Mapping or tracing? How journalism can navigate the digital landscape

MAPPING OR TRACING?

How journalism can navigate the digital landscape

MA Thesis

Simone Eleveld

Supervised by Toni Pape Second reader Sudeep Dasgupta

MA in Media Studies

Abstract

The arrival of Internet has had a disruptive effect on journalism, changing it from a steady, hegemonic industry with a monopoly on information distribution to a wide, networked field linking many practices. The practices of the old, analogue industry are refined and reliable, but many no longer fit the current media landscape. Meanwhile the new digital landscape offers many opportunities for doing good journalism, but exploring these involves many risks and unknowns. This thesis offers a theoretical framework to understand the shift the media landscape underwent, and to explore the tension between analogue reliability and digital opportunity, ultimately answering the question: How can journalism navigate the digital media landscape? This framework mainly builds upon concepts proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: the rhizome and arborescent structure, and their related navigating methods: mapping and tracing. This lens is used to analyze journalism as an industry, and zoom in on two case studies, De Volkskrant’s cross-media department Kijk Verder, and hyperlocal video channel PodKat, in order to explore how journalism can make the most of digital opportunities without losing the original qualities that made it valuable to us in the first place.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my supervisor, Toni Pape, for your feedback and open mindedness. I really enjoyed our conversations on this topic, your honesty and your repeated

warnings that I might be falling into the trap of using “Deleuzian lingo” or using theory for the sake of theory. Working on this thesis felt more like a collaboration rather than something I did under supervision, so thank you for that, I really enjoyed it.

I would like to thank Lieselot Versteeg for sharing her thoughts and writings with me, which pointed me in this direction to begin with and became an important basis for my own thoughts about ‘making stuff’. I’m happy we ran into each other on our first day back in school!

Lastly I would like to thank Hay Kranen and Jeffrey Schreuder, who generously donated their time, stories and thoughts. I really enjoyed meeting you both, I learnt a lot from our conversations and I hope you enjoy seeing your own words in this academic context.

Table of Contents

THE FIFTH ESTATE ... 23

NAVIGATING A FLUID LANDSCAPE ... 24 OPEN SOURCE IN JOURNALISM ... 28 MAPPING OR TRACING? ... 29 CH. 3: A CASE STUDY OF DE VOLKSKRANT’S CROSS-MEDIA DEPARTMENT KIJK VERDER ... 30 WORKING FAST AND INTUITIVELY ... 32 A RHIZOME IN A TREE STRUCTURE ... 36 MAPPING AT A LEGACY NEWSPAPER ... 37 CONCLUSION ... 39 CH. 4: A CASE STUDY ABOUT HYPERLOCAL MEDIA CHANNEL PODKAT ... 41 JOURNALISM FOR THE LOCAL YOUTH ... 42 STYLE AND RHETORIC ... 45 ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE ... 47 BUT IS IT JOURNALISM? ... 49 CONCLUSION ... 51 CONCLUSION ... 54 HOW TO NAVIGATE A FLUID LANDSCAPE? ... 57 BIBLIOGRAPHY ... 58 APPENDIX 1: TRANSCRIPTION OF INTERVIEWS ... 65

INTERVIEW 1: HAY KRANEN, NEWSROOM DEVELOPER AT DE VOLKSKRANT ... 65

INTERVIEW 2: JEFFREY SCHREUDER, FOUNDER OF PODKAT ... 77

Introduction

While browsing the Internet, looking for some distraction from my thesis, I found an interesting film called Farewell, ETAOIN SHRDLU (Loeb Weiss 19781_{). It is a record of}

the last day that The New York Times uses hot metal typesetting before switching to a modern system of computerized typesetting. The film shows how all the lines of writing had to be manually set with a Linotype machine, while headings were put in a letter stick by hand to make a mold in which hot lead was poured. These lines of type and picture cuts were then manually made up into full page forms, a process for with the page editor and the page setter had to cooperate closely, while working against the clock. The skill and precision that is required in the process are incredible and fascinating to watch, but also now redundant. As a ‘make up man’ says, “All the knowledge that I acquired over these 26 years is all locked up in a box now, called a computer.”

The tone of the film is nostalgic and melancholic about the end of an era, but at the same time curious and opportunistic about the possibilities that computers will bring. This is the same tension that marks any debate about the many changes the profession of journalism is currently undergoing. The arrival of the Internet has shaken up the profession of journalism much more than the arrival of the computer, bringing the possibility for anyone with an Internet connection to start his own publication, but at the same time causing the collapse of business models of our legacy media. Now, citizen journalism is rising but the Fourth Estate is in a precarious situation. Opportunities for doing good journalism are everywhere, but the media landscape has unrecognizably changed. Anyone who is involved in publishing now has to deal with many unknowns.

It is this tension that I want to explore in my thesis. The tension between old and new, between analogue reliability and digital opportunities. Ultimately I hope to answer the following question: How can journalism navigate the digital landscape? A very broad question that I will be narrowing down by investigating two navigating strategies in particular: mapping and tracing, a distinction that was proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1989). Tracing here signifies following a route on a map. Because this route has already been drawn out on a map, you know where it will take you, and you follow it because you want to get to its destination. Mapping on the other hand is the process that put the tracing on the map to begin with. Mapping involves leaving familiar

tracings to discover unknown territory by trying, experimenting and exploring. Neither process can exist without the other, but finding the right combination can be tricky. In the case of journalism, one of the important questions is: how can we make the most of digital opportunities, without losing the most important qualities that journalism

provides? And how do we know which qualities matter to us, and which we can safely discard?

In this thesis, I will explore this tension using mixed methods. Chapter One and Two contain a literature review, which will be used to analyze journalism as an industry. In Chapter Three and Four I will zoom in and use literature review, semi-structured interviews and textual analysis to investigate two case studies. Throughout all chapters, the main aim is to look at journalism through the lens of the concepts provided by Deleuze and Guattari, in which the focus lies on analyzing the production and textual side of journalism.

More specifically, in Chapter One I will investigate how the media landscape has changed in recent years. I will explain what the main consequences are of the arrival of the

Internet on legacy journalism, and explore what exactly made the business model of legacy media collapse. I will then describe the transformation the media landscape as a whole underwent, from being a steady, hegemonic industry with a monopoly on information distribution to a wide, networked field linking many practices.

In Chapter Two I will explore the consequences of this transformation further, through two theoretical concepts proposed by Deleuze and Guattari: the arborescent structure and the rhizome. These concepts will help to understand the consequences of the transition described in Chapter One. In particular, I will look at the consequences this move has for the ‘watchdog’ function of journalism. I will then return to the two

navigating strategies I described above to understand their relative merits, and see which strategy might be better suited to navigate the fluid, digital landscape.

In Chapter Three and Four I will use these theoretical concepts to investigate two case studies. In the first I will look at the practices of Kijk Verder, the cross-media department at Dutch legacy newspaper De Volkskrant. This digital department has had to carve out a space in which they can explore the affordances of digital formats, instead of using old

analogue formats online. I will look in particular at the practices and mindset that are shaping their productions, and how these could help media to navigate the digital future.

The second case study is about hyperlocal media outlet PodKat, who are combining journalism with vlog aesthetics to get the local youth interested in local politics. I will look at their ad hoc newsroom practices, how they arrive at new formats and what their new forms of journalism could do for the ‘watchdog’ function of regional journalism. I chose these two examples out of many that could be used to explore this tension between old and new media, because they provide two different perspectives: While Kijk Verder has managed to carve out a space within a top-down legacy media outlet, PodKat has emerged independently, and bottom-up.

During my research for this thesis, I found many articles that mainly zoom in on one of journalism’s many current developments. While these studies provide an important basis for my thesis, I hope that by zooming out, and using a theoretical lens, this thesis can provide an overview of the many developments in the media landscape, see how they are connected and hopefully even propose a method to navigate our way forward.

Ch. 1: Journalism in flux

The arrival of the Internet has had a huge impact on traditional journalism on many levels, but at a first glance it appears that it has taken many legacy media a long time to realize this. In a Dutch documentary about the state of journalism, the former editor in chief of The Hague’s local newspaper describes how his newsroom embraced the arrival of the Internet:

Over there in that corner, we had one PC on which you could use the Internet. And there was always a line of editors waiting to use it. This was 2001, and we hadn’t made the turn at all. … I always saw this as a symbol, “let’s keep it in this corner, hopefully it will be safe there”. I always felt there was this slumbering volcano in the room, and eventually it wiped out all the business models of all the newspapers in the world (Peter ter Horst in: Iedereen Journalist 2014)

Indeed, for legacy media, the Internet meant the slow collapse of a very successful business model, and they have been very reluctant to embrace the change. The old business models of many legacy media were largely based on scarcity and locality, two conditions that the Internet took away. Traditional information distribution models, involving printing presses and broadcasting studios, were very expensive to set up and run. Because the seed funding needed to enter the industry of information distribution, the competition was limited. Those who did manage to get started often had monopoly on distributing information in their local area, enabling them to become the sole provider of many kinds of content. As Larry Kramer points out, newspapers didn’t just fulfill the need for yesterday’s news, they also listed timetables for the local cinema, provided coupons for local grocery stores, predicted the weather and gave advice on stock investments (2010). Because the possibilities to distribute information were scarce, advertisers were dependent on these media organizations. When the Internet arrived, suddenly these media institutes lost their monopoly on information distribution and all this content was instantly available online, often for free (Picard 2010). Kramer: “It wasn’t just Google that put newspapers’ future in jeopardy; it was Craigslist, too” (2010: 46).

This old business model of news media is relatively complex, and dependent on many conditions. Now that some of these conditions have fallen away, old media will have to

adapt. Some are experimenting with new business models. Several, mostly specialized publications such as the Financial Times, are putting up pay-walls, to encourage readers to pay for a digital subscription or a single copy. Others, like The Guardian and The New York Times, are actively asking their readers for a donation. Several websites where individual journalists or publications can seek crowdfunding for big research projects have popped up, while others are increasingly relying on public funding for their projects (Bakker 2012: 628). Some other options that are being tested are using the revenue made through public events or by renting out journalists as public speakers, and almost all publications are still trying to find new ways to make online advertising profitable (ibid.).

However, as the distribution context is still undergoing big changes, so far no stable business model has been found, and many publishers are increasingly worried (Newman 2017). Constantly emerging technologies and platforms are causing a very unstable environment, and therefore much insecurity. Meanwhile many new players have popped up, such as new media entrepreneurs, bloggers and citizen journalists, who don’t have to pay for the maintenance of their old newsroom and distribution staff, and are thus able to move faster. To be able to compete, traditional media will not only have to find a new sales and distribution model, but also take a hard look at their cost structure.

Of course, this is already happening. As a result, many jobs in the journalism industry have disappeared, and for new graduates it has become very difficult to find a stable income in media (Carnevale 2015). Permanent jobs are scarce and can often only be accessed through internships or other forms of free or underpaid labor (Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2011). Most newcomers to the industry start as a self-employed journalist, but tariffs for freelancers have declined over the past decade (Deuze and Witschge 2017). ‘Long-term planning and ‘moving up the ladder’ have been replaced by job-hopping and a portfolio work life as news professionals increasingly have contracts, not careers in journalism’ (ibid: 7). Meanwhile, expectations for working journalists have increased. As news organizations are trying to keep their costs down, their employees are asked to work harder, often having to compensate for the decline in workforce due to lay-offs (Bakker 2012; Reinardy 2011). In addition, most journalists are expected to continuously adapt to an unstable media environment by gaining several new multimedia skills, learning how to collaborate with ICT staff, writing for search engines, knowing how to maintain interaction with the audience through social media and being able to use new online sources, such as amateur content and data banks (Anderson et. al. 2012;

Luckhurst 2011; Bakker 2012). For many journalists, this precarity and ‘culture of job insecurity’ (Ekdale et al. 2015) have become defining features of their experiences in the profession. High stress levels and burnouts are increasingly common and are causing many journalists to consider leaving the profession (Reinardy 2011). Furthermore, these cost cuts also have an impact on the quality of the journalism these media can provide. As Peter Vandermeersch, the publisher of Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad says:

The question of course is whether there is a future for newspapers. What I’m really afraid of is that we’ll soon only sell 220.000 newspapers, and that our newsroom will only employ 170 people, and that we will find ourselves in a terrible, downward spiral. We’ll sell less, which will decrease the quality, which will decrease the sales… and so on (in: Iedereen Journalist 2014).

The instability of the new distribution context has not just affected traditional media, as stated in The Reuters Institute’s yearly prediction report for digital journalism, even digital pioneers such as Mashable and Salon have announced budget cuts and lay-offs while popular new multimedia platform Buzzfeed was reported to have downgraded their 2016 earning targets by a considerable amount (Newman 2017). One of the causes that were named in the report was these companies’ reliance on “Facebook’s fickle

algorithms”, which had deprioritized posts by brands and publishers. Many media

agencies are reliant on large platforms such as Facebook, Twitter or SnapChat for a lot of their digital revenue (Owen 2017), which puts them in a precarious situation, as the business interests of these large conglomerates do not necessarily align with theirs. Unexpected decisions by one of these platforms can change the entire distribution context of many media companies overnight. Moreover, as Facebook tends to keep the details of their algorithm secret and often only hints at the changes that will affect publishers, relying on social media platforms for the distribution of content means any publishing strategy involves unknown and unstable factors (Rondon 2014).

Still, many media agencies are deciding to base their business on social media strategies, which has led to the emergence of several new business models and forms of journalism. Many of these strategies are based on the recycling and repackaging content from

sources such as social media, press releases, police reports, news wires or news articles from other publications, allowing publications to produce a large output of low-cost content. An example of this is the aforementioned Huffington Post, whose business model mainly relies on the recycling of content they picked up from other blogs (Bakker 2012).

Google News uses algorithms and search robots to find relevant news and republishes this in a customized version in over 60 countries, a strategy called aggregation. These new ways of content gathering are still controversial: The Huffington Post was threatened by a lawsuit on behalf of 9000 bloggers who had not been paid for the use of their content, and Google News has been forced to remove articles by Belgian publishers (ibid.). According to Piet Bakker, this increased competition has led to a growing pressure on more traditional agencies to produce more inexpensive content for their digital

platforms, “resulting in new models of low-cost or even free content production” (ibid: 627). Rather than cultivating an investigative news culture that creates original, high quality content, they too are becoming more reliant on quantitative strategies such as aggregation (Davies 2008).

Ernst-Jan Pfauth, publisher of The Correspondent and media watcher, thinks it’s exactly this tendency that is causing audiences to lose their faith in journalism.

We must be explicit about the reasons why journalism is about more than racking up likes and shares on Facebook with clickbait-y headlines, or giving an inordinate amount of attention to an unusual presidential candidate. Because we see the above happening every day, I’m not surprised that audiences think journalism’s highest aim is to hijack their attention and trick their eyeballs into spending a split second on banner ads. (Pfauth 2016: n.p.)

And, indeed, audiences are losing their faith in journalism. According to a 2016 study by Gallup, the percentage of people who trust the press has declined to about 32 per cent (Swift). This comes at a time when the presence of fake news on social media appears to be rising, and when both publishers and social media companies are still unsure how to tackle this situation. And even though 70 per cent of the respondents in a Reuters Institute poll among editors, CEO’s and digital influencers believed that the rise of fake news will actually strengthen the position of traditional media, Nic

Newman notes that “it could also further harm the public’s trust in media or cause people to turn away from news altogether. This is clearly a turning point for media and all eyes will be on how both publishers and platforms respond to this crisis of

credibility” (2017: 10).

From industry to networks

in traditional institutions amongst college-educated, middle class adults who are instead turning to non-hierarchical institutions and their peers (Deuze and Prenger 2016). This shift is reflected online, where mass media are losing their audiences to niches where the relationship between journalists and their readers is much more personal. From a wide range of media, readers are choosing the information they want to receive from many different kinds of providers, often gathering them on a platform such as Facebook and Twitter. The media-feed they receive here is the result of personal choices combined with a personalized algorithm, usually resulting in a mix of

professional content such as investigative journalism, semi-professional content such as blogs, and non-professional content like quick updates from direct contacts. This content-mesh is so highly personalized that it has been accused of creating a ‘filter bubble’, providing the user only with similar perspectives and ideas, so that he is never confronted with contrasting viewpoints to the point that he may not even be aware of their existence (Pariser 2011).

Users can choose where and when to read or scroll through these newsfeeds using their laptops, smartphones or tablets. Here, media are also highly converged:

broadcasters have started platforms for written journalism, newspapers are releasing videos and podcasts, and so on. New formats are popping up all the time and are often quickly copied by other content producers. This is a big change for traditional media companies, which until the advent of the Internet were based on an industrial, large scale logic, allowing them to deliver a standardized product to a large group of

customers on a set time, for a low price. This shift, from standardized media for a mass audience to fragmented, converged and personal media is called post-industrial

journalism (Anderson et.al. 2012).

This new media landscape has a big impact on the production side. According to Deuze and Witschge, journalism has transitioned from a more or less coherent industry to a highly varied range of practices. (2017: 2). As noted before, the unstable employment of journalists is causing many to flow in and out of organizations, often working for several media at the same time. Individual workflows are virtualized and connected, limiting the role of the newsroom as a central place in the newsgathering process (ibid: 6). This form of production is what Manual Castells calls ‘the networked enterprise’. In his definition, the network enterprise is a virtual organization, connecting many kinds of activities and networks through information technology (1996). This society is structured around networks instead of individual actors; access, connectedness, and flexibility are key

factors for success. In this global network, journalists increasingly find themselves collaborating with colleagues spread across countries, but also audiences are increasingly participating in journalistic processes.

For the latter, Van der Haak et. al. coined the term ‘networked journalism’, which denotes the idea that journalism in the digital age essentially should be a collaborative and open process that allows the audience to actively participate. They identify three stages in the journalistic process, namely data gathering, interpreting and storytelling, and make the claim that anyone involved in any of these processes, is doing journalistic work, even though he or she will usually not do it alone. Some examples are crowdsourcing, interactivity, user-generated content, wikis and crowdfunding. The journalism that results from these joint efforts is much less hierarchical and more fluid and interactive than it used to be in the analogue age. The collaboration can take many forms, from a journalist simply asking its audience on Twitter which subject she should dive into next, radio listeners suggesting questions to ask during an interview, to a crowdsourced effort to tackle a big database of leaked documents.

This open and fluid media landscape has called into question journalism’s gatekeeping authority. Now that everyone with a computer or smartphone has the power to write, record and distribute journalistic content, traditional media have lost their position of experts, the ones who decide what is newsworthy and what isn’t. More often than not breaking news will come from a member of the public (or what Jay Rosen calls “the people formerly known as the audience”), rather than a professional journalist (Tameling 2015). Powerful figures such as politicians can now bypass media and take their message straight to the public, and the public can use these tools to hold them, but also journalists to account. This is causing a tension between journalisms occupational ideology of autonomy and control, and the digital ideology of open participation (Lewis 2012). “From the perspective of journalism’s ideology, the digitization of media and the forms of participation together may well present a locus of chaos compared with the

professional desire for control” (ibid: 849).

Furthermore, while collaborations with the public can make journalism more affordable, they can also pose a threat to expertise, craftsmanship and employment prospects. For example, in 2013 the Chicago Sun-Times fired all twenty-eight of its photographers, and with them their expertise, and the knowledge and experience they had in covering the

city. In the future, the newspaper will rely instead on freelance photographers, citizen journalists and footage from security cameras. This will reduce the quality of their photographic material, but the reduced cuts will help the newspaper survive (Pavlik 2013).

On the other hand, collaborations with the public can also enrich journalism, and Nic Newman makes the case that as the pace of the news cycle accelerates, there is an even greater need for traditional journalistic skills to sort facts from fiction. As an example he uses the partnership between citizen journalists in Iran and the BBC for the coverage of the 2009 elections. During these controversial elections there were large protests, but as most foreign correspondents were banned from leaving their hotel rooms the BBC Persian TV was relying on user-generated images of these events. Meanwhile, the protesters understood that only professional mass media outlets have the power to influence public opinion widely and fast. Afterwards, Richard Sambrook, Head of Global News for the BBC said that this usage of audience content had a double benefit. It helped them to report the story, but it also put them in a direct relationship with their audience, which added engagement and authenticity. Newman notes that most of the content that was shared on social networks during these events either came from, or pushed people to the work of mainstream media. Not only did crowdsourcing make the work of traditional journalists possible, it actually amplified it.

Institutional structures and change

Despite all this turmoil, the occupational ideology and self-conceptualization of journalism seem to be surprisingly strong. In 2004 Mark Deuze notes that journalists have a strong occupational ideology, seeing themselves as providing a public service in an objective, neutral and trustworthy way; working autonomously and independently with good sense of ethics and legitimacy. Also the notions of immediacy, actuality and speed are very important, which Deuze points out as inherent to the idea of the ‘news’. In a 2015 research, Janet Fulton found that these notions, which she calls the myth of the fourth estate, were still used to define an occupational identity and that based on this, participants who were working as journalists in traditional media called themselves journalists, while participants who were professional bloggers or came into the media profession via a different route were very cautious to describe their work as journalism.

Many scholars agree that this is in fact a fallacy, which is problematic not only because it excludes marginalized and minority voices, practices and forms of journalism (Deuze and Witschge 2017) but also because it prevents journalists from recognizing opportunities:

Too many reporters remain locked into a mindset where a relatively limited list of sources is still relied on to gather evidence for most important stories, with the occasional rewritten press release or direct observation thrown in. This insider-centric idea of original reporting excludes social media, the explosion of digital data, algorithmically generated sources of information, and many other new strategies of information gathering (Anderson et. al. 2012: n.p.).

This is one example of how institutionalized thinking can hinder change. According to Anderson et. al. the purpose of institutional arrangements is to ingrain and rationalize standardized patterns of behavior. This provides stability, and allows institutions to perform complex operations. In the case of a newspaper, a highly standardized series of tasks allows the news organization to cover a wide array of events, gather data at a central point, add interpretation, put this into a format in which it is printed alongside advertisements, announcements, opinion pieces and the weather forecast, print and distribute these across the entire country, every day. In the words of Zach Seward, former editor for the Wall Street Journal: “It’s truly no small miracle that daily news organizations are able to produce what they do already, so 100 percent of effort is expended on existing processes” (ibid.: n.p.).

To sum up the current situation: journalism as a profession is highly structured and institutionalized which on the one hand has allowed it to perform complex operations and even achieve the status of the fourth estate, but which on the other hand is causing it to fare badly in an environment of flux. In the next chapter I will introduce several concepts that will help to explore this tension further.

Ch. 2: Arborescent and rhizomatic journalism

One helpful metaphor to explore the fluid media landscape, with its toppling institutions and emerging networks is provided by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their famous book Capitalism and schizophrenia 2: A Thousand plateaus. The introduction to this book reads somewhat like a love letter to the rhizome, a root structure that grows horizontally through the soil, sprouting new plants. This is used as a metaphor to denote a creative knowledge and thought structure that does not have a hierarchical structure or a decision center, but instead is a multiplicity that grows offshoots in many directions, engaging in unexpected cross-pollinations.

Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes ... Even some animals are, in their pack form. Rats are rhizomes. Burrows are too, in all of their functions of shelter, supply,

movement, evasion and breakout. The rhizome itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concentration into bulbs and tubers. (Deleuze and Guattari 1989: 6-7)

It is seen as an alternative to the arborescent or tree structure, which they describe as a self-contained totality whose components are enclosed in a fixed arrangement in which they can move vertically, or hierarchically, but never horizontally and as such are unable to engage in cross-pollinations with other structures, concepts or individuals. This metaphor has fruitfully been used by many scholars to analyze, amongst other things, social and political movements (Woods et. al. 2013), cryptomarkets (Bakken 2015) and urban development (Koster and Nuijten 2016).

The point here is not to argue in favor of one structure rather than the other, but to use these concepts a starting point to understand how the media landscape is transforming, and which different strategies exist to navigate this fluidity. Below, I will discuss several implications of both forms, and how these relate to recent changes in journalism. I will look at several aspects of journalism, but focus in particular on what a shift from one form to another means for ‘the watchdog’ function of journalism. In the last part of this chapter I will discuss the relative merits of two navigating strategies that are proposed by Deleuze and Guattari, and see how these could be used to arrive at new, working models for journalism.

It is important to remember that Deleuze and Guattari emphasize throughout their book that no pure form of the rhizome or tree-structure exist and that most rhizomes will display arborescent tendencies, and vice versa. Woods et. al. propose that both are best seen as tendencies that are present in all systems and processes, that achieve articulation at different points within a cycle of stability (2013: 435). However to understand the implications of each tendency, I will first discuss them as two sides of a binary.

Arborescent journalism

The first two principles of rhizomatic assemblages that Deleuze and Guattari identify are the principles of connection and heterogeneity: “the rhizome connects any point to any other point and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature” (1989: 21). This means that the many heterogeneous components of a rhizomatic assemblage are able to reach out in any direction, often resulting in unexpected connections. In doing so, they are not restricted by a hierarchy, or directed by a central decision-making center, which allows for flexibility and diversity. A good illustration of a social institution that has emerged out of spontaneous connections between a diverse group of entities is a pre-capitalist market, “a collective entity that arises from the decentralized interaction of many buyers and sellers, with no central ‘decider’ coordinating the whole process” (DeLanda 2000: 17).

Arborescent or tree-like assemblages on the other hand are organized in a hierarchical and linear manner. Their components are sorted into homogeneous groups, which are connected through a linear hierarchy. The only way they are able to connect is through this prescribed arrangement. “The channels of transmission are pre-established: the arborescent system pre-exists the individual, who is integrated into it at an allotted place” (Deleuze and Guattari 1989: 16). The decisions of individuals can be highly restricted by their place or rank within this hierarchy. An example of this is a military hierarchy, in which the recruits are sorted into homogenous groups, which are connected through a chain of command.

Legacy journalism can also be seen as an example for an arborescent assemblage, in which many divisions of labor have emerged over the decennia. Journalism first developed with the rise of industrialism, and early newspapers were often run by the owner of the printing press. Soon a division emerged between the owner of the printing

press, and those who were employed to take care of the content. A division was also made between the journalists and typographers, and amongst the journalists more divisions appeared between different kinds of journalists: reporters, editors, subeditors, photographers, designers, proofreaders and so on. All these divisions were connected to each other in a hierarchical fashion, perfectly orchestrated performing many intricate, standardized practices, filling in a variety of standardized formats, before unforgiving deadlines. This enabled them to produce a fresh newspaper, six days a week, filled with all the components the audience expected and was familiar with.

This audience was also homogenized so large groups of individuals could be catered to with a standardized product. This was possible because of the scarcity of content that determined the market.

These divisions and their linear connections were necessary to run a very complex operation, but at the same time pose large restrictions on the freedom of many journalists, preventing them from innovating or becoming personally invested in their work. According to Mark Deuze, the emergence of the start-up culture in journalism stems at least in part from frustrations among journalists about the restrictions within legacy media (2017).

Arborescent assemblages are organized through branches, which connect members to the central organization (Woods et. al. 2013: 438). Like trees, for which the linear growth and subdivision in branches allow it to capture a maximum amount of sunlight,

arborescent structures use branches to allow the organization to extend its spread, dividing space into manageable units. In journalism, these branches allow agencies for example to report on a wide geographical spread, and a wide array of subjects.

Different kinds of energy flow through these branches from the extremities to the center. Examples of such energy flows in a media organization are a flow of information - all the reporting that is done through the beat structure is gathered centrally, and then redistributed; and money flow, which would flow from subscribers to the center, on to the journalists, in return for flow of information they provide. These flows are not self-organized, but coordinated from the center. The branches are afforded a degree of agency, but they are not able to escape the overall constitution. Woods et. al.: “Such constitutional segmentation reinforces inertia and continuity, making wholesale organizational reform difficult to achieve” (2013: 438).

This kind of structure allows the arborescent assemblage to gain strength from maturity. The influence of these kinds of organizations increases over time, as their contacts thicken and they gain credibility and trust. In time arborescent organizations even become embedded in the culture and communities from which they draw support, as their authority becomes seemingly self-evident and their worldview hegemonic. As such, they are intolerant of competition. Their influence is greatest if they can claim to be the sole authority, and their means grow as they increase their spread, preventing others from occupying the same territory. This way, alternative voices and practices are marginalized. This tendency can also be observed in legacy journalism, which has frequently been criticized for being too Western-centric and “driven by elite sourcing mechanisms” (Joye et. al. 2016: 10).

However, Anderson et. al. observe that it is these institutional qualities that have allowed legacy media to produce what they call ‘the iron core of journalism’ (2012: n.p.). They provide the leverage and symbolic capital that give them access to other arborescent organizations, such as politics and large businesses. Here, leverage means that a

newspaper’s claim to a mass audience encourages other institutions to provide them with information - partly because this gives them access to the same mass audience, and partly because they fear the consequences if they don’t. In addition, this institutional structure can provide the continuity that gives them the ability to decide to cover a story, beat, or section of society for an extended period of time, even as individual reporters come and go. Drawing on an analogy proposed by Len Downie and Michael Schudson, Anderson et. al. propose that while symbolic capital and leverage are important for journalism to perform its watchdog function, it is continuity that give it its scarecrow capacity.

Though the scarecrow “does nothing,” its very existence, the very fact that the crows know it is out there, “watching,” is often enough to constrain bad crow-like behavior. And the same goes for journalism. The watchdog press, it must be admitted, barks only rarely. But the continuity of that press, the fact that it is “out there,” is often enough to constrain bad behavior on the part of powerful

institutions. (ibid.: n.p.)

However, it is the same qualities that make institutions so powerful that make them vulnerable. Like trees, which grow slowly and can adapt to seasonal change, and even

survive storms and droughts, they are incapable to adapt to swift environmental changes (Woods et. al 2013: 439). Legacy media’s sudden loss of their monopoly on information distribution has already caused several traditional news outlets to collapse, and puts pressure on the financial and symbolic capital of many others. This puts their watchdog and scarecrow function at risk, and the question emerges whether a different kind of structure will be able to provide the same accountability.

Networked journalism as a rhizome

The emerging culture of networked journalism, described in the previous chapter, is more akin to a rhizomatic assemblage. In rhizomes, connections can be made between seemingly unrelated entities. In their description of networked journalism, Van der Haak et. al. posed that in the different stages of the journalistic process - data gathering, interpreting and storytelling - one or more connections can be made, crossing through institutions, startups, editorial collectives, forums, audience members, and so on (2012). There is no formal membership to this assemblage, individual entities can move in and out of this process at free will. The initiative for activity can come from any entity within this network: a professional journalist can ask for input from the public, but audience members or communities can also decide to start publishing by themselves. Unlike in traditional journalism, there is no central decision center from which these activities are coordinated. Rather, they function like a multiplicity, in which there is room for

marginalized voices and perspectives, and in which unexpected connections result in all kinds of unfamiliar products. This has led to increased pluriformity in public debates, and many marginalized voices are now openly challenging the hegemonic perspective that traditional journalism provided.

Rhizomes function without a constitution. Rather, they function like packs or swarms, with a collective thought process that is often spontaneous and open to suggestion (Woods et. al. 2013: 436). Though in traditional journalism there is only a small formal set of rules, the informal rules - or occupational ideology - are surprisingly strict (Deuze 2004). The lack of a constitution in networked journalism has resulted in many

productions that are deemed low and unworthy by the standards of traditional journalism (Fulton 2015) 2_{. Citizen journalists produce pieces in which the names and photos of}

2 _{Jane Fulton also points out that in several instances, traditional journalists have acted against their own} code of ethics as well, and therefore adherence to these ethics is not a very good measure by which to differentiate professional journalists from bloggers, online publishers and broadcasters, and website developers (2015: 371).

crime suspects have not been anonymized; bloggers blatantly express racist or

misogynistic commentary; vloggers openly harass authority figures in their videos and communities push false news as if it were factual. But rhizomes can also move fast, and problems like these are often quickly addressed by a multitude of actors. For example, when issues with fake news first arose, legacy journalism outlets as well as journalism start-ups quickly came up with fact-checking solutions; audience members started drawing attention to incorrect statements by labeling them with hashtags, while research groups started investigating how these issues could be prevented in the long-term. Even though issues with fake news have not fully been tackled, this is a good example of the way that rhizomes self-regulate, without top-down imposed restrictions.

This is also an example of how a decentralized decision-making process allows a rhizome to be agile and quickly mobilized (Woods et. al. 2013: 437). The ability to quickly respond is also an advantage in catastrophic situations, which are often reported first through networked journalism. One example of this was the media coverage of earthquake on Haiti in 2010, when media outlets were reliant for 24 hours on ‘user-generated’ content and citizen journalism to report the catastrophic events before they could get their own reporters on the ground (Bruno 2010).

The expansion of a rhizome is opportunistic. Its different nodes are not organized around formal structures, but rather connect through direct communication. Like true rhizomes, they spread underground, penetrating the surface in unexpected places (ibid.: 437). This places them beyond the scope of easy surveillance and analysis. In journalism, this has provided an advantage in situations of censorship, as can be observed in the coverage of the 2008 election protests in Iran. Journalists were not allowed to leave their hotels, but outlets like the BBC were still able to cover the riots by relying on user-generated content (Newman 2009)3_.

A rhizome has no obvious starting point, and can be entered in many ways. There is no formal membership, and individuals can drift in and out at will. Networked journalism can be accessed from multiple directions. One can join in as a member of the audience, a self-starting blogger, a new media entrepreneur, a professional from a separate discipline but also as a traditional journalist, because “[i]f it is true that it is of the essence of the

map or rhizome to have multiple entryways, then it is plausible that one could even enter them through tracings or the root-tree” (Deleuze & Guattari 1989: 15). This does not work two ways. Legacy journalism can only be accessed through institutions, which themselves can often only be entered through an internship or ‘entry-level’ job, from which one can work one’s way up the linear chain. As I have observed in the previous chapter, this is reflected in the occupational ideology: as the symbolic capital of the fourth estate still mainly clings to institutional journalism, working one’s way up within these institutions is often the only way to gain access to this capital (Deuze 2004; Fulton 2015).

Rhizomes are also very resilient. “A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines” (Deleuze and Guattari 1989: 9). The predecessor of the Internet, ARPAnet, was in fact designed as a rhizomatic network because the US defense department needed a communication system that was able to survive a nuclear strike. A network that was designed around one central computer would be too vulnerable, because if the center was hit, the entire network would go down. So instead, they designed a network of nodes, and gave the information packets that moved between these nodes enough ‘local intelligence’ so that they would be able to find their destination on their own, without the need of a coordinating center, allowing the computer-system to self-organize. (DeLanda 1991: 117-118).

A self-organizing network does not provide the same continuity as institutional journalism, which can provide the certainty that a certain beat will be covered for an extended period of time. However, network journalism’s rhizomatic properties have other advantages when it comes to accountability: its resilience, its capability to provide a platform for marginalized voices and practices, and ability to rapidly mobilize make it able to hold institutions to account. From the way citizen journalism was used to hold the Chinese authorities to account after the catastrophic Sichuan earthquake4_{, to the way}

Romanian editorial collectives held mainstream media outlets to account for one-sided reporting about the Rosia Montana gold mine5_{, networked journalism provides a new}

accountability, giving it a new watchdog function.

4 _{This example was mentioned by Clay Shirky in a TEDtalk about social media. After an earthquake in the} Sichuan province in China, citizen journalists reported that government officials had taken bribes to provide permits for constructions that were substandard, causing these structures to collapse during the earthquake, which resulted in many deaths (2009: n.p.).

5 _{In 2013, a series of protests erupted in Romania in response to the government’s decision to grant} Canadian company Gabriel Resources a permit to open a goldmine in the mountainous area of Rosia

The Fifth Estate

William Dutton sees in this new power of networks to hold institutions to account the rise of ‘the fifth estate’: ‘networks of networks’ that can undermine the boundaries of institutions, and are thus able to hold them to account (2009). In his vision, the fifth estate will overlap and complement the fourth estate, and indeed, not in all but many of the examples provided in this chapter legacy journalism still played a vital role in the effectiveness of networked journalism. Internet theorist Clay Shirky agrees that when the ‘iron core of journalism’, is combined with the agility of networks, it is a powerful combination to hold authority and institutions to account (Benton 2009). He gives as an example the reporting that was done by The Boston Globe in 2002 on the widespread sexual abuse within the Catholic Church. These articles were instrumental in creating the pressure on the Catholic Church to account for and act upon this abuse, however, many of the positive effects that came from these articles would not be possible without the networks through which the articles were endlessly forwarded, and through which they were connected to other actors such as SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests and the database project, The Bishop Accountability project. A decade earlier The Boston Globe had also reported on abuses in the Catholic Church, and even though these stories shocked people, they had a very limited effect in terms of accountability.

That suggests to me that the ecosystem we’re in now is already different enough from the 20th-century ecosystem [and] that we should be looking at ways of balancing the very expensive and time-consuming production of accountability journalism with the possibility of public reuse of same. Because that public reuse produces a kind of value that doesn’t just come from publication. It comes from republication and reuse (ibid.: n.p.).

Even though the media landscape is transforming, currently legacy media still play a vital role in many of the functions it provides to society, including its ability to hold

institutions to account. This means that in its current form, journalism is still more arborescent than rhizomatic. This can put these functions at risk, because for now, it remains unsure whether many traditional media outlets will be able to survive the loss of

Montana. Part of these protests were directed at Romanian mass media outlets, who were accused of producing biased coverage as Gabriel Resources was a big source of advertising income for these companies. Romanian editorial collectives such as Casa Jurnalistului produced a series of articles on the coverage of these protests.

their monopoly on information distribution on which their business model depends. This means that in the current system, the watchdog and scarecrow function of

journalism are at risk. This is also due to the arborescent nature of traditional journalism, where these important functions are centered in few institutions. That’s why, going forward, Shirky suggests a more rhizomatic model of journalism:

[W]e don’t need another different kind of institution that does 85 percent of accountability journalism. We need a class of institutions or models, whether they’re endowments or crowdsourced or what have you — we need a model that produces five percent of accountability journalism. And we need to get that right 17 times in a row. (in: Benton 2009: n.p.)

Shirky believes that time spent on trying to mend the old business model of journalism is time wasted, and suggests that, in trying to find new models that can produce the same accountability as legacy journalism produced, we should try to find many overlapping models, that together can reinstate the watchdog and scarecrow function of legacy journalism. To show this can be done, a clue is again provided by Deleuze and Guattari: “there is always something that flows or flees, that escapes the binary organizations, the resonance apparatus, and the overcoding machine” (1989: 216). Woods et al. explain that it is these lines of flight that present rhizomatic opportunities. “They are the time-spaces of escape, of experimentation, of mutation, that lead to new assemblages” (2013: 440).

Navigating a fluid landscape

But how do one make the most of these opportunities? How can one navigate a landscape in transition, hoping to arrive at new models for journalism? In Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari elaborate two strategies, derived from cartography:

mapping, and tracing. The tracings here designate the lines on a map, the roads that have been discovered, carved out and marked up so that others can follow the same route. To follow a tracing is a result-oriented navigating strategy, you follow a route because you know where it will take you in advance. This navigating method is related to arborescent structures: “All of tree logic is a logic of tracing and reproduction” (Deleuze and Guattari 1989: 12). Meanwhile, mapping is a strategy, related to the rhizome, that is all about the exploration of the unknown. It does not involve a predetermined route, but ‘is entirely oriented towards an experimentation in contact with the real’ (ibid.) Like the rhizome

and the tree, mapping and tracing can be seen as the two opposite endings of a continuum and in practice most action will involve a combination of both.

Institutions involve many tracings. They are the structures, routines, systems and

processes that allow them to thrive in stable environments. They offer reliability, as they always produce the same outcome, but they also create the inertia that stifles their ability to innovate. Tracings could be considered a black box: once experimenting results in something productive, we encase it and no longer question its workings, even when the results it produces stop being desirable (Latour 1987)6_{. Tracings can also be the tools and}

techniques, standardized instruments and ways of doing things. They both enable and restrain: using tracings allows one to perform a certain task properly, but at the same time this excludes many possibilities. Using a format for a newspaper allows a journalist to focus on the content without having to worry about the form. However, this also restricts him from expressing certain things that can only be expressed in other forms. Tracings are related to competence and craftsmanship: in order to arrive at the desired result, techniques and routines have to be performed properly. Perfectly executed

tracings are often admired. Usually industries have standards according to which tracings have to be performed, which are taught in schools and apprenticeships. To reward excellence, competitions and industry awards are created. This is possible because tracings always arrive at the same destination, resulting in homogeneous products, which allows them to be compared. For example, in the film industry most practices are so standardized that film prizes are awarded for nearly every routine task that is involved in the production of a film, such as best actress, best costume design, or best sound mixing. Deviating from these standardized practices means missing out on these prizes. This is why tracings are linked to excellence, and this way not only competence and

craftsmanship are awarded, but also conservatism and risk avoidance. The same can be seen in legacy journalism, which like film is a prestigious industry. Here, the Pulitzer Prize is still seen as the international standard of excellence in journalism, and even

6 _{In his book Science in Action, Bruno Latour explains that cyberneticians use the word black box} whenever a piece of machinery or set of commands is too complex. “In its place they draw a little box about which they need to know nothing but its input and output” (1989: 3). According to Latour, concepts and tools can also be considered black boxes: things that provide a productive tension between

though occasionally innovative projects such as the Panama Papers are rewarded7_{, its}

award categories still roughly follow the formats of an analogue newspaper.

Mappings on the other hand, are all about taking risks, because the results are always unknown. They do not follow a set plan but improvise, responding to the situation that the present offers. Mapping is all about leaving the tracings, taking an unfamiliar side path when it occurs, exploring newfound possibilities along the way. Whereas tracings are useful to actualize a single potential from a material, mapping can explore all its virtual capacities. While carpentry techniques and tools can be useful to actualize a table from a piece of wood, using them excludes many other possibilities for which this wood could be used. The process of mapping is not oriented towards a specific result, but rather, “has to do with performance” (Deleuze and Guattari 1989: 12). In fact, you could say that mapping is the process, whereas tracing is always a result. Mapping tactics result in many heterogeneous products, for which we often have no framework of appreciation yet, but which may offer new possibilities we couldn’t recognize before.

It is this strategy that Clay Shirky is talking about when he suggests that, rather than trying to save or replace the big media institutions of the twentieth century, we should be looking at vast and varied experimentation, “transferring our concern to the production of lots and lots of smaller, overlapping models of accountability journalism, knowing that we won’t get it right in the beginning and not knowing which experiments are going to pan out” (2009: n.p.) He is far from the only media expert who has called for a more experimental approach in a bid to offset the effects of the declining legacy media: Larry Kramer suggests that, when looking for a new business model, media agencies should not look for one magic bullet, but instead take a ‘beta’ approach: “find as many promising ideas as you can, try them all and see what works in practice” (2010: 49). This can seem like a tricky strategy in an industry that is already experiencing a crisis in professionalism. When professional media agencies start churning out cobbled-together beta versions that are difficult to distinguish from amateur content, they might put their symbolic capital and business model in even more danger. Thus, it can be tempting for legacy media to hold onto the tracings by which they distinguish themselves. Also, as

7 _{Panama Papers refers to the series of journalistic investigations into 11,5 million leaked documents that} detail financial and attorney–client information about a large number of offshore entities. Journalists from 107 media organizations in 80 countries were involved in analyzing these documents. The Pulitzer Prize was awarded to the Washington-based International Constrium of Investigative Journalists, and two American newspapers, McClatchy and the Miami Herald.

we’ve examined in the previous chapter, the inertia caused by the arborescent structure makes innovation and organizational reform difficult. As media anthropologist Joris Luyendijk puts it:

Journalism as we know it grew up around the logistical constraints that came with printing on paper and broadcasting on the radio or TV. Today’s information and communication technology have brought about the collapse of each of these logistical constraints. Yet the profession clings to familiar genres, tinkering around the edges of something that has lost its underlying logic. (2012: 1-2.)

Here, Luyendijk suggests that journalists hold on to analogue tracings that no longer make sense in a digital environment. While these tracings used to provide a productive tension between affordances and constraints, they now mainly provide unnecessary constraints. However, journalists have yet to find out how to make the most of the many affordances that the Internet provides them.

Clay Shirky points out that, even when a project can only be tackled with a big, long-term plan, it is impossible to understand all the challenges that are involved in the project before one has started to execute it:

Rigid adherence to detailed advance planning amounts to a commitment by everyone involved not to learn anything useful or surprising while doing the actual work. Worse, the illusion that an advance plan can proceed according to schedule can make it harder to catch and fix errors as early as possible, so as to limit the damage they cause. (2014: 55).

In his newsletter, media expert Ernst-Jan Pfauth states that he understands that it can be tempting for media companies to try to combat the big issues they face with big,

professionally executed plans (2016: n.p.). However, “on the internet you won’t make it with an average development speed of three years” (ibid.: n.p., translated from Dutch). In the digital media landscapes, there are many unknown factors, and even known conditions can change rapidly. This is why planning too far ahead may prove

counterproductive, as it will be difficult, if not impossible to plan ahead when you don’t know what you are going to encounter, or what the ultimate goal should be. That is why he too urges to start experimenting with small, unpolished productions, and expand these when they perform well. This is what Deleuze and Guattari mean when they say

“Don’t sow, grow offshoots! ... Have short-term ideas” (1989: 24-25).

Open source in journalism

The emergence of networked journalism, with all its rhizomatic properties, already sees the emergence of a working method that tends more towards mapping. This is perhaps no coincidence, and the digital environment seems to perfectly facilitate such an approach. Online, new products can be released at very low costs, audience figures provide immediate feedback on the performance of the new products, users can provide qualitative feedback by sharing their experiences, and later adjustments will be effective immediately. Moreover, digital formats are very flexible, and new digital tools emerge constantly.

Other scholars like Seth Lewis and Nikki Usher have suggested that, to take advantage of these properties, legacy journalism can take a cue from software developers and

programmers, who have fully embraced the mapping approach. It was in this industry that the open source and hacker mentalities most prominently emerged. Lewis and Usher explore how the concept of open source could provide a structural as well as an ethical framework for news innovation. They understand open source as a:

[N]on-market, non-contractual transfer of knowledge among actors, sharing relevant information with a non-definite set of other actors without any immediate recompense. Actors share their ideas with the clear purpose of contributing to a joint development (Balka et. al. 2009: n.p.; cited in: Lewis and Usher 2013: 606).

In doing so, the actors are usually less motivated by profit, but rather by non-monetary forms of compensation such as reputation, play and a sense of belonging. They identify four key values of the open-source culture – transparency, tinkering, iteration and participation – and look at how these values could attribute to a more innovative culture in the newsroom. More transparency helps to open up the journalistic process, so everyone can join in at different stages. They define tinkering as ‘playfulness, remixing and radical experimentation’, focusing on the process rather than the result. This could lead to new concepts or unexpected implementations of existing products. This attitude should go hand in hand with iteration, or the continuous releasing of beta versions, whilst responding to feedback, which could speed up the development cycle of new

products and publications, and give the developers a more realistic view of their real-world performance. Participation is something that Lewis and Usher already see happening in many journalistic organizations, but they suggest that it could be taken further, by allowing users to take on a more active, interlinked and monitorial kind of role, ‘helping to supervise the ‘software’ of news, rather than merely adding comments post-publication, as too often is the case’ (2013: 609).

Tinkering and iteration are intrinsic values of any mapping, a navigating method with progresses through trial and error by default. Opening up this process through

transparency and participation could help a mapping to fork out or move faster, allowing it to acquire a mapping or an uncharted land more quickly and accurately.

Mapping or tracing?

Whilst mapping may be a more suitable approach to navigate a fluid environment, this does not mean that tracings are entirely obsolete, nor that we should blindly abandon all our tracings. As Deleuze and Guattari say: “Have we not, however, reverted to a simple dualism by contrasting maps to tracings, as good and bad sides? Is it not of the essence of the map to be traceable?” (1989: 13). Anderson et. al. agree: institutions can provide advantages, but we need to restructure our existing ones, and create new ones. More concretely they state that legacy journalism has to adapt to the internet age, and meanwhile new forms of news production should become institutionalized, “because without the virtues of institutions, albeit ones fitted to digital production, these new efforts will not be able to survive or to become persistent or powerful enough to discipline other institutional actors” (2012: n.p.). Lewis and Usher point out, however, that in the existing legacy media newsrooms, this often means that journalism norms and routines have minimized the potentially innovative nature of new digital practices (2013: 609). Potentially transformative practices such as blogging and user-generated content are only deemed useful when they meet the needs and quality of a predetermined news story, and often newsrooms are quick to introduce guidelines on how to use new tools and formats that prevent the exploration of their full potential. Deleuze and Guattari: “It is a question of method: the tracing should always be put back on the map” (1989: 13), but not the other way around.

Ch. 3: A case study of De Volkskrant’s cross-media

department Kijk Verder

In November 2015 editor in chief of Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant writes:

The symbolism is almost too cheap, but this is what is currently happening in our editorial office: we are cleaning out our paper archive because our cross-media editors are going to work in our archive space. Folders filled with foxed clippings and volumes of newspapers are going out. Editors who will experiment with new digital forms of storytelling will take their place. (Remarque, translated from Dutch).

This former archive space now houses the experimental cross media department Kijk Verder (which translates as: Look Further). The department has its own website8_{, but}

their productions are referenced in the daily newspaper and distributed throughout the newspaper’s website and social media. The output is vast and varied: one quick glance at their website reveals a series of daily explainer videos, a quiz about Nazi inventions accompanying a newspaper article, and several scroll-through stories such as one about the Somali diaspora, that combines text with data, photos, audio and video fragments. The website has a free form without any fixed headings, which emphasizes their experimental nature and lack of standardized formats.

In this case study I will investigate the organizational structure and working methods of De Volkskrant Kijk Verder, to find out how this legacy newspaper navigates the digital landscape. I will focus on how they experiment with form, how this relates to the content and how these experiments are embedded in the organization at large. My findings will be based on an hour-long interview conducted with newsroom developer Hay Kranen, as well as several articles and interviews about De Volkskrant’s cross-media strategy and object analyses of several of their productions.

As a legacy newspaper, De Volkskrant already has a rich history in experimenting with different multimedia strategies. In 1996 they launched their newspaper’s website. Ten years later, in 2006, editor in chief Pieter Broertjes decided to reorganize the

predominantly print newsroom into a cross-media newsroom. In her research into the convergence of Dutch media, Klaske Tameling points out that De Volkskrant did not use this opportunity to cut costs by doing more with fewer journalists, as was common at news organizations at the time (2012). Instead, the move was made because Broertjes believed that, in order to maintain De Volkskrant’s leading position in the Dutch media landscape, they would need to gain a strong digital presence. Along with the

reorganization of the newsroom, the editor and the newspaper’s then publisher PCM expressed ambitions to launch television, radio, web magazines and mobile devices.

However, in practice the print newspaper remained the main source of revenue for the newspaper, and most journalists working at the newspaper continued to focus on print, considering the online platform an afterthought. Several endeavors to launch additional online media were deemed unsuccessful, as the efforts and investments expended on the new platforms were not reflected in audience figures and advertising revenue (Tameling and Broers 2012). When De Volkskrant was hit by the crisis in 2008, further investments in multimedia projects were deemed unfeasible, and the newspaper’s cross-media

ambitions diminished (ibid.: 24). In 2009 the newspaper was bought by publishing house De Persgroep, who decided to focus on the preservation and improvement of the print newspaper. In 2011, the online journalists were moved from the main newsroom in Amsterdam to a digital desk in Rotterdam, where they became part of a shared digital newsroom, together with the other Dutch newspapers owned by De Persgroep: Trouw, Algemeen Dagblad and interestingly, local Amsterdam newspaper Het Parool. Here, ten relatively inexperienced journalists were mainly concerned with the aggregation of newswires and newspaper articles, working for all four newspapers in tandem (ibid.: 26). The focus was on quantity over quality: every weekday the online journalists were expected to produce 200 articles, on weekends 100 a day. The experiment was relatively short lived: by the end of the year De Persgroep announced that the digital desks would return to the main newsroom in Amsterdam (Brandenburg-Van de Ven 2011).

Back in Amsterdam, innovation in digital content comes from an unexpected source: the opinion pages. Head of the weekly commentary section Kustaw Bessems encouraged his team to start experimenting with digital productions that were complementary to the printed newspaper pieces. “People could be doing anything on a Saturday morning. So how do you make them read that difficult piece about the EU first? That is what we