Newswork

Framing the news: an ethnographic view of financial newswriting

by Tom Van Hout

Co-authored with Felicitas Macgilchrist, published in Text & Talk, 2010

This article is an ethnographic case study of a senior business reporter as he discovers, writes, and reflects on a... more This article is an ethnographic case study of a senior business reporter as he discovers, writes, and reflects on a news story. We ‘‘follow the story’’ from its entry in the newsroom through the review process during a story meeting and the writing process up to the point the story is filed for copy editing. Drawing on ethnographic data, this article sheds light on how a news story about Russian gas exports to France is discursively constructed. In this writing process, we focus in particular on a frame shift in the construction of the lead and argue that this shift is led primarily by technological rather than overt ideological concerns. The detailed description of one newswriting process supports the argument that framing is an interpretive practice achieved within the demands, relationships, and discourses that anchor business news as a social institution.

http://www.reference-global.com/doi/abs/10.1515/TEXT.2010.009

The Tension between Professional Control and Open Participation: Journalism and its Boundaries

by Seth Lewis

Lewis, S. C. (in press). The Tension between Professional Control and Open Participation: Journalism and its Boundaries. Information, Communication & Society. (Expected publication date: 2012)

Amid growing difficulties for professionals generally, media workers in particular are negotiating the increasingly... more Amid growing difficulties for professionals generally, media workers in particular are negotiating the increasingly contested boundary space between producer and user in the digital environment. This article, based on a review of the academic literature, explores that larger tension transforming the creative industries by extrapolating from the case of journalism—namely, the ongoing tension between professional control and open participation in the news process. Firstly, the sociology of professions, with its emphasis on boundary maintenance, is used to examine journalism as boundary work, profession, and ideology—each contributing to the formation of journalism’s professional logic of control over content. Secondly, by considering the affordances and cultures of digital technologies, the article articulates open participation and its ideology. Thirdly, and against this backdrop of ideological incompatibility, a review of empirical literature finds that journalists have struggled to reconcile this key tension, caught in the professional impulse toward one-way publishing control even as media become a multi-way network. Yet, emerging research also suggests the possibility of a hybrid logic of adaptability and openness—an ethic of participation—emerging to resolve this tension going forward. The article concludes by pointing to innovations in analytical frameworks and research methods that may shed new light on the producer–user tension in journalism.

The Open-Source Ethos of Journalism Innovation: Between participation and professional control

by Seth Lewis

Presented at the Future of Journalism Conference 2011, in Cardiff, Wales, September 8-9, 2011.

This paper examines the intersection of journalism and open-source software, in the context of the ongoing tension... more This paper examines the intersection of journalism and open-source software, in the context of the ongoing tension between professional control and open participation in digital media. Through interviews with key winners of the Knight News Challenge innovation contest, this article explores how open source, as a technological framework and a socio-cultural ethic, serves to legitimize and facilitate participation in journalism. News innovators are found to see journalism as an open-source practice to be shared, rather than a proprietary profession to be protected—and news not as a professional product alone, so much as a process of iterative, collaborative de-bugging. The implications of this shift are discussed in light of journalism’s changing occupational boundaries.

National News Cultures: A Comparison of Dutch, German, British, Australian, and US Journalists

by Mark Deuze

Gender in Political News Reportage: Messenger and Message

by Lelia Samson

Racial Profiling in the Newsroom

by David Pritchard

Pritchard, David, and Sarah Stonbely. "Racial Profiling in the Newsroom." Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 84 (Summer 2007): 231-248.

Study of the effect of journalists' race on the topics they cover; an assessment of the implications of assignments... more Study of the effect of journalists' race on the topics they cover; an assessment of the implications of assignments based in large part on race.

Patterns of Deviance In Crime News

by David Pritchard

Pritchard, David, and Karen D. Hughes. “Patterns of Deviance in Crime News.” Journal of Communication 47 (Summer 1997): 49-67.

Examination of how race, gender and other characteristics of homicides determine newsworthiness. Examination of how race, gender and other characteristics of homicides determine newsworthiness.