9

CONCLUSION
Considering the journalistic field anew
All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

To look beyond the core imagination of the journalistic field and to consider
interlopers emerging from the periphery is to engage with the way journalism has
evolved in modern societies as something socially anticipated – I know it when
I see it – and something socially constructed, where certain dominant narratives
of journalism have reinforced an idea of what journalism is, or at least what it
should be. It is also to explore where that dominant vision has been challenged
by new actors working online, and where the extant field’s claims of primacy
have been usurped as new actors show a particular agility gathering, verifying,
and communicating information. To return to the questions posed at the outset:
when we look at Gawker, WikiLeaks, Glenn Greenwald, bloggers, or any number
of actors explored here, are we seeing journalism? The answer, perhaps unsatis-
factorily, lands where we started: ‘it depends on what you mean by journalism’.
However, in the pages between there and here I have endeavoured to show that
through conceptualizing journalism as a field of shared conceits, tuned towards
shared expectations, we can find journalism in the work of interlopers and see the
field as vast and complex.
In closing out this effort, I will reflect here on what developing broader pictures
of the field can tell us about journalism, and what makes interlopers and interloper
media difficult to contend with. The interloper media concept has been employed
to capture a range of troublesome actors who embrace a would-be heretical and
subversive vision of the field. At least, they are subversive and heretical if we imag-
ine journalism narrowly, and if you think of journalism constrained to and defined
by those at the field’s core. In that case, interlopers and their work fall outside.
But if you think of journalism more broadly, and imagine it complexly, and take
into consideration the avenues available online for new actors to match journal-
Copyright 2017. Routledge.

istic roles and expectations, then the field is a dynamic space with a range of new
approaches to meet journalistic ends.

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AN: 1554172 ; Scott A. Eldridge II.; Online Journalism From the Periphery : Interloper Media and the Journalistic Field
Account: s8993066.main.ehost
 180 Conclusion

Beyond dominant narratives

This book set out in its pages an approach to reconsider the field and make sense
of journalism in a digital age by building a discussion of how the journalistic field
took shape, and how it consolidated around ideas held by social actors, which soci-
eties generally acknowledged. This gave structure to the importance and role of
journalism as a social force, and also helped identify where a reticence to consider
alternative visions has emerged. This reticence is due in part to a history where
few made claims to belong (Waisbord 2013), and in part because given the choice
between innovation and conservatism, the journalistic field has tended towards the
latter (Bourdieu 2005). The approach taken through this study, its impetus, was
to understand where new actors have posed ardent challenges to a bounded idea
of journalism built around too-narrow dimensions of the field – interlopers also
see their work as journalism, and often as a better version of it. At the same time,
interlopers look to the centre of the field for representations of what it means to
belong to a shared idea of journalism, and see journalistic recognition as an entic-
ing possibility precisely because societies have a shared sense of confidence that we
know what journalism is. They may be outsiders looking critically inwards, but
on some level they are looking in with anticipation and seeking recognition and
identifying their work as important: also a check on those in power, also adding
value, and also exposing information to publics in their interest.
And so, I argue, we can best understand this field in society by looking at both
its centre, and its periphery.
But to do so I have also set a challenging proposition within a research agenda
that insists on paying attention to social actors who are problematic, sometimes
deeply, and who are fundamentally antagonistic towards established notions of
journalism. Vainglorious actors from Assange to Drudge, disruptive media outlets
from Gawker to Breitbart – they all exist in a fractured and complex digital media
environment where many actors can gather, verify, and share communication pub-
licly, but do so differently. The discussions in this book suggest the field is less
a consolidated profession, and more a miasma of competing approaches towards
journalistic ends. Where the doxa may have traditionally reinforced orthodoxy, the
subversion of interlopers has seen heterodoxical visions of journalism made salient,
and the heretic no longer seems quite so blasphemous.
From this, we can be encouraged to explore societies’ complexities as part of
the field’s tensions, and within this discussion I see an opportunity to consider
journalism as vast, rather than finite, and widely differentiated, rather than mono-
lithic. The approaches in the previous chapter set out a conceptual framework
towards taking these reconsiderations forward in research, allowing for more
nuanced understandings of journalism and the ways we consider belonging and
non-belonging to the field. The effort here should be considered a starting point
in that research agenda, rather than a settled conclusion.
Writing about the journalistic field, Bourdieu spoke of dominance and the
weight of certain actors to set the dimensions of the field, parameters that others

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 Conclusion  181

then attuned themselves towards to also demonstrate belonging (Bourdieu 2005);

yet journalistic belonging is nowadays negotiable, and the composition of the field
more fractured. Where field theory has taken scholarship in journalism studies far
(and it has), the endeavour here took that foundation to build new ways of joining
field theory with digital journalism studies in the context of digital spaces, and in
consideration of digital actors. To return to Saki’s allegory The Interlopers, we can
see journalistic interlopers as “the dispossessed party [who] never acquiesced in the
judgment of the Courts” and their assault on the boundaries of the field as “a long
series of poaching affrays and similar scandals [that have] embittered the relation-
ships between the families” (Saki 1969).
Semi-autonomous in nature, loosely defined in practice, the journalistic field is
shaped by such contestations over what it is to belong to the field, and according to
whose judgements (Bourdieu 2005). Contests over what it is to be a ‘journalist’ and
do ‘journalism’, and how such determinations are made, are not straightforward.
As a snapshot of an increasingly polarized world, the debates in this book show
this is complicated by societies torn between liberalism and populism, between left
and right politics, between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, and even between
notions of truth and facticity that are now up for negotiation. But analysis can
embrace this ‘messiness’ as the macrocosm of society, within which the journal-
istic field is but one reflective microcosm (Benson 2006). Margaret Sullivan, then
public editor at the New York Times, wrote in 2013 an admonishment of her own
newspaper’s downplaying the journalistic work of Glenn Greenwald. In what has
come to be seen as a defense of bloggers and blogging-as-journalism, Sullivan offers
what she describes as a partial definition of what it is to be a journalist:

A real journalist is one who understands, at a cellular level, and doesn’t shy
away from, the adversarial relationship between government and press – the
very tension that America’s founders had in mind with the First Amendment.
Those who fully meet that description deserve to be respected and
protected – not marginalized.
(Sullivan 2013)

Journalism, even when we don’t like it

This brings me to an important consideration within the work of this book,
which is the polarized nature of debates about journalism including within the
academy. This seems to be the case not only of news content within our mediated
world (and all the more apparent online), but also of the in/out constructions of
the journalistic field, which treats ‘being a journalist’ as a permanent condition.
We find this within research as well, where narratives of normativity and demo-
cratic imperatives operate as de facto definers of journalism, conflating its practices,
products, and professionals (Eldridge and Steel 2016; Steel 2017). Matt Carlson
(2017) points to this as a product of proximity – we, as scholars, look to jour-
nalism for all sorts of reasons, including an affinity for excellent journalism, and

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 182 Conclusion

often appreciate journalism most when at its best. This can bring into research a
predisposition for seeking journalism’s own best self, and preempting conclusions
about those who do not reflect this ideal picture.
These dynamics were evident as this conclusion took shape, when Julian
Assange offered a critique of Clinton, set up against a pseudo-endorsement of
Trump, in an interview where he also praised Russia’s press diversity and freedom
(Jacobs 2016). In responses seen across Twitter and Facebook and a range of other
outlets the response was ‘does anyone take this guy seriously?’ with one colleague
referring to Assange ‘jumping the shark’ with his praise of Russia. In many cases,
there was also an expression of disappointment in a societal actor who a few years
ago was being defended for his work exposing government corruption, military
activities, and other types of malfeasance.
I would echo such disappointment. It often seems that as an individual, Assange
presents more contradiction than constancy with his positions, both politically
and with regard to journalism. Within this disappointment, however, I also find
instigation for understanding what is going on in an increasingly fractured media
world, and insist we try to understand things that we also do not like, especially
those that at times fit our notions of a changing journalistic field when at other
times they do not. Analytical frameworks that assess journalism undergoing change
need to take this into account as well, lest we continue to lean heavily on tradi-
tional and narrow interpretations of the field. In other words, I have tried in this
book to explore the journalistic identity claims and the journalistic performances of
new actors who struggle in many ways to fit our notions of what journalism is, or
what it might become – if we accept that they commit to ‘playing the same game’
as the rest of the field, then we can unpack how well they play.
There is a narrative as well where even to consider whether or not a problematic
‘other’ such as WikiLeaks or Breitbart is journalism is in and of itself a problematic
act, though hopefully within these pages it has been clear that making sense of new
forms of journalistic work is no less an endorsement of their discrete activities than
exploring tabloid culture is an endorsement of phone hacking, but for each they
are key to our understanding of journalism in Western societies (Eldridge 2014). As
Muhammad Idrees writes in his review of Pankaj Mishra’s Age of Anger, this comes
with asking questions of an equally messy Western society, and he cautions against
presuming “a West with a monolithic culture and coherent values [. . .] Western
culture is varied, with room enough for both the Tea Party and MoveOn; its values
can accommodate both Anders Breivik and Jon Stewart” (Idrees 2017). Overlapping
and contrarian dynamics, from filter bubbles to fake news, have an impact on these
dichotomies in our societies, and journalism is not insulated from this, as:

[M]ore than insane conspiracy theories about child sex rings operating out of
the backs of Washington DC pizza shops, the biggest media story to emerge
from the 2016 election was the degree to which far-right media were able to
set the narrative agenda for mainstream media outlets.
(Phillips et al. 2017)

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 Conclusion  183

Towards a new research agenda

We have seen incredible change at a rapid pace over the past 20-plus years as
digital media have become more commonplace. Technologies have enabled both
traditional and digitally native news outlets to communicate with publics online,
and the affordances of a robust and relatively accessible internet have opened
up a dynamic space for media and in particular news media to operate within.
While enabling a dynamism that has been, in many ways, unprecedented, we have
also seen previously stable notions of journalism confronted by newer and newer
forms of communication that take advantage of unique ways of gathering and
then communicating news and information to the public.
Of course, saying so is nothing new – even the most superficial of searches
would send one down a rabbit hole of innovative approaches to making sense
of these changes (Boczkowski 2004; Eldridge and Franklin 2017; Franklin and
Eldridge 2017; Witschge et al. 2016).
What has not developed steadily at pace with our witnessing of digital change
and our endeavour to make sense of it are the ways in which we conceptualize
the journalistic field. This includes gaps in determining how (and whether) new
types of digital actors who see themselves as contributing to journalism’s societal
endeavour can also fit within understandings of the journalistic field. To the extent
we know there is something new to be understood (and we do, and saying so is not
groundbreaking), I have outlined here how unique digital newcomers have run
up against their more traditional predecessors, and are dismissed for contradicting
a vision of journalism that (I critique) projects a particular, narrow, centrepoint of
the field. In many ways, this is a dynamic inherent for fields, which securitize their
place in society by smoothing over differences, uniting around dominant narratives
of belonging, even where unity appears contrived (Bourdieu 2005: 42). However,
considering the dynamism of the digital era, the coherence of this vision has fal-
tered and cracks in its homogeneous narrative have shown the field as susceptible
to new forms of journalistic endeavour, and new claimants of journalistic identity.
For Bourdieu, fields are relational and patterns of communication reflect
journalists’ efforts to maintain standing among fields of power, and enable the con-
version of cultural capital that journalists possess into economic capital. Overall, it
is a way to demonstrate primacy over information as news that makes journalism
viable, and valued. The narrative goes that as this cultural capital allowed journalists
to develop and maintain dominant visions not only of society, but also of the field,
reinforcing dominant narratives of what journalism ‘is’ externally to a public, it has
made their work notable and noble. Internally among its members, committing
cultural capital towards the cultural products of news allows news organizations to
build economic capital and reinforce meaningfulness to the belonging to a discrete
set of actors – an exclusive field.
From this perspective, interlopers are a threat – they propose a more diffuse
field, and a more varied imagination of what contributes to journalism’s societal
roles. They also present news and information in ways that disrupt the viability

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 184 Conclusion

of the conversion of capital from cultural to economic (Benson 2006: 189). This
watering down of traditional journalism’s primacy expands a further crack in the
boundaries of the journalistic field. Within this particular dynamic – the relation-
ship between information authority, cultural capital, and economic capital – we
can certainly see how a lack of singular authority over functions of gathering,
producing, and sharing information embedded in the ‘scarcity’ of those able and
willing to perform these functions that defined journalism previously. The work
here has explored the way narratives of authority to reinforce journalistic cultural
capital are still present, even where demonstrations of the societal value and func-
tions of journalism are no longer unique to the traditional members of the field.
Herein lies the rub. When considering their antagonistic entrée into our collective
consciousness, frequently attacking the ‘mainstream media’, it might seem para-
doxical to see the rise of a non-traditional media as part of a field, alongside actors
they also critique and who criticize them in turn. Bloggers may not see themselves
as “fleas on the dog” of old-school media (Carr 2008), but neither do they see
themselves as the same as traditional media actors, embedding in their content
frequent criticism of traditional media for failing to live up to journalistic ideals.
Interloper media, as a term, represents a pushback against an idea that ‘journal-
ism’ rests solely with the traditional media field, and interlopers express consistently
that journalistic roles can be performed with attitudes towards information that
fall outside the idealized portrait of journalism painted by journalistic actors. New
actors reject that theirs is a ‘lesser’ form of fact-based news, and instead present
their media work as an alternative source of information that foregrounds a jour-
nalistic understanding of their work: Gawker’s commitment to honesty and calling
‘bullshit’ where necessary, WikiLeaks’ ‘open model’ of journalism, Eschaton’s
interwoven narrative with its public. Implicit in expressions of belonging, along-
side explicit critiques of the journalistic core, interlopers understand their work as
journalism, and seek due recognition.
They do so because they see, at the core, a pattern of journalistic complacency
at least and failures at worst. The dynamics described by Gans (1980) and Manning
(2001), where information becoming news was sometimes subject to the whims
of reporters and editors on duty, were only made worse with the unpacking of
‘churnalism’. As Lewis et  al. (2008) explore, and as Nick Davies (2008) made
popular, the routinization of journalists repurposing public relation materials, and
the closeness between traditional journalists and those in power (Steel 2013) has
been a motivating factor in the rise of interloping actors. That they saw failures of
journalistic ideals in the media purporting to serve the public, but instead sidling
up to those in power, only inflamed this motivation.
This has made apparent contradictions in the way boundaries around the field
form and the consistency with which admonition is demonstrated; ‘failing’ at the
field’s core is treated as the work of a few bad apples, whereas failures on the
periphery spoil the bunch (Cecil 2002). The New York Post, wrong in its labe-
ling of ‘BAG MEN!’, nevertheless carries on as a newspaper and indeed enjoys
recognition as a journalistic organization (it is often seen as lousy journalism, but

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 Conclusion  185

journalism nonetheless). The Guardian is no less admired for challenging those

in power (admiration it has earned) just because of dalliances with sensationalism
reporting on gossipy news in the Sony emails. Yet when interlopers falter, their
journalistic claims are invalidated in total. The dynamic, in short, is that within
the recognized core of the field, faults and failings can be repaired whereas on the
periphery they are cause for exclusion (Eldridge 2014).
For asking whether our ideas about journalism can contend with an antagonistic
WikiLeaks, or a sometimes responsible (sometimes-not) Gawker, we should bear
this dynamic in mind and reflect on what cracks in the field’s own narrative tell us –
from the reporting of Seymour Hersch, who in the London Review of Books wrote
a roundly debunked account of chemical weapons use in Syria (Idrees 2014), to
Jayson Blair who bluffed his way through the pages of the New York Times (Fengler
2003). We can also consider the News of the World, whose hacking of phones and
invasions of privacy led to its shuttering and a series of court cases (Keeble and
Mair 2012). For the sake of argument, should Hersch’s LRB failings discount his
disclosures of the My Lai massacre in 1969, or of U.S. military abuses at the Abu
Ghraib prison in in 2004? Should it compel us to reject all writing in the LRB as
flawed? Most would say ‘no’, in the same way many continue to go to the New
York Times, despite its lapses in editorial oversight with Blair. Furthermore, tabloids
like News of the World themselves face derision in many circles, but we continue to
count their popular approach as a certain type of journalistic form (Bingham and
Conboy 2015). We can extend such examples to castigate, yet return to consulting,
the New York Times despite the failures leading up to the Iraq War in 2003 with
Judith Miller (Carlson 2013), the BBC despite the dodgy dossier in its coverage of
the second Iraq War (Bicket and Wall 2007), a whole range of newspapers’ whose
rabid coverage of Princess Diana’s personal life led to critique (Bishop 1999).
More often than not, when failings occur at journalism’s core, the traditional
centrepoint of journalism is reinforced and distinctions are made between ‘bad,
but still journalism’ as opposed to ‘not journalism’. This is not to say failure at the
core of the field is left unnoticed – plagiarists are openly chastised, lackadaisical
journalists reminded of the standards expected of them, and ‘quality’ journal-
ism distinguished from ‘tabloids’ to shame the latter’s focus on sensationalism
(Eldridge 2014), all done in ways meant to be seen (Bishop 1999: 91). From
the Hutchins Commission to the Leveson Inquiry, the scale of response to the
field’s ‘problems’ vary, but they tend towards repairing and making amends (The
Commission on Freedom of the Press 1947; Steel 2013). In contrast, flaws among
the digital prompt boundaries being drawn between traditional ‘journalism’ and a
digital ‘other’ portrayed as inappropriately claiming status among the journalistic
field. Sometimes that othering is necessary, and sometimes accurate when it helps
identify where claims of journalistic belonging are little more than a façade, but at
other times they emerge as exercises of power to preserve one set of actors and their
views of journalism, at the expense of the others. For all the dismissal of Assange
as an (un)willing Russian patsy, news organizations seized on and reported out the
content WikiLeaks published (Eldridge 2016; Lipton et al. 2016). At a minimum,

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 186 Conclusion

this weakens the distinctions journalists seem eager to draw between their vision of
journalism and the vision Assange espouses, and brings into focus a concept of ‘jour-
nalistic realization’; in any case it certainly complicates perceptions that WikiLeaks’
activities are anything but journalism.

Revisiting journalistic power: why such resistance to change?

This has never been a zero-sum game. Journalists at the core of the field set a par-
ticular vision of journalism against interlopers in part because this consolidates their
traditional power, and enables the products of journalism to secure economic capital
(Benson 2006). In these dynamics, the inherent tension between ‘opening up’ and
‘closing down’ the field’s boundaries on one level reflects a reticence to giving up
some of the field’s authority, which allowed the field to consolidate an idea of jour-
nalism that was meaningful in society (S.C. Lewis 2012). To explore broadening the
journalistic field and interrogating its boundaries is also to engage with a complex set
of problems without a clear end point. If you embrace new actors as introducing new
forms of journalism whenever they publish information through digital and social
media, then the range of journalistic actors would be insurmountably vast and in that
vastness, the cultural and symbolic capital of being a journalist becomes bankrupt.
When Donsbach (2010) describes a balance between journalistic identity
(a constructed sense of belonging) and external recognition (a public expectation
of journalism’s practices and products) at the foundation of journalism’s profes-
sional identity, he highlights this at the root of its definitional crises as an idea of
journalism situated in a uniquely vast chasm between a shared social ideal of jour-
nalism as a necessary force in society, and our ability to define journalism with any
specificity. This problematic still holds weight. As a key set of actors in society, and
for the society-building function of news (Anderson 1991; Berger and Luckmann
1966), journalists have long carried with their activities and conveyed through their
products social meaning and an ability to create and reinforce, through ritual and
narrative, a concept of the societies within which they operate. Bourdieu (2005)
refers to this as presenting a ‘dominant vision’ of society back on itself, Hanno Hardt
(1979) see journalism as holding up a ‘mirror’ to society, and Benedict Anderson
(1991) sees a role in shaping the ‘imagined communities’ of nations.
We can extend this shaping to other imagined publics, including publics of
peer journalists, (Conboy and Eldridge 2018 forthcoming). While there has never
really been ‘a public’ or ‘the public’ for journalism’s appeal (Dahlgren 2014), the
obviousness with which we can find many publics in a digital environ has made
this consideration pressing (Dahlgren 2005, 2014; cf. Fraser 1990). It is within that
context that I return to challenges identified in this conceptual project and the
discussions within, specifically when actors demonstrate elements of journalism –
or adopt its lexica – to speak to specific publics, fractured along politically partisan
(Eschaton, Breitbart) or ideological lines (WikiLeaks, the Intercept), catering to
communities of like-minded observers (Gawker), or along other points of division
(reddit, Anonymous).

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 Conclusion  187

Conclusion: a personal coda

While finishing this book I returned regularly to the front pages of some of the
most prominent news sites, as well as various social media feeds, to gauge reactions
to WikiLeaks, Assange, and Greenwald, and in the wake of a caustic, highly medi-
ated election season, exploring as well digital subcultures who placed themselves
in the middle of the discussions of Trump and journalism, and for that matter
the breadth of discussions in this book. What I found on legacy news sites was a
broad recognition that Russia was behind the DNC and Podesta hacks, corralling
Assange and Greenwald with Trump and Vladimir Putin in ways that marginal-
ized all of their journalistic work, and dismissed their skepticism about Russia’s
interventions in the US election as obsequiousness. Meanwhile, on social media I
saw as divided a set of voices, dismissing or accepting hacking claims and excoriat-
ing or taking on board the arguments of Assange, Greenwald, and even Breitbart
where my paths crossed with its audiences. As Washington Post reporters David
Weigel and Joby Warrick write of the strange reality that now sees bedfellows of
WikiLeaks and U.S. conservatives, where WikiLeaks’ releases propelled Trump:
“Assange has inspired both admiration and hatred – sometimes by the same
individuals – since his anti-secrecy organization first made global headlines in
2010” (Weigel and Warrick 2017).
My point here is on one level a casual observation, and on the other a caution-
ary reminder for scholarship in journalism studies and digital journalism studies:
When we look to explore change, and the ways in which new actors communi-
cating news and information are unencumbered to do so in Western democratic
societies, we need to take into consideration both the ideal visions of what that
might mean for a journalism we are comfortable with, as well as the messiness they
represent when that vision of journalism is uncomfortable. For understanding a
dynamic journalistic field before us, we need stronger bases for identifying what
makes something journalism before we can decide if something is good journalism,
or bad, and our starting point cannot be whether it is admirable and fitting within
idealized portraits of the field.
There are still problems with making sense of new actors – how do we
address authenticity when news emerges in various forms, and where do we
locate accountability when journalists move in and out of these identities?
What do we make of journalistic agency when news is presented simultane-
ously in many places, or shared among many actors? How do we avoid false
equivalence in research, as surely some ‘crimes against journalism’ are greater
than others? These are challenges for scholars, but to address them I argue we
are better served by first understanding those actors who assert they are ‘playing
the same game’ as the journalistic field, so we can more persuasively and compre-
hensively understand how this has emerged in society. By outlining this approach
through analysis of some of the more challenging and provocative cases, I have
tried here to set out an initial set of conceptual frameworks for this endeavour. It
is an agenda that poses challenges, as within interlopers’ work normalcy is confronted

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 188 Conclusion

and normative dimensions of journalism are up for negotiation. They are con-
founding for being adversarial, and outspoken, and adopting technological
approaches both to information gathering and sharing that resist easy categori-
zation, but nevertheless contribute to our social worlds. Their faults at achieving
journalistic ends pose a further challenge. But then, this has been a challenge for
making sense of many actors and many news outlets, for many years.
For all the problems they pose, I like that we have interlopers. I am appreciative
of Assange’s willingness to reveal information secreted away by those in power,
and he does so with a fervour that could, in an ideal world, be embraced by a
broader set of journalists in committing themselves to public affairs reporting. I am
as appreciative that Gawker’s better nature lives on in the sites that have remained
after Univision bought Gawker Media, now Gizmodo Media Group, and still
regularly check these for political and cultural reporting. Greenwald continues to
confound, but the site he leads demonstrates an unwavering approach to watchdog
journalism, and with his colleagues Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras they have
carved an important role for themselves as arbiters of information at the Intercept.
Eschaton, still as straightforward as it was in 2002, presents a necessary voice for
a specific public, and while less narrative and more aggressive in its political and
metajournalistic commentary, ‘Atrios’ demonstrates where a long-running seriali-
zation of news and commentary can add structure to our social worlds. I appreciate
as well how communities of publicly oriented actors assemble online, and whether
through fora like reddit or loose collectives like Anonymous, they bring different
forms of information to public attention – and do so in ways that reflect a dynamic
societal space. I could do without Breitbart, but would still rather an online media
space that reflects political interests – even unfortunate ones – so these can be better
seen, unpacked, and dealt with critically.
And for myself, I would have preferred Assange openly faced accusations of sex
crimes he faced in Sweden, and would prefer he adopt less of a victim narrative in
his work, as I think this would make his journalistic claims more approachable to
a wider audience. As a watchdog, he might then realize broader journalistic ends.
I would also prefer a Gawker that learned from its earlier mistakes, and found
from them a way to be both antagonistic and responsible in ways that tread more
cautiously around privacy. In the same light, I would also prefer legacy media and
traditional journalists open up to recognizing where new actors contribute journal-
ism to our worlds, rather than retrenching behind familiar boundaries that preserve
the journalistic field’s traditional core.
But then, that would be imagining a journalism we don’t have, rather than dealing
with the one we do.

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Berger, P. and Luckmann, T. (1966) The Social Construction of Reality. Harmondsworth:
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 Conclusion  189

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