Paper short abstract:

This presentation argues for the need to pay attention to failure in the study of digital journalism. Scholarship has focused on success over failure; and on innovation over resistance to change. Such an emphasis may render actual practices invisible, constituting an epistemological blind spot.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation argues for the need to pay attention to failure in the study of digital journalism. The field of journalism studies has frequently focused on new technology over old; on success to the detriment of failure; on innovation over resistance to change, and on the cutting edge over the conservative. Yet such an emphasis may not be consistent with understanding the plethora of actual practices, and may therefore constitute an epistemological blind spot. This is not to suggest that failure has been entirely ignored in journalism studies and related areas. Here we can learn from the growing body of work on journalism practice in todays' complex media ecology, which has traced difficulties in adapting to new realities. Further, we can enrich our methods for studying failure by drawing on the insights of other social science fields which have long taken it seriously, as an integral part of social life in general and organizational change in particular, including complexity theory and the sociology of scientific knowledge.

The presentation seeks to set out a research agenda based on taking failure seriously. Such a research agenda needs to pay attention to power relations within and between news organizations, and the ways in which particular - and often less privileged -- forms of news practice might be more likely to fail. Here, I see inattention to marginal and unfashionable practices as part of a broader problem of neglecting failure, but one which it most urgent to address.