Perhaps the case Sampson (2012) makes about contagion behaviour can be used to articulate the approach of this study toward the textual analysis of a television news story over periods of technological change. Sampson (2012) utilizes the argument of biologist Gabriel Dover to stipulate that the product of the gene is not necessarily designed by a master evolutionary mechanism; it is more likely shaped by a ‘programless search space.’
‘It is the interaction that evolves, not the gene (Sampson, 2012: 78).’ Although the use of his argument may not directly apply, as his study involves social interaction of a different variety and scale, the reason for the textual analysis of this study is to examine the ‘gene’
of the interaction, or in this case the act of journalism, to determine if the gene is changed by the evolutionary applications of technology. Therefore, the purpose of the textual analysis is to establish whether the evolutionary changes in producing television news directly affects the consistency of final product. In this context, it is important to understand the interactions taking place that may be affecting the product, therefore ethnographic study and the qualitative interviews will demonstrate the process from which the text is created. Just as important, the study of the construction of the news package, as the ‘gene’ of television journalism is examined through the textual analysis.
The unit of analysis for this research is the individual news story constructed by traditional and converged journalists during the ethnographic study. The texts of the individual stories were examined as a self-sustained, freestanding work of journalism.
The story was analysed individually and compared to other stories using variables of the characteristics of a television news story. Those characteristics are length, elements (edits), and structure. Other characteristics such as genre were used to measure the validity of equivalent sampling. Most content analysis studies tend to confine themselves to the analysis of one or two types of medium (Chapman, 1986) and Troyna (1981).
Ericson (1991) sampled three types of mediums. I sampled one type of medium, television, created with four types of technology.
Textual analysis was helpful in addressing the basic assumptions that the change in the news structure would impact the output. Hemmingway (2005) did not conduct a textual analysis of the work completed by ‘PDP operators’. This study aimed to bring to light the work of journalists and compare the outputs (the news story) based on similar inputs (the assignment). If a traditional crew and a converged crew were assigned a similar story, what was the eventual output generated? By textual analysis, a measure of productiveness of the storytelling could be determined if both stories appeared to be of a similar topic or genre. If the stories were dissimilar in structure and in context, the observational studies might shed light on why the stories were created differently.
The textual analysis was intended to focus on genre, construction and structural elements.
Genre is dictated by type of story. Construction elements are raw materials gathered by
the news production model. The elements can be defined as voice-over, sound bites, and piece to camera, and can be measured by length, frequency, and structural arrangement.
The purpose of doing so is for comparative studies between the different forms of production as well as comparing the impact of technology upon the unit of study (the news package).
Huang et al. (2004) asked whether the quality of professional activities such as writing and photography would suffer from multi-tasking. It seems one of the central issues of convergence is ‘quality’. It is hard to define and is subjective to the observer (Huang et al, 2004: 78). From that stance, as an observer, I pursued the list of activities as paradigms. Each paradigm was isolated and judged by its own standards. Each paradigm was placed within the framework separately and discussed accordingly.
To verify the components of local television news stories, 400 stories from WKYC-TV’s archives were examined in terms of construction patterns, size and frequency of elements.
The news stories were retrieved from the WKYC-TV tape archives. The tape archive consisted of daily television news stories from 1975-2010. Included with each archive tape was a logbook, which gave a date and title of the story. One hundred stories from each decade were collected and compared. Twenty-five MMJ ‘news packages’ were also analysed and compared to the traditional stories created at the same news organization.
Because the logbook only included date and story title, the stories could not be chosen without visual inspection. Using matched random sampling, stories were chosen
randomly by year and the tape was played until the story was determined to be a
‘package’. A ‘package’ is a self-contained story, with voice-over narration from a written script. Frequently on the archive tapes, many ‘VOs’ were archived. A ‘VO’ was strictly images with natural sound. A news presenter would use the video in correlation to a story read on a set or during a live remote. Many ‘VO/SOTs’ were also archived. A
‘VO/SOT’ is similar to a ‘VO’ because a presenter would provide the narrative over separately in a studio or at a live remote location. A ‘news package’ records voice-over and uses the voice-voice-over as an integral element in the construction of the news story.
The ‘news package’ describes the work produced by a traditional news crew as well as the MMJ. Any television news story in the archive without voice-over narration recorded on the tape was rejected. The criteria did not go any further. It was not necessary for the story to have a ‘piece to camera’ or ‘stand-up’ to qualify but did not need to have ‘sound-bites’ or interviews. The story had to be self-contained, with a narrative voice track.
Only one news story was chosen from a single archive tape. Each archive tape represented an average of two weeks of news stories.
After applying matched random sampling to choose the stories, I tested various key elements when viewing sample stories from various decades. From the tests, I constructed a list of variables present in all news ‘packages’7. Sampling error may have occurred because of biased parameters, in that the context of each ‘package’ was unknown. There was no definable way to know how each ‘package’ was ultimately presented or used by the news station. There was no way to determine how many
7 Keller, T & Hawkins, S (2002); Television news: a handbook for writing, reporting, shooting and editing, pg 387, Holcomb, Hathaway, Scottsdale, Arizona.
individuals participated in the making of the package. The time of day the story aired might have had an impact on the length. It was difficult to assess the manner in which the stories were constructed or presented based on simple sampling.
Some of the unseen variables might have involved the use of live remote broadcasting.
Some of the stories in the analysis might have had a component of presenting in a live remote location, which might have replaced the ‘piece to camera’ or the ‘stand-up.’ To avoid speculation, an on-camera presentation by the reporter was not necessary in the selection process.
To compare the differences of four decades of television news stories of various technologies, random samples were taken from the archives of WKYC-TV. Four hundred news ‘packages’ in total were analysed. One hundred ‘packages’ from each decade were collected, from the film days of the 1970s, through the three-quarter inch video days of the 1980s, to the beta video of the 1990s, to the digital DV of the present decade. The most notable similarity between them all was the length of the story. There was also a fundamental structure, which has become more complex over the decades.
The textual analysis of the collected data gives a comprehensive picture of the elemental nature of a television news story. Like a DNA chain, the television news story has building blocks of a reoccurring nature. Under scrutiny it is possible to identify television news stories as linear chains. The chains are built by three elements: the voice-over, the sound bite, and the piece to camera (or standup). Imagery is used in
conjunction with these three elements. Each image consists of different lengths. The total size of the combined elements is restricted.
Accordingly, the analysis used a population of thirty thousand packages produced per decade. Applying a confidence level of 95 percent and a confidence interval of 9.78 (based on using 50 percent as the percentage), the sample size needed was determined to be one hundred.
A ‘news package’ consists of the VO (voice over)8, SB (sound bites) 9, SU (stand up)10 and TRT (the linear time of the ‘package’ from beginning to end) The tests reveal the VO, SB and SU are constructed in a pattern unique to the story; however, the TRTs of all the news stories were found to have a consistent average length. The elements VO, SB, and SU are arranged within the fixed structure of the TRT.
After the tests, a worksheet was constructed and random samples were collected. Twenty-five news stories from each decade ‒ the 70s, 80s, 90s, and 00s ‒ were analysed. After the first hundred stories were collected, the decades were compared and the results noted.
A second sampling of another twenty-five news stories per decade was completed, and this time the samples were taken from different tapes and different times of the year. A
8 Keller, T & Hawkins, S (2002); Television news: a handbook for writing, reporting, shooting and editing, pg 391, Holcomb, Hathaway, Scottsdale, Arizona.
9 Keller, T & Hawkins, S (2002); Television news: a handbook for writing, reporting, shooting and editing, pg 9, Holcomb, Hathaway, Scottsdale, Arizona.
10 Keller, T & Hawkins, S (2002); Television news: a handbook for writing, reporting, shooting and editing, pg 390, Holcomb, Hathaway, Scottsdale, Arizona.
third and fourth sampling was completed using the same methods. In total, four hundred stories were analysed and one hundred stories from each technological era were examined. In addition, the existing MMJ stories were collected and a sample of twenty-five was collected and analysed.
WKYC-TV’s tape archive begins in 1975, when the news organization used videotape for archiving and editing. Film was transferred to tape and edited on videotape. The crews consisted of a reporter, a camera operator, a soundman and the tape editor. At the time, the news organization was an NBC-owned and operated station. One hundred stories were chosen from the archive, based on the previously mentioned criteria.
The more recent decades of the 1990s and 2000s contained complete archives. It appeared as if all of the news packages from those decades were archived and were available. As more newscasts became a part of the daily production schedule, the more news packages were created. In the 1970s, there were fewer daily newscasts. There may have been one or two newscasts a day depending on the day of the week. In 2010, there were five daily newscasts produced at WKYC-TV. The amount of news packages per day significantly increased with the additional newscasts. It is hard to approximate the number of total news packages produced over the four decades. Based on the number of newscasts each day and the number of packages per newscast, it may be possible to approximate that during the 1970s through the 1980s, 1100 news packages were created each year. From the 1990s to the present day, it may be possible to approximate 2500
news packages were produced each year. From those approximations, a total of 66,500 news packages may have been created during the forty-year span at WKYC-TV.
3.5 Conclusion
This chapter outlined the various features of the research design and methodological framework that were the guide during the ethnographic fieldwork and later analysis. It was argued that the pilot study is an important part of the research. From the pilot study, the paradigms of the traditional news organizations were identified. Those paradigms were compared and contrasted to the other news organizations. Questions for the qualitative interviews were tested during the pilot study for relevance and importance. A semi-structured list of questions for further interviews was created from the pilot study interviews.
The type of participant observation used in this study to analyse journalists requires time, commitment and self-reflection, especially when the participant-observer adjusts his or her stance to the positions held by others in the field. It seems at times there was participation and sometimes observation (Cottle, 2007: 5). The relationships with the individuals in the study developed through time and effort. The anthropological approach can give important insights into the nature of news, its informing practices and its cultures. The act of participant observation is reflexive and open to the likelihoods of the field experience and is less bound to the linear execution of others studies (Bromley, 2001). The strength of this study may rest in the access and relationships developed via the participant observation.
The framework that is proposed in this chapter was a guide through the processes of analysis. The relationship between the organizational structure, the news environment and the process is an integral part of each stage of the methodology. The methodology approached the MMJ and the traditional television news crew as if it were an individual organism. From that perspective, the methodology was created. ‘The evolution of the individual production unit is accompanied by the improvement in the ability of the unit to perform according to contingencies in their environment (Terreberry, 1968; 612).’ The goal of this methodology was to measure the stage of evolution that was occurring and the response of the external environment. It seems the environment exerts the selective pressure. Under that hypothesis, the output of the production unit and subsequent textual analysis may indicate the impact of convergence upon the organisms of journalism.
Schelsinger (1978) provides a historical chapter (Scheslinger, 1978: 14-46), a chapter outlining basic news processing (ibid: 47-82), three newsroom-related themed chapters (ibid: 83-162), a chapter that widens its sights to the level of the corporation, (ibid: 163-204), a case study chapter (ibid: 205-243) and a conclusion (ibid: 244-272). Harrison (2000) examined terrestrial British television in a similar fashion to Scheslinger (1978).
In Harrison’s study, she outlined the public spheres and news genres (Harrison, 2000: 18-42) and found television news is a blending of separate genres influencing the presentation of news. Her goal was to avoid defining news with one simple definition, and she views news as a kaleidoscope model created by the overlapping of events, messages, entertainment, magazine programmes, education, information and current
affairs (Harrison, 2000: 35). She also includes chapters on the public interest and democracy (ibid: 43-61) where she associates the changes in news production practices with the decline of society and the emergence of a consumerist and post-Fordist society.
Further on, she examines the impact of deregulation and expanded markets upon news organization (ibid: 62-78). Like Schlesinger (1978), Harrison includes a study of the structure and practices of news (ibid: 79-107). The majority of her study examines the culture of the newsroom and the journalistic values of those who create the news products (ibid: 108-204). Ericson Baranek, and Chan adopt a more straightforward approach, with introductory, theoretical and methodological chapters on the news institution, the news process and a conclusion (Ericson, Baranek and Chan, 1987). Hemmingway (2008) presents her findings with historical perspectives, subjective perspectives of news practitioners, and her observations within the context of her Actor Network Theory. This study will be straightforward and will contain interview perspectives combined with my own interpretations (Hemmingway, 2008). As Simon Cottle (2000) described, we need a
‘second wave of news ethnographies’. The previous findings of other research need to be complemented with continued forms of analysis, highlighting the analytical frameworks of the past (Cottle, 2000: 19). Past studies have approached journalism in terms of
‘political-economy’, of ‘social organization of news’ or of ‘cultural practices’ (Schudson, 2002: 249-269). The three approaches should rather be seen as different moments or aspects of news production, approaches from different angles using different methodologies. ‘News is both a permanent social structure and a means of social reflexivity and contestation; a product as well as a productive process’ (Tuchman, 2002:
90).