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Vaios Papanagnou

May 5th, 2021

The Guardian at 200: the world’s favourite brand of progressive social critique

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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Vaios Papanagnou

May 5th, 2021

The Guardian at 200: the world’s favourite brand of progressive social critique

0 comments | 8 shares

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

On the occasion of The Guardian’s 200th birthday, Vaios Papanagnou, who lectures at the American College of Greece, looks at the progressive news outlet’s role as a digital pioneer in the news ecosystem, and the growing importance of branding in digital journalism.

Today, 5 May 2021, British news outlet The Guardian celebrates its 200th birthday. It is one of the few news publishers to have successfully navigated the financial pressures and generalised uncertainty induced by the transformation of the news sector into an online news ecosystem. Historically the newspaper of British progressives, in the course of this paradigm shift of the past two decades, The Guardian has found a much larger global audience and gained international recognition as an authoritative journalistic voice.

As Guardian Media Group chief executive Annette Thomas says in the press release announcing the festivities planned around the anniversary, “Our business is in a strong position and our unique reader relationship model has proved successful, with a record increase in reader support in 2020. A big thank you to our readers, commercial clients and partners for their belief in the Guardian and our brand over so many years”. In the list of the activities that mark the occasion, the launch of a brand campaign is included under the slogan ‘For 200 years, a work in progress’.

This emphasis on branding the organisation by foregrounding its legacy as a progressive journalistic institution is not merely part of the promotional rhetoric of the Guardian’s business side. What allows for such harmonious synergies between editorial and business departments is a more profound shift, which is also happening in many other news organisations across the world: the digital transformation of journalism has involved the normalisation of branding as a standard part of journalistic practice. Today, individual journalists and news organisations actively work on branding themselves as experts in the matters of public concern.

Branding requires a level of always-on engagement with the users of various social network platforms in order to generate the invaluable capital of ‘followers’, solidify journalists’ reputations, and buttress the clout of news organisations. As a pioneering innovator of digital journalism, The Guardian not only exemplifies the news organisation as a trusted brand, but influences other news organisations around the world in developing their own reader communities around journalistic brand values.

I have studied The Guardian as an exemplary case of digital journalism for my doctoral research at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Seeking to understand the dynamics of journalism’s much debated transformation, I have found that the key development that ushered the logic of branding into journalism was the induction of social media into the routines of everyday news production. It was in The Guardian that the vision of ‘open journalism’ was conceived and put into practice, according to which the journalists could use social media to co-create the news with their audiences – now themselves turned news producers.

Grounding themselves in the justifications of this paradigm for social media practice as the ‘mutualisation of news’, journalists around the world were able to overcome their initial scepticism against the branding logic as antithetical to professional, civic-minded, quality journalism. They understood that it was precisely by foregrounding their personal and organisational commitment to professionalism, civic duty, and quality that they could compete in the news ecosystem and even challenge the big-tech companies that dominate its workings.

Paradoxically, whilst journalists today speak the same language of branding as their colleagues from the marketing departments of their organisations, they remain personally disinterested in financial profit. It is in fact by unveiling the financial motivations of other organisations, not least of the social media monopolies, that they cement their clout as critics of power at the service of the citizens.

Social media has accelerated the transformation of journalism from an institution of professionals to a practice of brands (personal and organisational) with institutional characteristics. However, this hasn’t been a one-way process of the induction of journalism into the neoliberal order of platform capitalism, what José van Dijck and others have insightfully described as the platformisation of the news.

I argue that what we see today in journalism is a second move: the neoliberal logic of branding is working in tandem with the progressive critique that challenges the power of platform capitalism. I claim that this fusion of opposing logics is not restricted to the field of journalism, but rather is part of a wider societal process. I view this as a process in which neoliberalism, as the set of ideas that justifies capitalism, incorporates some elements of the anti-capitalist critique – in this case, elements of discontent with the unchecked power of platforms. This reform constitutes nothing less than the renewal of neoliberalism’s attractiveness.

This article represents the views of the author and not the position of the Media@LSE blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

About the author

Vaios Papanagnou

Dr Vaios Papanagnou received his PhD from LSE’s Department of Media and Communications. His research focuses on journalism, social media, and the moral and political constitution of digital communication. He lectures at the American College of Greece and has practised journalism for more than a decade.

Posted In: Journalism

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