Convergence 2.0: Factors in the ‘Russian Spring’ for Modelling Journalism and Democracy

Prof Sarah Oates University of Glasgow

Political Journalism in Transition Workshop Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

University of Oxford/8 March 2012

‘The Kremlin’s Not Laughing Now’ (NYT 25 Feb 2012) …

!   How did Russia move from virtually no evidence of the effect of the online sphere on politics to street demonstrations linked to online actors/aggregation in December 2011-March 2012?

!   Is this just Russian politics or can we discern a pattern that is useful for developing a predictive model of the role of the internet in non-free states?

‘Produsage’ (Bruns)

!   Content ownership

!   Trust

!   Economic model

Are you ‘harvesting the hive’ or ‘harbouring the hive?’ Bruns, Alex. 2010. From Reader to Writer: Citizen Journalism as News Produsage. In Jeremy Hunsinger et al. (eds) International Handbook of Internet Research. Amsterdam: Springer Netherlands, pages 119-133.

Rejecting the idea of produsage …

!   … Instead ask how the online sphere changes journalism as we know it in a range of societies. In other words, how does the internet map on to the existing models of how journalists function? This is a subset of comparative media models, such as Siebert et al., Hallin and Mancini, etc.

Banned words?

!   Online journalism

!   Digital citizens

!   Virtual

!   ‘Produsage’?

!   Political journalism/political news

Journalism in the information age !   What is a journalist?: From information scarcity information

overload, shifting the burden on journalists from that of news creator to that of news aggregator.

!   Who is a journalist?: the convergence between news producers and news consumers via social-media, Twitter, blogs and other user-generated content platforms calls for a new understanding of the nature of what it means to be a ‘journalist’ When the role of the news producer is widened, it significantly challenges these rules and norms, leading to problems with ‘business as usual’ in the journalistic sphere. On the one hand, this can be liberating if it can create a new and broader public sphere, in which information is part of creating a more democratic society. On the other hand, it can lead to information chaos as the ability of professional journalists to articulate the public interest is lost in a sea of user-generated content with little meaningful engagement with key political issues.

The comparative view

!  Although convergence brings challenges to journalists in general, the specific challenges in different nations with varying media norms must also be understood.

Media levels of analysis

News Production Model

Top down or bottom up?

!   How does the internet offer significant changes to what journalists offer to the audience OR to what the audience demands?

!   How do changes from the journalist/audience demands interact?

!   How is journalism challenged or augmented in a range of states?

Berkman Center for Internet & Society

“We find the emergence of a vibrant and diverse networked public sphere that constitutes an independent alternative to the more tightly controlled offline media and political space, as well as the growing use of digital platforms in social mobilization and civic action. Despite various indirect efforts to shape cyberspace into an environment that is friendlier to the government, we find that the Russian internet remains generally open and free, although the current degree of Internet freedom is in no way a prediction of the future of this contested space.”

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/publications/2012/exploring_russian_cyberspace

Factors in ‘Russian Spring’ !   Diversity of online information, with mismatch between

non-free traditional media and relative diversity on line (as in Egypt)

+ !   Explosion of internet growth

+ !   One nation, two audiences (older for TV, younger for

internet)

= CREATION of credibility gap AT THE SAME TIME as it creates a public sphere

More exacerbating factors …

! Catalysing event: election falsification:

http://www.kartanarusheniy.org/ (as above)

!   Lack of effective online media management by oligarchy

!   Difficulty of media management with speed and unpredictability of the ‘hive’

!   The rise of (delegative) democracy – Hale in Europe-Asia Studies … ‘It’s democracy but not as we know it, Jim’

Is this a pattern that inform/predict what may happen in other countries? John Lloyd mentions ‘populism’ – is this relevant to Russia?

Leader reaction

!   @MedvedevRussia: "It has become clear that if a person writes the expression 'party of thieves and crooks' in their blog then they are a stupid sheep getting f***** in the mouth :)” [Tweet reported, now removed]

!   Putin on TV call-in show: election protesters white ribbons "look like contraceptives, [it’s] like they are fighting Aids”

!   For example, in Russia, it would appear to change how citizens perceive their rights to information and agency. But will that change journalism?

!   The online sphere: source for journalists, challenge for journalists, tool for journalists, source for citizens, tool for citizens (Rasmus’ question)

!   In Russia, the eventual outcome of online communication has been to challenge news frames, agendas and who is able to appear on the main nightly news from December 2011 forward.

!   This brings us back to the idea of convergence, but convergence will occur in very different systems (news production, content and audience) and this gets lost a bit in thinking comparatively

Russia

!   Content: great richness of content, with a focus on Russia and Russian issues (as opposed to engagement with global ideals/trends/news). Evidence of this from weblink analysis/richness of Russian blogosphere. Unique information and challenge presented on line, i.e. through Alexander Navalny’s wiki on corruption and reports on vote falsification

!   Audience: switch from attention to TV to attention to the internet in younger generation, decline of dominance of state TV: new public sphere?

!   Content/journalism: Change in agenda and framing on state TV

Funding

!   U.K Economic and Social Research Council, The Internet and Everyday Rights in Russia, RES-000-22-4159.

!   British Academy, International Potential, National Limits: Investigating the Role of the Russian Internet in Constraining the Social Agenda.