Now, you are right about the attitude problem: the companies that hire ethnographers are the ones that acknowledge that they might need one and the ones that really need it will never dream of that.

So maybe the solution is to be proactive: instead of sitting down and waiting for a company to say come and see what our problem is, ethnographers could be offer, … “sell” their skills a bit more, because, believe it or not, many people don’t even know this exists. And here I think the academia plays a major role.

There are a lot of implications about what it means to do this “organization” or “business” ethnography though — some people say it shouldn’t even be called that — but that is a whole different discussion and I won’t bother you with that.

As I mentioned in the conference, I will be looking into the relation of journalists, technology and the implications of the organization of work in a national newspaper in London for my theses. Maybe I will find it brilliant, or maybe I will come back here in a few months to tell you that it doesn’t work. Let’s hope for the first one. I will keep you posted.

The problem I see is that the companies that most need to hire some ethnographers are also the least likely to admit they have a problem. People in management get institutionalised and become blind to the flaws in the way their company functions. Unless someone in the company has an epiphany, I don’t think that ethnographers will get a chance to do their jobs.

It is good to see an ethnographer taking part in the discussion though! And I’d love to hear if you have any examples of ethnographers working in the media to help media companies adapt.

I am the journalist-now-researcher that was sitting by your side at the conference. First I would like to say that I appreciated you check for reality (”i heard all this 5 years ago and if we don’t do anything I will be listening to it all over again in 5 years”).

Second, as a response to your question in the last line of this post — who will have the balls to go around to the manager’s room and say that they’re doing things wrong. I say ethnographers.

Not to be too wide-eyed about the profession I am novice in, but my view is that companies are seriously considering what is wrong with them (newspaper in the first row) and they believe that part of the solution is related to design.

Not (only) graphic design as in how things look on the pape, but as in “how can we design our system so it works more efficiently and makes life easier in this place?”.

Bosses won’t go around asking you “what do you think is wrong here?” the same way employees won’t go around saying “you are missing the point”. But system designers and the ethnographers that inform these design projects are able to find out where the flaws are the flag it to management with the advantage of an “outsider”’s point of view. And this point of view is not based on beliefs, but on proper qualitative data gathering and analysis.

Again, I might be too optimistic about it, but it is an answer that is worth trying. What do you think?

Kevin tells me that that happened in Princeton, but that it was a truncated discussion. He also says that as long as journalists consider themselves essential, and because of that consider themselves to have a right to a job, we’ll never get the chance to talk business. I think he’s right. Journalism has to be paid for, but whilst journalists think they have some divine right to exist, they won’t think about where the money comes from.

Regarding management, not all managers are crap just as not all swans are white, but I can happily sit down with you over a pint and point to many detailed examples. The problem is so widespread that it passes for normality within the industry. As you say, the problem is not the technology anymore - it’s the people, and it’s the culture. And in that sense the news industry is having the very same problems as all the others. And until people wake up and realise that they need to reassess the way that they are running the show, we’re going to be stuck exactly as we are.

Without a doubt it’s something that needs to be addressed, and it should be on my list of things that we need to actually have frank discussions about. Although it’s less a monster under the bed and more a monster about to eat the bed, blankets, pillows and all.

Part of the problem is that many journos just don’t like thinking about ‘business’, and even see it as a dirty word. They feel that they are above it. (Oddly enough, as do many software/web developers.) But if someone, somewhere doesn’t start having a serious thing about non-advertising sources of revenue, the bottom’s going to fall out of the industry and there’s going to be nothing there to replace it.

It’s not an easy problem, and that’s exactly why we need people to experiment! So good on you for doing something a bit different.

For all its flaws, the investigative journalist in particular still has a crucial role to play in exposing the things that corporations, governments and other interested bodies don’t want to see in the public domain. That takes time, effort and…dare I say it, money.

There can of course be arguments that describe a tiered approach to reporting but that’s something I’m not seeing in this debate.

Regardless of which models are chosen, there does need to be a level of professionalism in the sense of understanding what is and is not acceptable both in content and quality but again, I don’t see arguments that demonstrate how it gets funded.

I have always been concerned about the conflict that exists between those who write and those who manage. In other words it is the model of advertising that hurts the writer, however spirited and independent that person wishes to be. Nowhere is that more obvious than in the US.

What are the alternatives? Banner ads on websites is only a substitution model. What about complementary content that competes for real eastate? That’s what I’m playing with on my site and so far so good. But it is early days in figuring out the alternaqtives and to be honest, I don’t see a lot of invention coming from the advertising side of the house.