Hybrid News Practices (final ms. to download)

Hybrid News Practices Dr. James F. Hamilton Associate Professor Department of Advertising and Public Relations University of Georgia Athens, GA 30602-3018 Telephone: +001 (706) 542-3556 Email: [email protected]

Revision submitted to Sage Handbook of Digital Journalism, edited by Tamara Witschge, C.W. Anderson, David Domingo and Alfred Hermida. London: Sage. Revision date: 15 February 2015.

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Hybrid News Practices Despite claims otherwise, news practices have always been hybrid. But, with the recent incorporation of digital technologies and attendant changes, by 2008 it seemed only a matter of time for this hybridity to go all the way. I suggested only partly tongue-in-cheek the possibility of “a Protest Channel comprised of on-the-street video footage shot by global-justice activists with running commentary, interviews and analysis, sandwiched as it would likely be between a channel devoted to home improvement and one to golf” (Hamilton 2008, p. 2). Since then, however, a good portion of this at-the-time farcical scenario has come to pass in the form of Vice News. Although lacking the running commentary and analysis, and hosted on the Internet instead of on cable television, a signature component of this commercial news organization consists of hours’ long unedited video—what it calls “raw coverage”—of its reporters in the midst of civil disturbances and protest such as the autumn 2014 Hong Kong Occupy protest, and in August 2014, civil disobedience, protest and confrontation in Ferguson, Missouri following the shooting death of African-American Michael Brown by a white police officer. While in Ferguson, three Vice News reporters “captured [days’ worth of footage of] tear gas canisters being lobbed into crowds of protesters, [and] filmed conversations with on-duty officers and local residents” (Advertising Age 2014). Instead of selling the coverage to cable-television systems or selling advertising time (although its YouTube rendition did wrap it in YouTube-selected advertising), Vice News stumbled on possible commercial success due to its Ferguson livestreams securing a surprisingly steady viewership. As reported in an advertising trade magazine, rather than “turning viewers off, people appear to be tuning in for increasingly longer durations: Thursday night’s livestream averaged four and a half minutes of watch time per view; that figure hit fifteen and a half minutes for Saturday night’s second instalment” (Advertising Age 2014). While the commercial value from aggregating audiences through livestreamed protests is still uncertain, it contributes to boosting the brand value of Vice News as a reputable news outlet, thus building upon the Emmy Award it won earlier in 2014 for its Home Box Office-hosted cable-television documentary series (Advertising Age 2014; “We Won an Emmy Award” 2014).

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The case of Vice News seeming to straddle mainstream and alternative journalism suggests one of a number of possible futures of journalism in an increasingly digital media ecology. As will be discussed, it is only one of many cases of the continued hybridization of news. This case helps establish key premises for the argument of this chapter. First, “mainstream” and “alternative” are treated too often in discussions of digital journalism as separate spheres, which belies their hybridization in practice. Second, and following from the too-often uncritical assumption of separate spheres, comparatively less has been written about the insufficiency of positing separate spheres, despite the empirical necessity of doing so. Third, the resulting task which this chapter addresses is to critique separate spheres and to retheorize hybrid news practices, in which features heretofore allocated into “mainstream” or “alternative” sphere become mixed and copresent.

Against oppositions Scholarship in alternative media has contributed great understanding to journalism studies and to media studies generally by drawing attention to the determinations exerted by media organization and practice within particular historical conditions. By drawing needed attention to media and communication produced by social movements, it has forever rendered corporatized, commercial or statist media work and organization as no longer natural, singular or commonsense (Hájek and Carpentier 2015). Early scholarship in alternative media posits key differences between the alternative and the mainstream such as intention (challenging dominance vs. supporting it), organization (horizontal and egalitarian vs. vertical and hierarchical), and form (commentary, personal story and imaginative art as routes to authoritative claims to reality vs. solely “objective” news reporting) (Armstrong 1981, Downing 1984, Hamilton 2000, Atton 2002). However, by staking itself out as a distinct field of research, earlier alternative-media scholarship had to by logical necessity distinguish itself from its ostensible opposite the “mainstream” in order to validate itself as an identifiable phenomenon and topic area. Retrospectively speaking, this separation has come at a cost of a narrowing of explanatory reach and of political value.

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Despite the tenacity of the distinction, their insufficiency has only become clearer in more recent scholarly work (Downing 2001, Couldry and Curran 2003, Atton 2004, Kenix 2011, Uzelman 2011). Indeed, what “alternative” is depends on time, place and situation (Hamilton 2008). More specifically in the case of alternative journalism, personnel, intention, form and organization vary immensely due to its radically historical and contextual constitution in relation to a specific, provisional dominant (Atton and Hamilton 2008, pp. 9-21). Furthermore, the perpetually porous boundary between legacy journalism—what Bruns (2011, p. 133) aptly calls “industrial” journalism—and alternative journalism is only one example of a broader case about popular culture generally. As Williams argued more than 40 years ago, journalism like all popular culture cannot be categorized into pure, invariant types, but rather “is always an uneasy mixture of two very different elements: the maintenance of an independent popular identity, often linked with political radicalism, resistance to the establishment and movements for social change; and ways of adapting, from disadvantage, to a dominant social order, finding relief and satisfaction or diversion inside it” (Williams 1970, p. 22; see also Hall 1981). Indeed, historical inquiry reveals the depth and extent to which the alternative and mainstream journalism have always overlapped in a wide variety of ways, with developments ostensibly ushered in only recently by digitization actually having much deeper roots (Wunch-Vincent and Vickery 2007). Indeed, industrial journalism as today’s “mainstream” emerged as an alternative to a mainstream of a very different kind. Beginning in the later 18th Century, newspapers’ gradual adoption of advertising and political support broadened the range of content contributors. While the earliest newspapers were personal projects of individual printers, a merchant press emerged that was intended largely for business and community leaders and written by correspondents and later letter writers only sometimes aware that their letters would be printed. By the 19th Century in the United States as well as in Britain, this specialist press broadened again in readership and content with the emergence of commercial-popular presses (Schiller 1981; Nerone 1987; Williams 1978; Wiener 1988). Yet what made this broadening possible was paradoxically the gradual institution of increased restrictions. Efforts to establish and defend a market position led to efforts first to “out-scoop” the

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competition on breaking news and, later, to legally protect against unauthorized republication (Schwarzlose 1989; Hamilton 2008, p. 134). Consistent with this effort was the gradual, simultaneous professionalization of journalism, which justified exclusive employment of writers for a specific paper (Høyer and Lauk 2003). As a result, while enabling new kinds of public participation, industrial journalism also restricted public participation to being suppliers of letters and other brief contributions of opinion, sources in news stories, and buyers/readers of the publication. It was in response to this commercial-industrial form and organization of journalism that an alternative journalism composed of various labor and socialist presses sought to open writing to the rank and file (Fogarasi 1983/1921]); Worker’s Life 1983/1928]; Hogenkamp 1983). They enacted different relationships with and among readers, such as what was described by a labor organizer of the late 19th-and early-20th Century as “long-distance handshaking” (Haywood 1966, pp. 153-154.) However, no clear dividing line ever separated the mainstream from the alternative. Even in the 19th Century, an amalgam of evangelism and commercialism characterized social-reform media in the U.S. already to a high degree (Hamilton 2008, pp. 97-99). The Appeal to Reason, the largest-circulation socialist newspaper ever in the U.S., was funded primarily through advertising (Shore 1988). And the 1960s underground press’s reliance on lifestyle-product advertising underscored its mainstream features (Peck 1985; McMillian 2011, pp. 6064). When moving from an historical argument to one concerning the current digital environment, the inadequacy of posing discrete kinds or types of journalism is even clearer. Commercial social media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube play key roles in national movements for social change, such as in the variety of Occupy sites or the Arab Spring (Christensen 2011; Khondker 2011; Gerbaudo 2012). Amateur textual, video and audio accounts appear with increasing regularity in professional news outlets (see Chapter 14 Nicey), as well as occupying increasingly central roles in professional news organizations (Allan and Thorsen 2009; Thorsen and Allan 2014). Innovative news organizations such as ProPublica and TalkingPointsMemo that aspire to conventional professional goals are supported increasingly by noncommercial and nonstatist means (Holcomb and Mitchell 2014). Other barriers between discrete types are

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also being breached, including those between discrete forms, such as news and videogames; between discrete formations, such as public and private; and between discrete approaches, such as objective and subjective (Meikle and Redden 2011, pp. 7-15, see also Chapter 7 Steensen and Chapter 9 WahlJorgensen).

Articulation and context Fully acknowledging this empirical complexity requires moving past the limitations of taken-forgranted categories. As one way of doing so, studies of digital journalism might gain greater explanatory reach by centering analyses not on the cohesiveness and consistency of discrete categories and kinds, but on the practice of hybridization. As used here, hybridization has much in common with Hall’s notion of articulation. Informed by the work of Gramsci, Laclau and Mouffe, and many others, articulation provides a way of understanding how diverse and seemingly unrelated cultural, political and ideological elements are assembled at a specific historical moment, or “historical conjuncture” (Hall and Grossberg 1996). Writing more recently, Hall describes a conjuncture as a “period in which the contradictions and problems and antagonisms, which are always present in different domains in a society, begin to come together” into what Gramsci calls a “‘ruptural unity’,” underscoring through this paradoxical formulation how unstable and contradictory such an amalgam is (Hay, Hall and Grossberg 2013, p. 16). Analysis of the conjuncture is crucial, because it is what generates the forces that produce the articulation and thus the phenomenon. It is for this reason that Grossberg has called articulation and the version of cultural studies informed by it a theory not of things and essences, but “a theory of contexts,” for the crucial issues are located in the analysis of these contexts and how they produce phenomena as articulations (Grossberg 1993, p. 4). Where the characteristic positivist question regarding any phenomenon concerns essences (“What is it?”), and the idealist question concerns individual choices and uses (“What do people do with it?”), the question driven by a radically contextualist perspective concerns the combination of forces that brought it into being, and thus that constitute and maintain it.

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Its paradox and contingency makes hybridization a tricky term. Logically, to claim a phenomenon as a hybrid depends on first positing the existence of certain elements, in order to claim that they have been subsequently hybridized. If left at this point, such a claim reverts to a form of a-priori categorization, thus returning us to the same set of theoretical limitations noted in the beginning of this chapter about taken-forgranted categories. However, when fully grasped as paradoxical and radically contextual, hybridization has the capacity to organize thinking about digital journalism in a way that mutually exclusive categories do not. A focus on articulation and historical conjunctures places discussions of specific innovations and changes within the broader terrain of digital journalism writ large. Furthermore, it not only recognizes how multiple journalistic formations are produced but also how they come to be articulated in various ways within particular historical contexts. Hybridization via a focus on articulation also avoids the problems of a-priori categories by treating the various elements combined as themselves radically contextual and produced via their relationship. Thus, the very production of elements that become hybridized such as the “opposing sides” of mainstream and alternative becomes a key concern of analysis, emphasizing that they are reproduced rather than simply existing. Such an intention (although with different theoretical premises) has already informed studies of newsroom routines and ideologies under pressure from user-generated content. They address how the dominant institution is maintained in part through its resistance to the threat of amateurs storming the barricades (Cook and Dickenson 2013; Hermida and Thurman 2008; Paulussen and Ugille 2008; Singer et al. 2011). Investigating digital journalism via hybridization and articulation has great possibilities for generating new questions and insights. By addressing the production and maintenance of many journalisms within the current digital environment through a theoretical perspective that focuses on articulation through particular historical conjunctures, a number of new kinds of research topics and questions can be identified. While suggestive rather than definitive, the following discussion presents some key emergent hybridities whose investigation would solidify and deepen understanding of digital journalism by understanding it as produced through an articulation of a provisional alternative and an equally provisional mainstream.

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Hybrids of Social Formation and Use: Media interventions As examples ranging from the Pentagon Papers case to the publication of revelations of NSA surveillance suggest, mainstream news organizations articulate at least some of the time with an oppositional rather than dominant social formation. However, these and similar accounts remain theorized largely though normative liberal press theory (Altschull 1990). By lauding the bravery of individual sources and reporters for bucking the system, such examples are interpreted either as exceptions to the rule of mainstream subservience to power, or as evidence of the continued necessity of a strong and independent “Fourth Estate” to serve as a bulwark against abuse of state power. In both cases, analysis assumes and takes for granted the existence of the mainstream, with alternative journalism regarded by implication either as the tragic ideal or mainstream wannabe, due to aspiring to mainstream resources, effects and importance, but forever falling short. However, the concept of “media interventions” proposed in Howley (2013) calls into question this established, habitual formula. By focusing on a kind of action taken instead of a kind of content or a kind of institution, the label “media intervention” moves past analyses that rely on positing different kinds of institutions and journalism. The concept of media intervention, then, has great relevance and value for studies of digital journalism that view it through the lens of hybridity and articulation. On one hand, the concept of media intervention draws upon the scholarly debate regarding tactical media. Such an approach regards social movements not as singular agents that can be studied in isolation, but as generalized social processes of resistance and challenge dispersed throughout popular culture (Boler 2008). As derived from readings of Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, de Certeau, and others, the notion of tactical media signals not only the impossibility but also the undesirability of asserting general theories of media/communications and social movements due to the need to refuse any rationalizing containment of praxis and human possibility. Thus, tactical media suggest the need to focus on modest and achievable interventions at an everyday, tactical level—interventions that always change in relation to context and the array of specific forces and potentials. Given such a conception, no attempt is made at defining the essential characteristics of tactical media, because there is no unchanging essence in the first place to define. What

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remains instead is the ever-present need to theorize and act while at the same time recognizing the radical contingency of both. A “media intervention,” then, labels these articulated acts of challenge and resistance, no matter the location of the institution, resources or practices drawn upon and used. But, on the other hand, the concept of a media intervention extends this discussion about tactical media into new directions of great relevance to digital journalism. It provides a way of thinking about media and social change that, in its contextuality and variety, coincides clearly with a perspective that stresses hybridization and articulation. Howley conceives a media intervention as “associated either with advocacy or activist practice” or with “mainstream media institutions and texts,” and furthermore uniformly within “the purview [neither] of progressive nor conservative cultural politics” (Howley 2013, p. 9). The concept of a media intervention is more attuned to particular modes of practice, rather than essential characteristics of “mainstream” or “radical.” Developing this point further, and by paraphrasing Couldry, Howley notes that the concept of media intervention “encourages scholars to ‘identify agencies and processes of change’ … whether they originate from the state, the market, or civil society [emphasis original]” (Howley 2013, p. 9). Various forces articulate a media intervention, which arises out of potentially any institutional location and which plays out in a variety of ways. Case studies in Howley (2013) that concern journalism highlight how media interventions work through hybridization and articulation. On one hand, mainstream journalism operates in many ways as an alternative media project by coinciding with social movements to effect social change. An example is Howarth (2013) which addresses commercial-newspaper campaigns in Britain, and a specific campaign regarding genetically-modified (GM) foods. Following the appearance of the first GM foods in food stores in 1996, a generally receptive climate for it changed by 1998, largely due to “an intensification of newspaper engagement and a shift in content from ambivalence to increasing hostility towards the policies promoting GM food.” As a result, “public opposition, including a de facto consumer boycott, escalated and hardened” to the point that “four [mainstream] newspapers had launched campaigns against the policy.” By 2000, the government had “negotiated a voluntary moratorium with the biotechnology industry,” the prime minister apologized in print, and the newspaper campaign subsided (Howarth 2013, pp. 37-38).

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On the other hand, alternative-media efforts both challenge as well as support the position of mainstream media. For example, Orgeret (2013) focuses on the role of alternative, citizen journalism in pressing news agendas developed by the mainstream. During what he called “‘16 days of activism’,” an activist “decided to live on the streets of Cape Town [South Africa] and emulate the life of a street child as closely as possible,” sharing his experiences through social media (Orgeret 2013, p. 178). Yet, the effort challenged as well as supported legacy journalism organizations. While demonstrating that ordinary citizens can create and circulate news to overcome limitations of mainstream coverage, this media intervention at the same time served as fodder for the mainstream press, which reported on it. As a result, the alternative fed the mainstream at the same time it challenged it, producing an understanding of this media intervention as complexly located in overlaps of different social formations and with varying, complex effects. Many other examples could be offered. Yet, by steering clear of categorical types and focusing instead on specific tactics and practices, they all illustrate the degree to which media interventions recognizes hybrid relations between media organizations, social formations and uses. That the mainstream can be alternative and the alternative mainstream no longer becomes nonsensical, but emerges instead as empirically characteristic.

Hybrids of Technology and Form: Social witnessing Hybridity and articulation also characterizes current innovations in technologies and cultural form, such as that between digital recording, social media and personal accounts. From their earliest years, news accounts written by eyewitnesses have appeared in newsletters and newspapers. Their veracity, authority and resulting institutional value comes in no way from a claimed intrinsic truthfulness or accuracy, but instead derives discursively from long-standing Anglo-American traditions and conventions of empiricism as well as their place within institutions of competitive disputation, particularly law but extending as well into the developing practice of experimental science (Hamilton 2008, pp. 43-48; Shapiro 2000). These

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traditions and conventions underwrite its value for institutions whose value is determined by empirically verifiable accounts, such as what became professionalized, industrial journalism. However, in addition to having great value for industrial journalism, witnessing places infinitely reproducible representation within the reach of individuals who do not have industrial-media resources at their disposal. The combination of value to professional news as well as amenability to individual practice that has made what Allan (2013) calls “citizen witnessing” such a compelling phenomenon in digital journalism today (see Chapter 16 Allan). Granting that recording technologies actively produce accounts rather than simply and neutrally capture them, facsimile recordings via digital devices makes video and audio citizen witnessing even more valuable for legacy news organizations than written accounts because facsimile accounts are assumed to be unaffected by human bias and interpretation, an assumption that has however been a target of critique for some time (Sontag 1977; Berger 1995). What’s more, the recent inclusion of digital video and audio recording on mobile phones that are carried through habit by many people each day has only extended the ability to be a citizen witness or, as Allan (2013, p. 1-25) puts it, an “accidental journalist.” Metamorphoses in citizen witnessing hybridize the individual and the social, as well as the mainstream and the alternative into a form today that can be called social witnessing. Paradigmatic of a new point in this process is the work by digital-innovator-turned-activist-livestreaming-eyewitness-turneddigital-journalist Tim Pool (Gynnild 2014; Lenzner 2014). Pool has articulated a variety of readymade devices and capabilities and, furthermore, deployed them in new ways as well. His basic technical setup consists, first, of a networked smartphone and subscriptions both to a wireless carrier that allows unlimited data transmission and to a wireless livestreaming service. This enables Pool to transmit to any users viewing the livestream remotely whatever is in range of the phone’s video camera and audio mic. An external battery allows Pool to stream for 15 hours at a stretch (Pool 2012a; Pool 2012b). The final articulated piece is chat apps on the smartphone to carry on real-time conversations with people who are viewing the livestream. Pool converses with others about events he is showing and users are seeing, while

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on occasion even taking requests from remote viewers for what to show or what questions they would like him to ask people he is interviewing. Social witnessing as a hybrid news practice is more than this technical assemblage. It requires in turn an articulation to larger institutions and social formations. While one could use this combination of equipment and services to livestream hours of, as Pool puts it, “friends doing dumb stuff,” Pool began to use it instead as a means of informing others in real time about events and developments in protests and civil disturbances, thus articulating social witnessing as a self-described activist-journalist in support of a social movement. As a reporter summarizes, Pool and others “aren’t satisfied with American mainstream media coverage, calling the medium largely corrupted by the corporate world. Instead, as he often takes time to tell his audience, he’s here to show what’s really going on” (Townsend 2011). While attending the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protest at Zuccotti Park in Manhattan, Pool livestreamed each day, sometimes for 21 hours straight. His livestream reached more than 2 million unique viewers over two months later that fall (Jardin 2011). Pool took the technical basis of this practice to the next level by using Google Glass, the eyeglasses-like mobile computer and communications device. He claims that wearing Glass rather than holding a smartphone allows him to stay focused on the event, helping him protect himself and avoid arrest or injury in volatile demonstrations or situations (Ungerleider 2013). As Pool put it in a recent interview, “‘When there’s a wall of police firing plastic bullets at you, and you’re running through a wall of tear-gas, having your hands free to cover your face, while saying “OK Glass, record a video,” makes that recording process a lot … easier’” (Dredge 2013). Yet, while social witnessing hybridizes commercially available consumer electronics with alternative media practice, it has as much relevance to legacy commercial news organizations as to social movements. On one hand, social witnessing articulates with mobilization and social protest as a cultural form of simultaneity, engendering a vicarious solidarity that sometimes people also act upon (Anderson 1991). As one attendee told Pool during his Occupy Wall Street livestreams, “Your livestreaming today got me out of bed, and got me here. So, I think that happened to a lot of other people, too. That you’re doing a

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job for us, that is, is important” (quoted in Townsend 2011). But, on the other hand, social witnessing has also articulated with legacy professional journalism. Pool’s efforts have been significant enough to be noted by U.S. legacy commercial newsmagazine Time as “Occupy Wall Street’s Live Streamer” (Townsend 2011; Time 2014). In 2013, Pool joined the multimedia news, branding and entertainment conglomerate Vice, Inc. as head of live news. And, in autumn 2014, Pool became senior correspondent and director of media innovation for the commercial media company Fusion, a joint venture of Univision and the DisneyABC Television Group (Steel 2014). The degree to which social witnessing as a hybridized phenomenon of digital journalism overflows the boundaries between the mainstream and the alternative is indicated as well in an email by CEO Isaac Lee that announced Pool’s hiring at Fusion. Someone who is hailed as both a “‘guerrilla journalist of the digital age’” but also as “‘the future of journalism’ by Time Magazine” indicates through this contradictory pairing of guerrilla and professional, alternative and mainstream, the inability of a-priori categories to adequately take account of where social witnessing fits in (Fusion 2014). By being “in” both “sides,” it renders irrelevant the very conceptions of them as sides.

Hybrids of News and Marketing: Valuing the Real Hybridizations that operate in relation to digital journalism take many different forms. This final example suggests that attention to articulation and hybridization is also valuable for understanding institutional hybridizations between news and marketing industries, with the clearest current example that of multimedia conglomerate Vice Inc. It calls itself the “world’s leading youth media company specializing in creating, distributing, and monetizing original content globally,” and with justification. It embraces a vertically integrated, transnational conglomerate organization by not only creating content, but also distributing, promoting, and selling it via its many web portals (Vice Inc. 2014). Currently it has offices in 35 countries and an audience in the tens of millions that it delivers to advertisers by using an “unorthodox though compelling coverage of news, music, travel, sports and fashion” (Brownstein 2014). In addition to Vice News, the brand content umbrella includes Noisey (pop music coverage), Motherboard (high

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technology), Munchies (food), Vice Sports, The Creators Project (art and technology), Thump (dancehall music and culture), i-D (clothes fashion), Fightland (competitive martial arts), and Vice on HBO (currentissue documentary cable-television content). Its significance for this chapter is how it hybridizes news and marketing to an extent much more fundamental than simply adding soft-news or self-promotional aspects to hard-news publications or shows. Vice Media Inc. uses news to build its brand. For Vice, news is not just related to nor simply assists in marketing, but literally is its marketing communications. News is marketing communication. To hybridize news and marketing, Vice articulates fearless truth-telling not to public service or social responsibility, but to libertinism. Its editorial formula that shocks and appals bourgeois sensibility is a marketing tactic to generate publicity, awareness, and brand value for urban hipster-wannabee young males. Indeed, co-founder Shane Smith has been described as “P.T. Barnum meets Lord Byron” (Ortved 2011). These are the two most important Romantic-era figures for understanding current media culture. While circus master Barnum is the pioneering marketing communications specialist who first discovered the value of how to gather a crowd and generate interest in order to sell, Byron is the quintessential Romantic self-centered destructive sensualist. Vice News produces news as marketing via the cultural form of naturalism. Indeed, its signature content is real-time witnessing, later recut and repackaged as long-form naturalist documentary (of course, with the claim of taking viewers to hidden places to see for themselves a self-conscious construction). Given the infinite range of what could be shown, Vice News articulates with libertinism by choosing to specialize in thrills, danger, and offbeat if not underground situations and practices. But, by also presenting itself as telling the truth no matter what it is or who is offended, Vice at the same time articulates with the objectivity credo of professional journalism as an independent “Fourth Estate.” Evidence of its marketing effectiveness is its worldwide and growing audience, and of its journalistic aspirations an Emmy Award in 2014 for Outstanding Information Series or Special (“Vice | Television Academy” 2014). The articulation of news and marketing was as strategic as it was happenstance. The project that became Vice, Inc. started in 1994 as the publisher of a free alternative weekly newspaper in Montreal

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(Picard 1998). As paraphrased in a 2000 profile, the “juvenile joke of a magazine—which pontificates on poo, sex, alcohol, politics, drugs, punk rock and hip-hop,” later characterized as an “international delinquency magazine,” had by 2000 become big business (Dunlevy 2000). By 2001, the brand of this “rude, smart-ass magazine” was a “stick-it-to-the-man brand—a post-modern marketing concept tailormade for kids looking to buy rebellion,” and “a blend of Anglo-Montreal cynicism, straight-up New York hip hop and 18-year-old libido” that “appeals to an elusive group of 15- to 28-year-old trendsetters that every marketer of everything from soda pop to skateboards is desperate to reach” (Toane 2001), a response to the challenges of marketing noted by Frank (1997). However serendipitous the origin of this editorial formula, the co-founders soon recognized the marketing value of the project not only despite its contradictions, but because of them. As one co-founder put it, “Vice is comfortable with the contradiction inherent in promoting a counter-culture magazine as a full-fledged, multi-channelled, value-added brand.” As another co-founder put it at the time, “‘It’s a business, at the end of the day …. Kids come into our stores and buy $500 Dub shells. [Some of those] kids are 15 and they live at home and they have nothing to do with their money except buy clothes and CDs.” The news story concludes in a suitably paradoxical vein by calling Vice Media Inc. “an industrial-strength anti-brand for the most brand-conscious generation ever” (Toane 2001). The only question about this news-marketing hybrid was how to finance it and what specific form it would take. Initially it expanded into fashion retailing in an effort to develop itself as an e-retailer. As a journalist summarized at the time, “Vice magazine, Vice Fashion, Vice Film, Vice Records and Vice TV will all be used to guide traffic to the Web site and promote E-commerce - online purchasing of fashion, music, video games and anything else deemed worthy of a sales pitch to Vice’s audience” (Dunlevy 2000). It brought in outside investor money to continue to expand, but later bought out its outside partners to go it alone (Dunlevy 2000). What opened the doors to the pathway to the Vice Inc. of today was the addition of news in 2006 and the move in 2007 to the Internet as a cost-effective distribution network, first via its own web property and, later, as branded content sold to and seen on other online media sites, initially from Viacom via MTV

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to CNN, marketing-media behemoth WPP, and cable-television company HBO, with its relevance to all yet another example of its ability to articulate news and marketing (Kelly 2007; Levine 2007; Rabinovitch 2010; Krashinsky 2011; Dunlevy 2013). The documentary formula solidified as it hybridized “short videos about independent music, extreme sports and, of course, some nudity” together with “ambitious news reports, like an interview with Hezbollah’s self-proclaimed ‘mayor of Beirut’, investigations of environmental abuse, and a story about a Colombian date-rape drug” (Levine 2007). The success of articulating news and marketing via libertinism and documentary became clear by the mid-2000s and its trajectory “from little more than a fanzine to a magazine with 900,000 readers in 22 countries and an international brand which takes in clothing, TV, book publishing, music (Bloc Party has released an album in the US through Vice Records) and now film” (Wilkinson 2008). To this range was added a brandstrategy/creative division called Virtue to monetize the Vice branding formula by offering branding assistance to other companies and products (Iezzi 2009; Harding 2010). From the start, and consistent with naturalist documentary, Vice News specialized in first-person documentary of unusual topics and situations related to war, sex and youth culture. A Vice news executive of the day put the marketing value of news clearly. “‘We see ourselves as CNN for kids who can’t be bothered to watch CNN, …. We feel there are things people should know about. In a way, we try to educate people by tricking them into being interested in stuff. “Look—trainers!”, and then you find the piece is about Liberia or Sierra Leone’” (Horan 2006). This hybridization of sensational and informational, of shock and seriousness had its branding value. “What makes Vice stand out,” argues one profile, “is the way it works serious and insightful reportage into a milieu normally associated with froth. A recent Russia special, for example, painted as stark and graphic a portrait of the lives of young Russians as you will read anywhere. An issue by and about disabled people was shocking and confrontational, but at times it brought a lump to the throat. Above all, both sets of stories had the ring of truth” (Horan 2006). The episode with which this chapter began only moves the Vice hybridization of news and marketing into the next stage. What has remained consistent throughout the emergence of Vice Media Inc. is the hybridized nature of this project in terms of content, intention, institution, and purpose—one that

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required the emergence of digital journalism to be realized. As a co-founder of the company put it in 2013, “we ended up creating something new that is one part news, one part entertainment, one part - I don’t know, but you put it all together and it creates something that doesn’t really exist in the mainstream news or mainstream content-creation world. There’s the rest of the world and there’s VICE doing our own weird s--t over here. Something has happened to make the VICE stuff a true alternative” (quoted in Dunlevy 2013). By developing an urban punk ‘zine of the 1990s into a commercial transnational multimedia conglomerate of the 2010s, and by developing a content formula in which long-form documentary becomes one of its most effective marketing strategies to sell itself as a brand, Vice Media Inc. is no more a true alternative than it is a co-opted alternative. Instead, it provides a look into a possible future of digital journalism that hybridizes both.

Conclusions and future directions Attending to hybridizations suggests novel and crucial questions to ask. Following the case of media interventions, more serious attention can be paid to hybridizations of social formation and use, in which journalistic projects support a dominant by challenging it, and/or challenge a dominant by supporting it. For example, in its reporting on NSA and GCHQ eavesdropping, The Guardian challenges governments of liberal democracies to live up to their ostensible ideals in a sort of restoration of the dominant. Attention to other examples of digital news practice located in multiple, tangled social formations would deepen our understanding. Following the case of social witnessing, more attention can be paid to hybridizations of technology and form, in particular to the diffusion (or not) of social witnessing as an increasingly accepted tool of legacy news reporting and why or why not, as well as to the compelling truth-effect of social witnessing as a form of collective engagement, both for activists and for armchair voyeurs. It also draws attention to other kinds of assemblages of digital technology and reporting, such as the recent exploration of the use of aerial drones with cameras, which in their capability for remote surveillance heightens concern about the value of news coverage for state-sponsored intelligence gathering as well as more generally about

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the implications of military bases of technological innovation generally (Bishop and Phillips 2010). Finally, following the case of news as branding, further attention can be paid to emerging organizational forms that dispense with historical categories of editorial and sales departments, and with content categories of news and advertising (such as the evolving category of “sponsored content”). But these suggestions are but a tentative beginning to what is needed. For the changes currently rippling through digitizing news industries have hardly ceased. Like the hybrids only briefly discussed here, the most challenging phenomena and important questions about them have yet to be conceived. By posing a productive ambiguity, perhaps the neologism “post-journalism” best captures the current historical moment of digital journalism as one of hybridity and articulation, one that accepts current claims about what Bell (2014) calls “post-industrial journalism” while theorizing such developments even more radically. Just as with postmodernism, the term suggests a point that has moved past an earlier accepted stage, but that is still indebted to this earlier stage in the sense of being produced by its relation to the past, present and possible futures.

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