Theories of Journalism - Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication

22/11/2019 Theories of Journalism - Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication
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Online Publication Date: Aug 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.83
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Summary and Keywords
Journalism seeks to observe and communicate what it learns of social importance,

something called news, and in doing so is always in the process of creating a public by
bringing it into synchronized conversation with itself. Theories of journalism provide
explanatory frameworks for understanding a complex combination of social practice,
product, and institutional arrangement. Journalism’s late 20th-century professionalized, high
modern version, which is still recognizable today, has continued to change, particularly with
the disruptive effect of the Internet, as it has evolved to absorb other forms. The boundaries
https://oxfordre.com/communication/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.001.0001/acrefore-9780190228613-e-83 1/26
of profession and news organization have been destabilized within this rapidly shifting
media terrain, but still there remain productive approaches for systematically organizing
knowledge around the concept of journalism.
The early 20th-century perspectives on journalism—before becoming linked to the

communication field and a more narrow media effects focus—were at home in the
University of Chicago school of sociology, which emphasized community-based, multi-
method participant observation. A sociology of news perspective resurfaced with more
ethnographic research in newsrooms in the 1950s, and theories of journalism have
continued to highlight the ethnographic method, especially in understanding the impact of
technology on a more digitally-oriented journalism practice. A hierarchy of influences
perspective, developed by Shoemaker and Reese, incorporates other perspectives beyond
the ethnographic by considering factors at multiple levels of analysis that shape media
content, the journalistic message system, from the micro to the macro: individual
characteristics of specific newsworkers, their routines of work, organizational-level
concerns, institutional issues, and the larger social system. At each level, one can identify
the main factors that shape the symbolic reality constituted and produced by journalism, as
well as how these factors interact across levels and compare across different contexts (e.g.,
national, technological).
A hierarchy of influences model worked well to disentangle the relationships among

professionals and their routines, and the news organizations that housed them, which
cohered into institutions. But journalism has been newly problematized, destabilizing and
restructuring both the units and levels of analysis in journalism theorizing. The networked
public sphere is constituted with new assemblages: of newswork, institutional
arrangements, and global connections, which give rise to new emerging deliberative
spaces. Journalism theories now have as much interest in process as product, in
assemblage as outcome, but still need to be concerned with the nature of quality of these
spaces. What shape do they take on and with what implications for healthy democratic
discourse?
Keywords: journalism, assemblage, levels of analysis, networked journalism, profession, media

sociology, hierarchy of influences, deliberative spaces
Introduction
Journalism seeks to observe and communicate what it learns of social importance,
something called news, and in doing so is always in the process of creating a public by
bringing it into synchronized conversation with itself. Theories of journalism provide
explanatory frameworks for understanding a complex combination of social practice,

product, and institutional arrangement. Journalism’s late 20th-century professionalized, high
modern version, which is still recognizable today, has continued to change, particularly with
the disruptive effect of the Internet, as it has evolved to absorb other forms. Unlike many
other more settled fields, journalism research has been obsessed with the very definition of
its core concept—what journalism is. The boundaries of profession and news organization
have been destabilized within this rapidly shifting media terrain, but still there remain
productive approaches for systematically organizing knowledge around the concept of
journalism. In this article I review some of these approaches using levels of analysis
framework and consider ways this perspective must be adapted to new conceptions of this
rapidly changing field.
Theories of journalism, as Löffelholz (2008) observed, come from diverse perspectives,

beginning with early normative concerns leading to more empirical analysis of how
journalists work. Adding a systems perspective attempted to position the individual as part
of a larger system (e.g., Rühl, 1969) and to understand news as a cultural product. The
early 20th-century research perspectives on journalism, before they became linked to the
communication field and a more narrow media effects focus, were at home in the University
of Chicago school of sociology, which emphasized community-based, multi-method
participant observation including issues of communication and public opinion. Early figures
like Robert Park had an interest in the newspaper and how it not just affected but created
community itself by extending social networks—regarding communities as existing in
communication. The post-WWII shift of sociological influence to Columbia University, and
related communication research along with it, displaced this more holistic concern with a
short-term effects, variable-analytic, social-psychology perspective on questions of interest
to the burgeoning mass consumer industries—and to the mass media built on their
advertising revenue.
Theories of journalism have largely been situated within this tradition of communication
research more generally as it developed during this period. As a result they have shared a
preoccupation with the large-scale mass media in the U.S. and Western Europe, and the
professionals operating within those media institutions. Journalism has been regarded as
having vital functions for the larger social system, leaving the task of research to explore
the process of journalistic communication and ways audiences responded to news
messages. This left relatively less room for more critical questions concerning how
journalism fits within the larger social structure—including who makes news, what counts as
news, and whose interests news serves. (Gitlin, 1978; Reese & Ballinger, 2001). Aligned
with journalism and mass communication education—which in turn was concerned with
training for media industries—research took on a strongly normative character in regarding
journalism as a crucial underpinning of democratic society. That was what journalists
themselves believed, serving as a justification for their professional status and legal
protections.
Shift to a Sociology of News

Running counter to this process and effects tradition, a couple of early newsroom studies,
in particular, signaled special concerns with journalism as a social practice. David Manning
White’s (1950) classic study of the news “gatekeeper” suggested that news is what the
“newspaperman” says it is, while Warren Breed’s (1955) study of social control in the
newsroom, showed how journalists absorbed news policy, even if that policy was not
always explicit, and how the tension between the different motivations of journalists and the
(often more conservative) owner needed to be reconciled to make the system work. As
Reese and Ballinger (2001) have argued, the findings of White and Breed were safely
interpreted at the time within the prevailing narrative, or received history of the field, as
upholding the status quo: namely that the gatekeeper and newspaper publisher would
select stories in the interest of the community of which they were part. This blunted the
critical edge and subversive quality of such research, which threatened to make journalism
decision-making newly problematic.
Journalism professionals have historically adhered to a philosophical, realist view of the

world in which news of external events is “out there” waiting to be gathered and
disseminated. But this process is a social construction determined by a number of larger
forces, making the search for these forces and understanding how they interact a logical
focus of theoretical development. Theories of journalism have followed a sociological turn,
a perspective that brings with it questions of power, control, structures, institutions, class,
and community: all concepts that, as Waisbord (2014) observes, have been applied to
journalism research more than other communication subfields, yielding an area often called
“media sociology.” Broadly speaking, this approach to journalism ties social structures to
symbolic formations, seeking to understand how social reality takes shape and
foregrounding normative concerns of how well journalism is working under these
arrangements.
Social protest and upheaval in the 1960s brought greater concern about how journalism
was implicated in a discredited power structure, leading to greater interest in the inner
workings of institutional journalism—as represented most visibly by a number of newsroom
ethnographies. Stonbely (2013) identifies a group of such studies that, after a long hiatus,
followed in the later 60s and 70s the earlier example of White and Breed. These studies,
she argues, represent a “cornerstone” of American media sociology, covering that “legacy”
period of media development centered around a handful of major broadcast and print
media that commanded mass audiences and, for the most part, their trust. Among these
she identifies Edward Jay Epstein’s (1974) News from Nowhere (about network television
news), Mark Fishman’s (1980) Manufacturing the News, Gaye Tuchman’s (1978) Making
News (about local newspapers), and Herbert Gans’ (1979) Deciding What’s News (about
national newsmagazines and television). They all broke with the prevailing approaches to
communication research by emphasizing news as an organizational product that had to be
socially constructed, not simply transmitted to the audience. These became classic
examples of newsroom sociology, time-consuming but rich in detail, and until recently
served to anchor our understanding of how newswork happens.
The sociology of news has continued to highlight the ethnographic method, long
marginalized within mainstream sociology. The method, however, has enjoyed a
resurgence in recent years across the social sciences with its greater capacity to engage
public interest with accessible storytelling—indeed, a quality more closely aligned with
journalism itself. Ethnography and its participant observation have proved especially useful
in understanding with close observation the impact of technology on a more digitally-
oriented journalism practice. A new wave of news ethnographies has been precipitated
particularly by the migration of news online. Prominent examples include the work of
Boczkowski (2004, 2010), especially in showing how technology has affected the
newsroom organization and practice. His work on Argentinian newsrooms shows the
paradox of striving in an age of digital abundance to conform to the news competition.
Ryfe’s (2012) analysis of three American newsrooms showed that journalists have not
adapted very well to change, using the tensions embedded in their profession to reconfirm
and justify the same procedures they have used since before the industry upheaval.
Usher (2014) provides the most recent single-newsroom ethnography within the Gans
tradition of the New York Times, choosing an elite news organization as the embodiment of
the journalism profession. Her participant observation shows what happens when a
traditional and powerful institution must adapt to the inescapable digital world, that despite
the major technological shifts, “many of the routines and practices of news production
observed in the golden era of news ethnography remain constant” (p. 228). What is more,
the routines surrounding key values of immediacy, interactivity, and participation show
remarkable similarities to a diverse host of other online news settings (Domingo &
Paterson, 2011; Paterson & Domingo, 2008).
Levels of Analysis: Hierarchy of Influences

Perspective
Although ethnographies provide a nuanced, insider view of a social setting, they can
privilege the immediate context of the newsmaking experience and work toward
organizational functionalism. That is, everything observed is easily assumed to be there for
a good reason, and selecting one organizational site elevates it as the key player in news
gatekeeping decisions. Thus, beyond the first-hand observation of newswork, primarily
within an organizational setting, a broader conception of the sociology of news is needed
that incorporates the ethnographic perspective but includes other levels of analysis,
including individual professional issues and larger macro social structures impinging on
journalism. A hierarchy of influences model, developed by Shoemaker and Reese (2014,
1996), does this by considering factors at multiple levels of analysis that shape media
content, the journalistic message system, from the micro to the macro: individual
characteristics of specific newsworkers, their routines of work, organizational-level
concerns, institutional issues, and larger social-systems. The model “takes into account the
multiple forces that simultaneously impinge on the media and suggest how influence at one
level may interact with that at another” (2014, p. 1). At each level, one can identify the main
factors that shape the symbolic reality constituted and produced by journalism, how these
factors interact across levels and compare across different contexts (e.g., national,
technological).
This approach raises, especially at the individual level, the notion of structure and agency.
As a human activity, journalism naturally involves the agency of individuals, which is both
constrained and enabled by the structures surrounding them. Ascribing relatively more
agency to individuals leads to a greater emphasis on the personal characteristics that guide
them (the crusading journalist myth and biographical tradition underscore this tendency); an
emphasis on macro structures, on the other hand, tends to de-emphasize this personal
agency. A political economic perspective, for example, has the effect of rendering
journalists as mere tools of class and other interests. Taking these issues into account,
journalism research can be organized by these hierarchical levels as reviewed below, with
examples of new conceptual issues.
Individual
On the most micro level, we assume that individual creative, professional practitioners
matter and knowing who they are helps understand the larger journalistic project—who is
being drawn to the profession, how adequately they reflect society, and what professional
values they support. The individual level of analysis considers the personal traits of
newsworkers, news values they adhere to, professional roles they take on, and other
demographic features (e.g., gender, race, class). In spite of the traditional notion of
professional “objective” detachment, we assume these characteristics matter in their work.
Journalists make decisions based on psychological-level attributes, but they operate within
a web of constraints.
Thus, this level of analysis considers the relative autonomy of individuals, how they are
both shaped by, contribute to, and identity with their surrounding organizations. Defining
news professionals as those working in major decision-making capacities for media
organizations, Weaver and colleagues (e.g., Weaver, Beam, Brownlee, Voakes, & Wilhoit,
2007) have tracked the composition of that group over several years, along with how they
perceive their roles. Surveying journalists working for traditional news organizations shows
perceptions by those individuals most invested in the shrinking professional core. They see
journalism heading in the wrong direction, have declining job satisfaction, but give greater
importance to their role in analyzing complex problems and investigating official claims
(Wilnat & Weaver, 2014).
Although many such studies seek to capture a description of the profession as a whole, the
individual level certainly draws attention to the fact that there is no single professional type,
not even within national cultures. As professional environments are shifting rapidly, analysis
at this level helps understand how professional roles relate to larger structures, serving as a
means of adaptation and survival. In the dynamic Chinese media context, for example,
Hassid (2011) has identified four types of journalists: American style professionals,
communist professionals (“throat and tongue” of the Communist Party), workaday
journalists (corrupt, anything for a price), and advocate professionals, who push the
envelope and are committed to ideals of transparency, openness, and public participation.
Geall (2013) argues that these are the professionals especially equipped for survival, who
can exploit the openings provided by the chaotic aspects and contradictions of the Chinese
media environment.
Routines
The routines level is concerned with those patterns of behavior that form the immediate
structures of newswork. If journalism is primarily a social practice, routines are the ways of
working that constitute that practice. They may include those unstated rules and ritualized
enactments that are not always made explicit. In studying these routines, we assume that
power is exercised within organizations—not always by idiosyncratic dictates by leaders but
through establishing a pattern of practices that serve the needs of the organization, adapt
to requirements of news sources, control the workflow, and give it a meaningful structure.
These range from deadline and space requirements to pack journalism and the strategically
enacted procedures (e.g., using quotations and balancing) designed to invoke “objectivity”
itself. News routines serve the needs of journalists and the organization, but they also have
come to embody considerations about the audience, what it will find acceptable and
interesting in the forms of news values.
But these routines have been unsettled, as news media adapt to digital flows and metrics,
affording the ability to present information that allows greater user participation. From a time
when journalists had only a vague conception of their audience, reading and viewing now
can be monitored in real time, leading to new value being placed on what is trending,
shared, and endorsed. News aggregators, for example, both within and outside traditional
news organizations, have had to develop new routines of screenwork, continually checking
the incoming streams of information, monitoring what types of stories drive audience traffic,
and finding ways to appropriately verify and advance what Coddington (2015) calls
“second-hand story-telling,” with routines that support transparency. They help to reconcile
the tension between the professional imperative of control and a more open participatory
news space online. This “second-order” newswork still maintains a professional ethos,
distant from the eyewitness field reporting professionals have always valorized, yet still
holding that ethos as an aspiration.
Organizational
Associated with the organizational level in particular, the ethnographic approach to
journalism contributed the insight, now well accepted, that news is an organizational
product. Edward Epstein’s News from nowhere did that for television news, showing its
organizational constraints and structure in how the location of bureaus dictated what events
were available to be translated into daily news flow. Now the walls of these organizations
have become more fluid as they enter into collaborative relationships to produce news, and
they take on a range of new emerging forms from the large-scale enterprise of daily news
gathering to the small-staff, minimalist blogging operation. The key question at this level is
“how does it work?” In that respect, the early analysis of Breed (1955) of social control in
the newsroom continues to be relevant today in considering how the different parts of the
organization work together to maintain itself and accomplish its goals.
These tensions are particularly revealed during times of social change. Lee and Chan
(2008) show, for example, that although Hong Kong has a strong tradition of journalistic
professionalism, self-censorship has increased following the handover to the mainland
government, bringing greater political pressure on local media. News managers try to
minimize conflicts by assigning sensitive stories to less experienced journalists, warning
them ambiguously to “be smart,” or justifying their instructions with a professional rationale
(“be objective”). Since the so-called “Umbrella Revolution,” news organizations there have
faced greater challenges in smoothing over these conflicts with owners, many of whom
have business ties to the mainland.
Institutional
At the next, more macro, socio-institutional level is concerned with the “inter-organizational
field,” how the various organizations doing news work cohere into a larger institution. The
media institution in turn enters into structured dependency relationships with other major
systemic players: including the state, public relations, and advertising. Benson (2004) has
advocated bringing the sociology of media (systems) back into the analysis, by
emphasizing the journalistic institutional field, deconstructing the media system (especially
cross-nationally) into its institutional components. This represents the meso-level
environment for media—the interplay of economic, political, and cultural factors—lying
between organization and society as a whole.
The new institutionalism perspective imported from political science treats the “media” as a
political actor in relationship with others (e.g., Ryfe, 2006). This approach includes a
historical dimension, which helps explain the emergence of practices and norms as a
contingent outcome. In showing how the news media have in common their goals of
seeking legitimacy, access to information, and making money, institutionalist analysis helps
explain their homogeneity (Cook, 1998; Sparrow, 1999). Bourdieu’s (2005) field theory is
similar to institutionalism in identifying spheres of action, which must be understood in
relation to each other, and which in the case of the journalistic field implies autonomy,
homogeneity, and is a result of a path dependent historical trajectory. We understand the
journalistic field to be structured by combinations of economic and cultural capital, and
although there is individual agency the field conditions the actions of its members.
Both fields and institutions bring up questions of where the boundaries lie among these
institutions as they jockey for power and how these interdependencies shape the news
product. Power flows not only from the state to the media, but the other way around in a
process of mutual adaptation. Fox News, for example, has dictated to the Republican Party
as it seeks to manage the presidential campaign by creating a debate forum for aspiring
candidates, some of whom had contracts with Fox for on-air appearances. At the
institutional level we can better recognize the even more complex nature of mediatization: a
distinctive stage in the long-term development of contemporary mass democracies in which
political processes have grown more or less dependent on the mass media and shaped
themselves accordingly.
Social System
The most macro, social system level is concerned with traditional theories of society and
power as they relate to journalism. Much of early U.S. communication research was
predicated on a benign, functional pluralism view of power in democratic society that
assumed a self-righting balance of interests. But when journalism decision-making
becomes problematic, powerful interests become directly implicated, and more critical
political economic explanations consider journalism to be an extension of class and
corporate power. Herman and Chomsky’s (1988) propaganda model, for example, gives
journalists relatively little autonomy as they work to uphold the interests of their sources,
advertisers, and other elites. In a more subtle elaboration, long pre-dating the propaganda
model, hegemony theory takes Antonio Gramsci’s extension of Marx to explain how power
relations become naturalized, even while granting media some relative autonomy from
class power and interests. Ideology explains how the social system hangs together as the
media project ideas and meaning in the service of power and interests. Violations of
paradigmatic boundaries in a society require repair work and help explain media
representations of deviance and marginalization of dissent.
One doesn’t need to take a Marxian perspective to recognize that journalism and media
institutions function within a larger social system, and these systems increasingly span
national boundaries. The most direct way to address factors at the social system level is
through cross-national comparison, an important theoretical development at this level. This
comparative approach applied to professional journalism is exemplified by Hanitzsch et al.
(2011), who mounted a survey across 18 countries from a mix of news organizations on
their role perceptions, epistemological orientations and ethical views, a design that allowed
them to directly assess the influence of national context on the perceptions of journalists
themselves. Their research raises the question: To what extent is there a global journalistic
culture? They found three major clusters of similar countries classified as Western,
peripheral-Western, and developing/transitional, but generally shared is a sense of
detachment and non-involvement in their perceived professional roles, and in being a
watchdog of government (and to some extent business). They differ on the value of
interventionism, the promotion of certain goals of social change, but in general there is
evidence for a universal ideology and professional identity.
Utility of the Hierarchy of Influences

As key concepts developed within journalism research, it has become helpful to unpack
them across a levels of analysis perspective. Professionalism, for example, can be seen to
operate in different ways across each of the five levels (Reese, 2001), as can another key
concept, news gatekeeping: the winnowing of a vast amount of possible news items into a
constricted space. Shoemaker and Vos (2009) examine gatekeeping across the five levels,
discerning the forces at each level operating to shape news decision-making. These
questions have been more focused on specific editorial decision-makers, but an increasing
online abundance of news and social media platforms, capacity and audience interactivity
require a similar rethinking of this concept. In spite of online abundance, news decisions
are still being made, but in different locations and sequences. This seemingly flattened
hierarchy of gatekeeping authority may disguise the actuality, as Vos and Heinderycks
(2015) argue, of a persistent homogeneity to certain stories, and missing important others
altogether (e.g., financial crisis of 2008).
A hierarchical model has encouraged the sorting out of micro, meso and macro levels, and
provides a framework for analyzing the operation of combined factors. Evaluating the
contribution of multiple levels simultaneously helps yield greater explanatory power. Survey
of journalists, for example, by Weaver et al. (2007) examined the contribution of different
nested contextual factors on journalistic work (organization, medium, etc.) This has been
extended to include the social-system level in a hierarchical approach to factors shaping
international journalism (Hanitzsch et al., 2010).
New Geography of Media Sociology

For a number of reasons, then, the hierarchy of influences has been a valuable guide to
theorizing journalism, but to what extent must it be reconsidered in light of the major
changes in the media landscape? The journalism of the 20th Century was synonymous with
the prevailing industrial forms. News was what news organizations produced, and
journalists were the professionals who worked for them. A hierarchy of influences approach
worked well with this model to disentangle the relationships among professionals and their
routines, and the news organizations that housed them, which cohered into institutions.
How does this levels of analysis framework adapt to the new media world where the lines
are not as tidy?
The news industry and profession have changed dramatically in the last two decades, with
the internet severing the association of advertising with the news product, undermining the
once robust subsidy provided by those seeking the mass audiences media were able to
command. As a result, large-scale news organizations have faced serious economic
disruption, along with easy digital access to free content threatening the unique role of
professional journalism. Anderson, Bell, and Shirky (2012) put a positive face on the recent
decade’s “post-industrial” effects on the news ecosystem as an increase in freedom to
communicate beyond the traditional publishing and broadcasting models. This freedom has
brought an explosion of digital practices and platforms, with in many respects new, more
effective journalistic forms—but at a cost to institutional clarity and coherence. In the
process, these changes have made the definition of journalist and news organization
increasingly problematic.
In accommodating the ethnographic perspective, the hierarchal model has not precluded
the variable-analytic, effects-on-content tradition, but the new online journalistic ecosystem
has moved theorizing farther away from that tradition in adopting more spatially-oriented
models of networks, spheres and fields. As the boundaries of journalism have shifted to
include more citizen interaction and global connectivity, various terms have been used to
describe the new journalistic eco-system, but they all suggest a more networked quality.
This extends to the broader socio-political deliberative arena in general to which journalism
contributes, a space now often loosely deemed a “networked public sphere,” or even a
“global networked sphere.”
To refer more specifically to journalism’s new reality shaped by the internet, Benkler (2011),
for example, uses “networked 4th estate” to refer, along with professional journalists, to
those citizen and other social movements that combine to form a more decentralized
democratic discourse, revealing a redistribution of how content is created and shared. One
of the most prominent writers in the “future of news,” Jeff Jarvis (2006), uses “networked
journalism” to refer to the new collaborative relationships between professional and citizen
in creating new information. Journalists have become nodes in this larger networked
journalism, a “diffused capacity to record information, share it, and distribute it” (Haak,
Parks, & Castells, 2012, p. xx). At the more formal news industry level, Anderson, Bell, and
Shirky (2012) use the “networked institution” concept to capture the need for news
organizations themselves to become more collaborative. These concepts suggest that
journalism can no longer be easily understood within organizational containers but extends
across traditional, more well-defined boundaries through connectivity in unpredictable
ways. These spatial metaphors and orienting concepts—whether networks, fields, or
spheres—point simultaneously to the blurring of lines between professional and citizen,
between one organization and another as they develop more collaborative partnerships and
work across digital platforms.
This is a different way of thinking of news compared to studies of production within

institutions. Adding a more organic quality to the picture, leads to terms like news “ecology”
and “eco-system” (Anderson, 2013), still suggesting interconnected but disparate units, all
participating in a similar space with a differentiation of roles. Traditional legacy media
provide an anchor for smaller publications, bloggers and citizens, who react to and
supplement what happens in the larger press. Thus, the practice, product, and institutional
dimensions are captured in this new metaphor of networked journalism. The eco-system
shift is revealed in new forms of newswork that theories of journalism must take into
account. The relentless flow of abundant information has led to a new breed of news
aggregators (referred to earlier) who add value through digesting, repackaging information
—stripping it down to its core components. The news narratives traditionally housed within
article story structures now get broken down into smaller “atomic units,” which can be
restructured, reordered, annotated, aggregated, and widely shared—ordering them back up

into different narrative structures (Coddington, 2015). Thus, this potential for connectivity
extends even at the content-structure level to the elements of a traditional news story,
which can be more easily disaggregated and redeployed.
Of course, this flow of dis- and re-aggregated information would not be possible were it not
for the computational power now available. Journalism, like other forms of knowledge-
production, has encountered its big data, or data-driven, moment, which has led to
theoretical shifts to better understand the restructuring of news and potential for interactivity
with users. From a professional vantage point, the effects of this computational power on
journalism take on several closely related forms. From an early concern with “precision
journalism,” when journalists were encouraged to use the tools of social science for more
rigorous insights, other terms have emerged in recent years to capture this phenomenon
(Coddington, 2014). Data journalism, loosely employed, refers to the use of data by
journalists to gather and present stories, merging with web design and visualization to allow
massive amounts of information to be marshaled and made available for crowdsourcing
analytics. Access to big data tools brings both greater analytical power to journalists but
also changes the way they can structure stories to allow greater utility for the audience.
Regarding professional practice, a “computational journalism” is regarded by Hamilton and
Turner (2009) as embracing both, bringing “algorithms, data, and social science to
supplement the accountability functions of journalism” (p. 2). Through algorithms the
audience itself has a more interactive capacity to learn and tailor news consumption based
on personal traits and patterns.
Technology has reshaped the journalistic field in a more general way by importing new
values. As news organizations have relied on those from outside the professional field for
digital expertise, the values of the technology culture have become linked with journalistic
practice. The open source concept, for example, is both a practical approach to coding but
also a philosophy of sharing (it makes transparent the DNA of its design). Lewis and Usher
(2013) argue that the ethos of open source—embedded in hacker culture and emphasizing
iteration, tinkering, transparency, and participation—has important implications for
journalism, drawing it out from its closed professional boundaries into greater transparency.
New Methodological and Conceptual

Challenges
Capturing the workings of these new eco-systems brings new challenges to the traditional
ethnographic method. The ethnographer must decide the appropriate “site,” identify the
“social actors,” and describe their practices. But when news becomes more diffused in its
production, with journalists working and communicating remotely, or in small organizations
loosely aligned with a larger parent company, or dispersed across platforms, the single site
becomes more difficult to select (e.g., Cottle, 2007). How can ethnography be done on
decentralized, deterritorialized communities? What is there to observe?
In keeping with the “networked journalism” perspective, newer efforts fittingly have shifted
away from a location-based “factory floor” ethnography. Howard (2002) has demonstrated
the utility of a “network ethnography”: “The process of using ethnographic field methods on
cases and field sites selected using social network analysis” (p. 561). In his analysis, he
identifies a distributed “e-politics” community, not based in a single organization but in
various agencies, party and campaign staffs, and individual consultants—a loosely
configured professional group of digital tool developers for political communication. He
locates the critical actors through their strategically located position in the network that links
them together and targets interviews accordingly.
Beyond these methodological challenges, the new eco-system requires new conceptual
tools. In social network analysis, connections typically are found among homogeneous
nodes (whether people or news hyperlinks), but related to the network is the richer concept
of assemblage, which can include human and non-human, material and non-material,
combined into a nexus of meaningful integration. This concept is useful in many areas of
social science to capture dynamic phenomena spilling out of existing categories, becoming
recombined in new ways, and not as easily identified within a single level of analysis. An
assemblage can be a contingent set of relationships to accomplish shifting and transitory
social objectives not otherwise defined by formal institutions. In that respect, journalism is
not some naturally existing category, but a complex and contingent assemblage—less
product than process.
Technology is at the heart of this transformational connectivity, affecting journalism’s tools,

processes, and ways of thinking. Rather than regarding technology as an exogenous force
making its effects felt from the outside on journalism, it increasingly must be taken into
account as “making a difference” as it becomes integrated into journalistic practice. This
has led to new ways of theorizing socio-technical systems and examining their
interconnections, such as Latour’s Actor Network Theory (ANT), borrowed from science
studies (reviewed in Turner, 2005). This radically descriptive approach blurs the
human/technological lines, rendering both “actants” in an “ontologically flat” perspective.
From a levels perspective ANT doesn’t make the same distinction between individual-level
factors and routines, merging them into an integrated nexus. More broadly, Lewis and
Westlund (2014) have advocated approaching cross-media work, the integration of multiple
platforms, as a “system of actors, actants, audiences, activities engaged in complex set of
media activities” (p. 34).
The assemblage concept has richer utility than its association with ANT. Anderson (2013)
argues more broadly that newswork itself is one of “assemblage” and “can be envisioned
and described as the continuous process of networking the news” (p. 172) across “news
products, institutions, and networks . . . drawing together a variety of objects, big and small,
social and technological, human and non-human” (p. 4). In the case of “news objects,”
these are the things available for inclusion into larger assemblages. He maps online
hyperlinks in the Philadelphia community to show a form of assemblage within a news
ecosystem, “pointing to a pattern of iterative pyramiding in which key web sites positioned
within highly particular communities of interest act as bridges to larger, more diffused digital
communities” (Anderson, 2010, p. 289).
This idea directs attention outside of journalism organizations to those places where
interaction with journalism plays an integral part, especially in political communication.
Assemblages can be viewed as a combination of heterogeneous elements oriented toward
a given task (including semantic elements, messages, frames). Chadwick (2011) argues
that, facilitated by digital platforms, political information cycles are complex assemblages of
modular units, with permeable boundaries among them, which can only be understood in
their relationships with each other. In the “hybrid media system” he designates assemblage
as both process and event:
multiple, loosely coupled individuals, groups, sites, and temporal instances of

interaction involving diverse yet highly interdependent news creators and media
technologies that plug and unplug themselves from the news-making process,
often in real time (p. 64).
Recent studies of political campaigns uses the concept to capture the relational aspects of
mobilization, where elements are assembled in ways that have an identity, outside of a
more formally constituted organization or institution (e.g., Kreis, 2012). Studying the more
personal dimension of political field campaigns Nielsen (2012) finds ad hoc combinations of
staffers, volunteers, and part-timers, that vary in their allegiance to hierarchy and length of
their commitment.
Networked assemblages can still be located within specific levels of analysis, but they
encourage reordering relationships and rethinking a linear process of influence in favor of
constantly changing interest clusters driven by information entrepreneurs. Traditional
political communication studies, for example, at the institutional level have treated news
production as responding to state actors as it relays information to citizens, either in a
cascading activation process (Entman, 2003) or through the indexing of news construction
to the boundaries of debate within the political system (Bennett, 1990). Elite circuits of
information exchange among institutional players, however, don’t map onto this relationship
so easily. As Davis (2007) has argued, policy-making networks—a form of assemblage of
elite actors—constitute micro-spheres of power which don’t correspond to representative

politics. Journalists are integral, often captive, parts of these networks, not just the
recipients of political newsworthy information which yields communicative output.
Assemblages within a Levels Framework

This new geography of journalism has problematized and destabilized both the units and
levels of analysis in journalism theorizing. Because of these disruptions, much of the most
important effort in recent years has been directed at the very definition of journalism and its
boundaries with other fields (Carlson & Lewis, 2015). As a professional issue journalism
becomes a jurisdictional project, policing its boundaries and defending its prerogatives. This
can also be thought as a process of repair and maintenance of the journalistic “paradigm”
(e.g., Reese, 1990), an ideological process similar to that captured at the social-system
level of analysis. These concerns resemble Zelizer’s (1993) introduction of the “interpretive
communities” concept to explain how journalists come to collective understandings of their
work through shared discourse—a frame that extends beyond the strictly formal tenets of
the profession itself. Despite the contested boundaries around the journalistic units of
analysis, whether profession or organization, these boundary actions can also be identified
across the levels of analysis. In this section, the levels of influence are considered in how
they map onto new forms of assemblage.
Certain norms and routines, such as verification and sourcing, serve as boundary objects or
markers, and are used to distinguish between journalism practiced by professionals and
what they deem as less worthy practices. Individual organizations, such as the New York
Times, seek to differentiate themselves from less acceptable entities as WikiLeaks, suspect
because of its statelessness and non-institutionalized relationship with official sources
(Coddington, 2012). The institutional level points to how mainstream journalism
experiences an identity confusion, given the fuzzy borders between it and partisan news
organizations such as Fox News, or comedic platforms such as The Daily Show and the
former Colbert Report. That brings into question the homogeneity of the institutional field,
violating the assumption for both Bourdieu and Institutionalists but making the process of
boundary work more theoretically important.
As suggested earlier, the work of journalism and many of our theoretical questions are not
so easily nested now within a set of hierarchical levels. Societal changes force a re-
examination of the relationship between individuals and larger structures. That is, the
aggregates traditionally signaled by levels—whether community, organization, or nation—
are containers that don’t have the same meaning as they once did, as new structures are
woven outside of and through institutional frameworks. As Castells (1996) argues, we need
to rethink particularly the fundamental issue of identity, given that people “increasingly
organize their meaning not around what they do, but on the basis of what they are, or
believe they are” (p. 3). They are no longer as easily described by their individual markers
of group membership. As a result, research needs to be more cautious with what it claims
about the explanatory power of traditional demographic and other classifications when it
comes to journalists (and other creative workers). For example, technology has brought
new pressures on journalists, increasing the velocity of incoming information and need for
multi-tasking, but it has also given them the ability to create a personal brand. Using social
media such as Twitter can create personal reach beyond anything possible before,
meaning they are not so easily subsumed within their organizational container.
The idea of assemblage is appealing in reflecting the reality of new configurations,

suggesting elements that cut across several levels of analysis. But that means the
boundaries between levels are not always as clear. Routines of newswork, for example,
must now accommodate the combination of individual workers and their tools, combining
individuals and their techniques into actor-networks. And “technology” has become a multi-
scalar phenomenon, a nexus of actants not easily located at any one level. Previous
theorizing reasoned from structures to predict symbolic expressions found in news
coverage and mediated representations (“influences on content”), but this content itself now
is not so easily detached from the hierarchical structures. Symbolic expression becomes a
resource for inclusion in an assemblage. Nevertheless, even in a dramatically restructured
news environment, hierarchical power—not the least of which the State—is still with us and
reasserting itself in many areas, even if deployed through different means. And much of the
work of journalism continues to occur in organized, institutionalized settings. This is true
even for non-news organizations that practice journalism as a part of their social mission.
Advocacy NGOs, such as Human Rights Watch, investigate, report and disseminate
information, not only to provide to traditional media organizations journalist but to share
directly with their stakeholders (Powers, 2015).
The hierarchy of influences presents a useful standard against which to measure the
destabilization of journalism and realignment of forces, and to incorporate explanatory
power. The idea of a radically contingent and ever-shifting assemblage is at odds with the
drive in social science to find predictable aggregates of social material, congealing into
institutions that have a history and life of their own. Assemblages are still located within a
framework of power, even if not so intuitively, and these larger structures add explanatory
value. Benson (2014) has cautioned against the tendency of perspectives like actor-
network theory to simply describe these new configurations of professionals and practices,
to “follow the actors,” advocating instead that they be explained within larger structures.
And a levels of analysis framework reminds scholars to identify in which larger macro
structures their phenomena of interest are located.
New Global Assemblages

The changing theoretical landscape for journalism must be positioned against the forces of
globalization, which brings a “stretching” of social relations, connecting people at a
distance, and “compression” as they interact with simultaneity and synchronicity. The idea
of “global journalism” brings another kind of assemblage. Certainly, there has been in
recent years a greater international emphasis in journalism theorizing, which brings greater
emphasis on the social-system level. The growing use of cross-national research designs
allow for testing the influence of the national social-system on journalism and help untangle
institutional-level variables—showing, for example, how the extent to which media rely on
commercial support as part of the political economic field shapes media practice (e.g.,
Benson, 2013). But emphasis on institutional fields within national cultures may
overestimate the degree of national journalistic homogeneity. Certain components of a
journalistic field—such as television, and increasingly online news—may be more likely to
converge toward a more global standard, while the printed press, more firmly rooted in
historical styles, may be less likely to change. So the social-system level is not synonymous
with the national, and assemblages help alert us to new configurations.
Corcoran and Fahy (2009) take a more pan-national approach to global journalism,
examining how power flows within and across national contexts through elite-oriented
media, whether the International New York Times, Wall St. Journal, or in their case the
Financial Times. The FT is global in the sense that it has a privileged place in European
Union discourse, with a core audience among globalized elites doing business in Europe
and Brussels. Journalists became part of networks of information flow that support elite
structures, leading the authors to suggest a “cosmopolitanism embedded in the
transnational culture of European elites, whose material interests stretch beyond national
boundaries and whose social imaginary is nourished by elite media such as the FT” (p.
110).
Globalization adds a different dimension that works beyond these nested levels-of-analysis
hierarchies to produce something of the “global” embedded in local subnational spaces.
Global phenomena operate at multiple scales and are not neatly located on a continuum
ranging from local to international. Sassen (2006) points to not only the disassembling of
the state, but reconstituted arrangements: new global assemblages of, in her case, territory,
authority, and rights. Ethnographic analysis of newswork need not be abandoned in the
search for new globalized forms of journalism. Research may take the form of case studies
with thick description where these new combinations may be properly explored. But this
more subtle aspect of global spaces raises the possibility of new sites for investigation. For
example Firdaus (2012) has studied Al Jazeera journalists working in Malaysia, signifying a
subnational, “glocal” journalistic space embedded within the global media-hub city of Kuala
Lumpur.
In another approach to global journalism, Berglez (2008) advocates a new way of analyzing
news from a content-based perspective that takes into account its deterritorialized quality.
News texts can be examined empirically for their “global outlook,” to the extent that they
draw wider connections, reflecting a different epistemological stance:
The national outlook puts the nation-state at the center of things when framing
social reality, while the global outlook instead seeks to understand and explain
how economic, political, social and ecological practices, processes and problems
in different parts of the world affect each other, are interlocked, or share
commonalities (p. 3).
Mediated Spaces
The networked public sphere is constituted with new assemblages: of newswork,
institutional arrangements, and global connections, which give rise to new emerging
deliberative spaces. Journalism theories now have as much interest in process as product,
in assemblage as outcome, but still need to be concerned with understanding the nature of
quality of these spaces. What shape do they take on and with what implications for healthy
democratic discourse?
Journalism research has a strong tradition of equating these spaces to a mapping of media
content, and content-based studies are growing in number with vast amounts of media
material available for analysis. Certainly, big data and related computational tools have
begun to allow the kind of analysis more consistent with the new ecosystem at a network
level of analysis. This is particularly true in research on online content that takes the
hyperlink as the fundamental connecting feature, which allows the mapping of the
networked space, including blogo- and Twitter-spheres based on a post- and Tweet-centric
space. These analyses often provide striking visualizations of the patterns, but structures of
these networks must still be related to larger structures of which they are a part. In
explicating the idea of these “mediated” spaces, the challenge, perhaps counter-intuitive, is
to conceive of them from a less media-centric perspective. Theories of journalism, by their
nature, tend to begin with organized journalism and work out from there, but this may
overstate its influence and hinder a fuller understanding journalism’s position. Journalism is
itself an assemblage and a part of, albeit an important one, of others that lie both inside and
outside of institutionalized structures. The assemblage concept alerts us to wider
combinations of elements that constitute new mediated spaces, and these configurations
must be identified, while a levels of analysis framework will continue to help organize
explanatory efforts.
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22/11/2019 Theories of Journalism - Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication

Interpersonal Communication Media and Communication Policy

Online Publication Date: Aug 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.83

Summary and Keywords

Journalism seeks to observe and communicate what it learns of social importance,

The early 20th-century perspectives on journalism—before becoming linked to the

A hierarchy of influences model worked well to disentangle the relationships among

Keywords: journalism, assemblage, levels of analysis, networked journalism, profession, media

explanatory frameworks for understanding a complex combination of social practice,

Theories of journalism, as Löffelholz (2008) observed, come from diverse perspectives,

Shift to a Sociology of News

Journalism professionals have historically adhered to a philosophical, realist view of the

Levels of Analysis: Hierarchy of Influences

Utility of the Hierarchy of Influences

New Geography of Media Sociology

This is a different way of thinking of news compared to studies of production within

restructured, reordered, annotated, aggregated, and widely shared—ordering them back up

New Methodological and Conceptual

Technology is at the heart of this transformational connectivity, affecting journalism’s tools,

multiple, loosely coupled individuals, groups, sites, and temporal instances of

elite actors—constitute micro-spheres of power which don’t correspond to representative

Assemblages within a Levels Framework

The idea of assemblage is appealing in reflecting the reality of new configurations,

New Global Assemblages

Benson, R. (2013). Shaping immigration news: A French-American comparison. New York:

Benson, R. (2014). Challenging the “new descriptivism”: Restoring explanation, evaluation,

Berglez, P. (2008). What is global journalism? Journalism Studies, 9(6), 845–858.

Boczkowski, P. J. (2004). Digitizing the news: Innovation in online newspapers. Cambridge:

Boczkowski, P. J. (2010). News at work: Imitation in an age of information abundance.

Castells, M. (1996). The rise of the network society. Oxford: Blackwell.

Coddington, M. (2012). Defending a paradigm by patrolling a boundary: Two global

Coddington, M. (2014). Clarifying journalism’s quantitative turn: A typology for evaluating

Domingo, D., & Paterson, C. (2011). Making online news—Volume 2: Newsroom

Epstein, E. (1974). News from nowhere. New York: Vintage.

Fishman, M. (1980). Manufacturing the news. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Find this resource:

Hanitzsch, T. et al. (2010). Modeling perceived influences on journalism: Evidence from a

Howard, P. N. (2002). Network ethnography and the hypermedia organization: New

Jarvis, J. (2006). Networked journalism. BuzzMachine. Retrieved on August 10, 2015.

Lee, F. L. F., & Chan, J. (2008). Organizational production of self-censorship in the

Löffelholz, M. (2008). Heterogeneous-multidimensional-competing: Theoretical approaches

Nielsen, R. (2012). Ground wars: Personalized communication in political campaigns.

Reese, S. D. (2001). Understanding the global journalist: A hierarchy-of-influences

Rühl, M. (1969). The newspapers’ editorial department as an organized social system.

Sassen, S. (2006). Territory, authority, rights: From medieval to global assemblages.

Sparrow, B. (1999). Uncertain guardians: The news media as a political institution.

Turner, F. (2005). Actor-networking the news. Social Epistemology, 19(4), 321–324.

Waisbord, S. (2014). Media sociology: A reappraisal. London: Polity.

Zelizer, B. (1993). Journalists as interpretive communities. Critical Studies in Mass

Copyright © 2019. All rights reserved.

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