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Online News: Public Sphere or Echo Chamber?

Moderator: Jason Spingarn-Koff
Pablo Boczkowski Joshua Benton: February 24, 2011; Running Time: 1:54:10

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

Two panelists debate whether journalism in a digital age amounts to feast or famine, and differ on even basic questions: Are people just snacking on the news equivalent of junk food, and starving for the kind of information they need to be informed citizens? Alternatively, doesn’t the abundance of information on the internet make possible a healthy media diet?

Pablo Boczkowski describes results from his ongoing research into changes in the nature of news supply and demand. He is interested in particular in the gap between stories news organizations deem important--international and national subjects--and the stories most people like, involving sports, crime, and entertainment. His studies look at online news sites, cable and broadcast TV, and newspapers in the U.S. and around the world, during normal times, and times of crisis or momentous events (elections, the global financial meltdown).

The bottom line: “People consider public affairs news anxiety-provoking, requiring a lot of cognitive effort,” and pay attention to serious topics primarily during momentous times, after which they return to their normal news diet, rarely clicking on or tuning into the kinds of stories journalists consider “page 1.” As a result, news publishers in all media, in an increasingly competitive environment, feel pressure to cater to consumer demand, says Boczkowski. There is a “growing tension in all newsrooms between the logic of their occupation and of the market,” which threatens to reduce public affairs coverage in many broad-based, traditional publications, leaving serious news to “niche sites.” This may lead, Boczkowski worries, to a “deepening of information inequality.”

Joshua Benton is more sanguine about the trends, noting that historically news organizations have never presented “a pure reflection of journalists’ judgments of the most important stories” on the front page, and that news consumers have long been accustomed to a mix of hard stories and lighter fare. Benton sees a larger “news universe” that defies a supply and demand metaphor, since “it’s hard to look at the internet and say there is a shortage in supply of anything.” The web, particularly social media, connects people to quality news and information, a quantifiable phenomenon seen in rising readership for publications that suffered in print-exclusive form, notably The Atlantic, and New York Review of Books.

Benton continues, asking provocatively whether it is “OK for people not to be informed about public affairs—how much does it matter? In the U.S., it is not clear “how important the element of mass is in mass media,” when so much public affairs writing is aimed at politicians and lobbyists, “who do the heavy lifting.” On the other hand, the web has made it possible for many more people to set the political agenda; “We live in a world where Gawker can take down a Congressman, Talking Points Memo can get an attorney general to resign, and Wikileaks can set the whole world talking.” Niche news sites collectively have clout, and may help fill a vacuum in Washington and world coverage. Says Benton, “In the end, there’s room for lots of different kinds of players.”

Lecture Details

Location: 3-270

“A combination of a far more competitive environment and massive technological changes, not only in distribution and promotion but in production and consumption over 15-20 years, have decoupled the marriage between being public institutions and businesses, forcing more and more news organizations to go niche or downstream.... In the same way immunologists look at the diet of a population over 20 years, and see a rise of disease in relation to the over-intake of salt, or processed foods, I think these changes over time are detrimental to the body politic of society.”

Pablo Boczkowski

About the Speakers

Moderator: Jason Spingarn-Koff

Documentary and feature film director and producer

Jason Spingarn-Koff is a filmmaker and journalist whose work has appeared on PBS (NOVA, Frontline/World, History Detectives, LIFE360,), the BBC, MSNBC, and in Time, and Wired. Spingarn-Koff is a 2010-2011 Knight Journalism Fellow at MIT. His feature film, Life 2.0 was shown at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, and was featured on the Oprah Winfrey Network. Spingarn-Koff is a graduate of Brown University and the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

Pablo Boczkowski

Professor of Communications Studies, Northwestern University

Pablo Boczkowski is studying the transition from print to digital media, with a focus on the organizational and occupational dynamics of contemporary journalism. Before coming to Northwestern, he was Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Assistant Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

He is the author of Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers (MIT Press, 2004), News at Work: Imitation in an Age of Information Abundance (University of Chicago Press, 2010), and more than 20 papers in such publications as Journal of Communication, New Media & Society,and The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. His work has received awards from the International Communication Association, and the American Sociological Association, among others. He is currently working on three book projects.

Boczkowski earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies from Cornell University. He also bears the title Doctor, Psychology, University of Belgrano, Argentina.

Joshua Benton

Director, Nieman Journalism Lab, Harvard University

Joshua Benton spent 10 years in newspapers, most recently at The Dallas Morning News. His reports on cheating on standardized tests in the Texas public schools led to the permanent shutdown of a school district and won the Philip Meyer Journalism Award from Investigative Reporters and Editors. He has reported from 10 foreign countries, been a Pew Fellow in International Journalism, and three times been a finalist for the Livingston Award for International Reporting. Before Dallas, he was a reporter and rock critic for The Toledo Blade Benton also spent a year at Harvard as a 2008 Nieman Fellow.