, Schapals argues, requires acknowledging the emergence of multiple journalistic formats, styles, and outlets that diverge from those found within traditional journalism and ‘form a legitimate part of the assemblage that makes up contemporary journalism’ (p. 10). On the other hand, given that peripheral actors share characteristics of traditional journalism, and that traditional journalism is evolving and adopting characteristics demonstrated by peripheral journalistic actors, aren’t we merely seeing one journalism field that is in a constant state of flux, rather than a field consisting of distinct journalisms? Some of this conceptual murkiness is clouded by Schapals's deliberate selection of a sample consisting of outlets located on a wide established-to-emergent spectrum, and likewise including journalistic actors who once worked in traditional journalism outlets and migrated to peripheral outlets. Nevertheless, Schapals's work provides a welcome invitation to continue exploring journalism's evolution by accounting for the diverse ways in which it exists, offering a view beyond the crisis.
